Reds' rookie rotation could turn into success down the road
When Brandon Finnegan takes the mound for the Reds against the St. Louis Cardinals on Wednesday night, it'll mark the 53rd consecutive game that Cincinnati has started a rookie pitcher.
That's already a major league record -- the team broke the previous mark, which stood for 113 years, 11 starts ago -- and should the Reds finish the next two weeks without another non-rookie start, seemingly a likelihood at this point, they'll end up with 110 games started by rookie pitchers this season, more than two-thirds of their total schedule.
That, however, would not be an all-time high. And frankly, it's not close. As recently as 2009, the Oakland A's featured 116 such starts in the rookie seasons for Trevor Cahill, Brett Anderson and Gio Gonzalez, among others. In 1998, the Florida Marlins set a major league record with a startling 124 rookie starts, one season after winning the franchise's first World Series.
In fairness to the Reds, their reliance on rookie arms this season has not been the result of an epic fire sale, though perhaps the impact of the Marlins' infamous sell-off on their starting rotation is also overstated. After all, Kevin Brown and Al Leiter were the only starters dealt during the '97 offseason and early part of the '98 campaign, as Tony Saunders got scooped up by the Rays in the expansion draft and Alex Fernandez missed all of 1998 following rotator cuff surgery.
That being said, trades have certainly played a part for Cincinnati, as pending free agents Johnny Cueto and Mike Leake were both swapped for prospects at the trade deadline in July. In addition, the Reds saw another major injury end Homer Bailey's season after just two starts in April, and Jason Marquis' comeback effort was a dud, the veteran going 3-4 with a 6.46 ERA in nine starts before his release in early June.
The result has been a rotation that features Anthony DeSclafani, Michael Lorenzen, Raisel Iglesias and Keyvius Sampson and a season that has gone worse than expected (and the forecast was never especially sunny). The Reds have just 63 wins through 150 games, a staggering decline for a team that two years ago won 90 games and in 2012 took the NL Central crown.
Still, second-year manager Bryan Price has been as optimistic as one can be during a challenging season that's not entirely his fault. He's remained adamant that he "can't simply throw a life preserver" every time one of his young arms finds himself in trouble -- which is somewhat often; his rookies have combined for 38 quality starts in 98 tries -- and according to others who have played and coached through a season rife with rookie pitching, that's about the only approach there is to take.
"We had an extremely young, inexperienced team, and it was a mental and physical grind every night," said Atlanta Braves minor league pitching coordinator Rich Dubee, the pitching coach for that '98 Marlins team, which went 54-108.
"Probably the one advantage Cincinnati has is that they have some established position guys, and I'm sure that gets tough on them. It gets tough on your position guys if you're down early every night. That gets to be a grind. But cycles run differently for each organization and sometimes you just have to move with it and hope the young players you have invested in get better."
In 1998, the Marlins' regular rotation featured just one non-rookie in Livan Hernandez, who made his first big league start in June of the previous season and went on to be named MVP of both the NLCS and World Series that fall. The only other "veteran" starts came from 23-year-old Felix Heredia, who made two in April before being moved back to the bullpen and eventually traded, and Florida retread Chris Hammond, who made three appearances before May shoulder surgery ultimately led to his first retirement.
Ryan Dempster tried to get a handle on big-league hitters as a rookie, and it didn't always go so well.
One of the rookies who helped fill the gaps in the Florida rotation that season was Ryan Dempster, who was called up from Double-A Portland shortly after Hammond's final start. Dempster ended up making 14 appearances that season, including 11 starts, and says it didn't take long for him to realize that he was out of his league.
"I remember striking out Brant Brown on three pitches to start my first career start at Wrigley and thinking, 'OK, I've got this,'" recalled Dempster, now an analyst with MLB Network. "But then I walked (Mickey) Morandini, (Sammy) Sosa hit a home run, I walked Mark Grace and then Henry Rodriguez hit a home run and it was like, 'OK, maybe I don't got this.' It all happened pretty fast.
"Then in my second start I remember in the first inning I gave up a solo homer to the Yankees and I had runners on first and second with two outs and Darryl Strawberry is up," he continued. "I didn't throw much of a change-up, but I (threw a first-pitch ball) and I was shaking and shaking and the catcher came out and said, 'What do you want to throw here?' I told him, 'Change-up.' He said, 'You don't really throw one,' but I told him, 'Well, if I throw a fastball it's going to be 4-0, so I should throw something else.'"
The man behind the plate in each of those games (and a total of nine of Dempster's 11 starts) was Gregg Zaun. Zaun assumed the role of starting catcher that May, when Florida traded All-Star catcher Charles Johnson for Mike Piazza -- who played five games in a Marlins uniform before he, too, was dealt -- and Zaun said handling a rookie pitcher every night presented some challenges for a player getting used to being a full-time starter, himself.
"They were a lot worse than I thought they would be," Zaun said of the Marlins' rotation, which outside of Hernandez and Dempster relied most heavily on Brian Meadows, Jesus Sanchez, Andy Larkin and 29-year-old rookie Kirt Ojala. "Then couple that with the fact that I had a lot of personal struggles hitting-wise that year and dealt with some Jim Leyland disciplinary issues, and it was a tough year for me to keep my mind completely focused on my game-calling and my defense."
Jim Leyland and Gregg Zaun didn't see eye to eye in Florida.
Zaun recalled one particular time when Leyland, who declined a request for an interview for this story, unleashed a memorable stream of invective in the clubhouse after a loss in Houston.
"It was very tough to go out there," said Zaun, now a Blue Jays analyst for Rogers Sportsnet. "We were getting beat every night and it had a lot to do with the pitching. If you don't have guys with big league stuff, they better have big league command, and they had neither. Outside of a couple of guys on that team, there weren't a whole lot who had that great stuff, and to be honest, several of them didn't have a big league work ethic either. They were extremely cocky very early about being in the big leagues and that was probably the main reason for that one particular tirade by Jim. These guys just didn't get it."
And that, says Dubee, is one of the risks teams run when they trot out a rotation full of inexperienced pitchers. Players can't let their status as a big leaguer get to their heads, and even if perpetual losing is understandable, it shouldn't become expected.
"To a degree you don't mind having your bumps, but you also don't want guys going out there thinking it's OK to get beat every night," Dubee said. "There has to be some improvement along the way and you have to continue to not only have the work ethic and the desire and the grind to get there, but there has to be some visible sign that you are learning. If you're just going to stay stagnant and go out there and get your brains beat out and say, 'Well it's because I'm young and I shouldn't be here anyway,' then you're probably not the guy who people want."
In Dubee's case, he tried to use the early struggles of other great pitchers of the era to keep his own callow staff motivated. Dubee says he consulted the Braves media guide and jotted down the numbers Tom Glavine, John Smoltz and Greg Maddux posted in their first two major league seasons, then showed them to his staff without telling them who the stats belonged to.
"I remember I said, 'How do these numbers look?' and of course they weren't very pretty," Dubee said of the early returns from Glavine (9-21, 4.76 ERA his first two seasons), Maddux (8-18, 5.59) and Smoltz (2-7, 5.48 ERA as a rookie). "So they go, 'They're awful, they're terrible,' and I said, 'Well, this is the Braves rotation right here,' and it kind of put it in perspective. Not everyone has to go through it, but most players have to go through some learning curve."
Unfortunately, not everyone on the Marlins bench seemed to show the same patience as Dubee, who at the time was in his first year as a major league pitching coach. So whereas this year's Reds pitchers might feed off the energy of their manager Price, the '98 Marlins at times struggled to find that same motivation from Leyland.
"It was detrimental, to be honest with you," Zaun said of the presence of a veteran manager. "Jim was so used to being around veteran players and being successful that he could not stomach the losses. It had been so long since Jim had been around losing. You think about where he came from -- he won in Pittsburgh, we won the World Series the year before in Florida, and that team was not the team that he signed up to manage.
"It was tough watching him," Zaun continued. "He was a miserable son of a bitch. He was not fun to be around that year because we stunk. And not only did we stink, but we didn't have big league players, and he wasn't real shy about telling people, 'You're not a big league player.' He'd flat out tell you, 'You don't deserve to be here.'"
One of the regular targets of Leyland's frustration was Dempster, who admits that year's staff sometimes "didn't always know when to keep our mouths closed and our ears open."
"He turned into a hell of a pitcher, but he was all arm at that point, too young to be there," Zaun said of Dempster. "He was definitely one of the guys that Jim was talking to when he said, 'Go look at the team in the other dugout. That's a big league team. You guys are a bunch of dudes with 4.50 ERAs from Double-A. You don't belong here,' and Ryan would probably admit that he was in the big leagues a year or two premature. But it was a great opportunity for him because of the situation with the Marlins."
Dempster, of course, went on to spend 16 years in the majors and won 132 games. He won a World Series ring with the Red Sox in 2013, his final season, and says his experience with the Marlins in '98 helped prepare him for a long tenure.
"I thought it did a really good job of teaching us how to lose, and I think that there's something to be said about that," Dempster said. "You're supposed to learn how to win and win graciously, and at the same time, you've got to learn how to lose and move past those losses so that you can bounce back from them and have success, and that was something, over my career, that I think I was pretty good about."
That's also likely the approach being taken in Cincinnati, where the Reds hope 2015's failings on the arms of an extremely young core will be a harbinger for future success, even if this season was virtually over before it started.
"I think they're very fortunate, and it's really exciting to be able to go out there," Dempster said. "People might say, 'Oh, he's not ready for the big leagues, so why should we do that?' but I think as long as you don't set those expectations on them, it's not too early. So what if you take some bumps and bruises? You almost have to treat your first season in the big leagues like Four-A.
"They're getting opportunities," Dempster continued. "Opportunities to show their arm and their stuff, their work ethic and how they prepare, how they go about their business. Those are the kinds of things that are going to set them apart from what they do, performance-wise, on the field, and there are super-invaluable lessons that these guys can be taught through these experiences."
Added Dubee: "It doesn't matter if they're old, young, whatever. You still are trying to get the most out of every guy you have, wherever you're coaching, whether it's in the minor leagues or the majors. You're trying to find what makes every guy as good as he can possibly be. Does it get tough? Yes. Did I enjoy losing 108 games in the dugout? No. But at the same time, when you see growth and you see improvement and you see guys giving it all they've got to get better, that's the part you enjoy."
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