'Pitching confidently and taking chances': How the Miami Marlins Create Pitchers

A melting pot of approaches owes its success to many

PHILADELPHIA — Discovering precisely how the Miami Marlins develop a pitcher isn't easy. Take the Game 2 starter in their National League Wild Card series against the Philadelphia Phillies, Braxton Garrett, for instance.

Garrett, the seventh overall pick in the 2016 MLB Draft, was a curveball-first pitcher out of Florence High School in Alabama. But after torn UCL cost him his 2018 season and COVID-19 cancelled the minor leagues altogether in 2020, he began to reconstruct his repertoire with the assistance of Marlins’ minor league pitching coordinators Tommy Phelps and Scott Aldred.

“Coming out of high school, I had a little higher slot,” Garrett said at a pregame podium prior to Game 1 of the series in Philadelphia. “Like you said, I loved to throw that curveball. I had Tommy John surgery basically the first full season, and I came back. My first couple of seasons after coming back healthy, my arm slot just kept getting higher and higher, and it just kind of took away from everything else other than my curveball.

“So it kind of turned into more of a slider league at that point, and dropped my arm a little bit. The slider kind of broke out for me. I feel like I can spin the ball pretty well since I've been young, so the slider wasn't too hard. It was just kind of figuring out how to command it at first.”

The result has been a breakout performance for Garrett. In 2022, he pitched to a 3.89 ERA over 17 starts, the 90/24 K/BB ratio in 88 innings suggesting even better days ahead as he turned 25. With his slider as primary pitch in 2022, he was effective. Featuring his slider more and more in 2023, though, he cut his walks-per-nine to a microscopic 1.6 without sacrificing the swing-and-miss in his repertoire. And the changeup remains important as well.

“They do an awesome job,” Garrett said of Aldred and Phelps. “I love working with Scott and Tommy. They worked with me a lot on my changeup and a lot on just how to pitch really and good spots for my fastball. Yeah, they've done a good job.”