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The Miami Marlins turned heads across Major League Baseball in September when they became the first team to call pitches from the dugout, but that was merely the tip of the iceberg.
Long before that, they had done away with traditional bullpen sessions and soft-toss batting practices and replaced them with hyper-competitive alternatives, part of an organizational push to persistently challenge players. Practically every team seeks more pitch velocity and bat speed, but perhaps none other is as unabashed about building it in-season. Base stealing is back in vogue, but Marlins minor leaguers take more risks than anyone.
For decades, the Marlins have been defined by fire sales, empty seats and last-place finishes. But they are now gaining a reputation as arguably the sport’s most cutting-edge organization, a distinction their circumstances might have forced upon them. In order to survive against teams with far more resources, the Marlins believe they have to be different. Aggressively so.
“We have to innovate,” Marlins general manager Gabe Kapler stated. “We do not have a choice.”
The Marlins have won two championships but also have posted 25 losing records in 33 years of existence. Nineteen of their seasons finished with the lowest attendance in the National League. Over the past 14 years, the Marlins have ranked within the bottom five in payroll 11 times. Their history is a continuous cycle of star-studded rosters being disassembled. Sustainability has been nonexistent. And so, in search of it, the Marlins’ principal decision-makers are putting aside their fears and embracing criticism — even if from their own players — while relentlessly pushing the envelope.
Doing anything else, they believe, would be malpractice.
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“We know that we cannot do things the same way as other teams and expect to beat other teams,” Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix stated. “That’s the mindset throughout our entire organization. We need to be different, and we need to be better. And that involves taking risks, that involves trying new things, and that comes with an understanding that they’re not all going to work. But we have to push those boundaries and find value and success on the margins.”
Bendix joined the Marlins in late 2023 after a 15-year run with the Tampa Bay Rays, a model franchise for thriving with inexpensive rosters. He started by gutting a veteran-laden Marlins team that had made the playoffs with a negative run-differential, then took aim at sustainability by focusing on infrastructure and preaching open-mindedness.
He and his staff live by one guiding principle, repeated so often it should be plastered on their walls: Get better players, get players better and, as Kapler likes to add, get players better faster.
The Marlins spent $108 million to revamp their spring training facility, which they unveiled earlier this year, and are constructing pitching and hitting labs that will sit adjacent to it. It will be a massive boost, but not a novel one. In an era when information is so prevalent, and every team is up to speed on analytics, can teams still find legitimate advantages on the margins?
The Marlins are betting on it.
“The trick here,” Kapler stated, “is believing in human spirit.”
The Marlins first began calling pitches from the dugout during last year’s Spring Breakout game, an annual preseason showcase of baseball’s brightest prospects.
Over the course of the 2025 season, Marlins coaches called pitches at every one of their minor league affiliates. The communication flowed efficiently, alleviating concerns about getting calls in on time. Getting the dugout involved prompted more conversations between innings, a welcomed surprise for coaches concerned that their pitchers and catchers would stop thinking along with them. An initial belief that the information available in the dugout would provide a legitimate advantage was, in the coaches’ minds, further validated.
On Sept. 19, with nine regular-season games remaining and a playoff berth still possible, Marlins manager Clayton McCullough agreed to roll the concept out at the major league level and became the face of an organization that caught flak from every corner of the industry.
Now, as other teams begin to follow their lead, the Marlins seem like pioneers.
“The first ones through the door always get bloody,” Marlins pitching coach Daniel Moskos stated. “It’s the adage for a reason. It’s tried and true over time. I mean it’s our organizational mantra — f—ing come at us. Like, we’re not gonna back down from this.”
Moskos’ assistant — Alon Leichman last year, Rob Marcello this year — will sit behind the dugout railing staring at a card, then raise his left or right hand and flash a series of two numbers. His catcher will then input the information into his PitchCom device, which sends the signal to the pitcher’s ear. If pitchers shake off the call — and the Marlins are adamant that they can — the decision rests with the players.
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The idea is to clear a catcher’s plate, given the added importance of offense, framing and throwing. Stripping emotion out of decision-making from a catcher who, say, struck out to end a rally in the prior half-inning is also a plus, the Marlins believe. But the biggest incentive is the wealth of information coaches have access to in the dugout, from scouting reports to real-time data on velocity, movement and practically every other metric. After all, there’s only so much that can be stuffed into a catcher’s wristband.
“It’s very fine print and a small area,” Moskos stated. “How much can they actually go to and read really quickly in a concise way? Probably not that much. And if it ends up that they don’t go to it, then that defeats the purpose of even having the card.”
A primary concern was the efficiency of having another person relay signs, one brought up over the offseason by then-free agent closer Pete Fairbanks, who takes up almost every second of the pitch clock. So far, Fairbanks stated, it hasn’t been an issue. (Marlins pitchers overall have had three pitch-clock violations, roughly the major league average.) A much bigger concern is removing agency from catchers, and what Moskos referred to as the “social pressure” from peers who operate more freely. Moskos and the other coaches have stressed to their catchers that this has nothing to do with trust.
“We just think that we can be better,” he stated, “and we think that it’s a competitive advantage around the league.”
How much of one is hard to tell from the numbers. The Marlins ranked 10th in the majors in ERA over their last nine games of last season, but that was a small sample. They’ve experienced a year-over-year drop in ERA (4.60 to 4.14) and home-run rate (3.2% to 2.3%), as well as an increase in strikeout rate on two-strike counts (39.7% to 42.2%). But determining how much of that was directly tied to pitch-calling — and not opponent, personnel or individual improvement — is difficult.
In the aggregate, though, the Marlins believe it’s a net positive.
Others are starting to think the same.
The Colorado Rockies, who now employ Leichman as their pitching coach, are also calling pitches from the dugout this season. But it isn’t just the young, small-market clubs that see value in it. The New York Mets explored the concept in spring training. The Los Angeles Dodgers have begun utilizing the system at the Class A levels, according to sources. And teams throughout the industry have been kicking around the merits of it, some of them waiting for the proper time to unleash it, sources with various organizations have stated.
“I think within three years,” former Marlins starting pitcher Chris Paddack stated, “every team will be doing this.”
It was around 3:30 p.m. on April 26, and Marlins players were showering and dressing in Oracle Park’s visiting clubhouse, scrambling to leave for the 350-mile trip south from San Francisco to Los Angeles. But Janson Junk’s day had just begun.
The 30-year-old starting pitcher didn’t have enough time before the game to take part in what the team calls a “pitch design session,” basically a ramped up version of between-starts bullpens with a hitter in the box. His turn came after the Marlins’ 6-3 loss. And so while custodial workers picked up trash from the stands and fans sat in traffic exiting the parking lots, Junk was throwing the equivalent of a simulated game. It was a bizarre scene by major league standards, but clearing logistical hurdles is nothing new for a Marlins team now in its second year of these sessions.
To them, it’s worth it.
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“Our belief, for the most part, and in every aspect of this, is if we can train close to the game and make it more game-like, that’s probably a better training environment,” Marlins director of pitching Bill Hezel stated. “That’s probably more transferrable to the game.”
Training at game-like intensity is a core belief of the Marlins, and their “pitch-design sessions” are the best representation of it.
Rather than throwing a traditional bullpen, each session comes with what Kapler calls “a prescription,” be it putting hitters away with two strikes, generating more spin on sweepers or locating fastballs at the bottom of the zone. Pitchers work off different mounds and utilize a variety of training tools, but mostly, they pitch to one of their own hitters.
It’s exclusively starting pitchers who use the sessions during the season, but the entire Marlins pitching staff throws them in spring training. Last year, Moskos stated, these sessions gave Anthony Bender the confidence to unveil a new gyroslider when the regular season began. This year, Paddack stated those sessions helped him develop both a sweeper and a kick-change.
“I’m not saying you can’t get those same results out of a normal bullpen,” stated Paddack, who was released by the Marlins earlier this month and is now with the Cincinnati Reds. “But to me that uptick in adrenaline, that uptick in knowing the hitter is swinging the bat, getting that feedback, knowing that we’re trying to work on something prior to being under the lights against the Dodgers — I gotta sharpen my tools before I get here in different aspects.”
It does have its drawbacks. One is logistical, when weather, travel and time constraints make utilizing the main field — a necessity for hitters to swing freely — unfeasible. Though the Marlins stress that their pitchers are not being evaluated in these sessions, pitchers have expressed to their agents that they feel judged nonetheless. The other is the workload. Having a hitter in the box brings out the type of adrenaline that often prompts pitchers to throw harder than they otherwise should in between their starts. Hezel believes that is solvable through coaching and communication.
“There’s definitely workload concerns,” Hezel stated. “But when we really thought about it, I think those concerns are there no matter how you do it. The guys that are probably gonna overdo it in those sessions are probably the same guys that are gonna overdo it without a hitter. That happens all the time. Or they’re gonna do it the other way — you’re gonna have a guy who throws 98 in games and is gonna throw these side sessions at like 80. That’s not good, either. You do that for a handful of weeks, a couple of months, now you’re de-training, and that’s bad too.”
On an unusually hot April afternoon at Dodger Stadium, Marlins bench coach Carson Vitale wore a black tank top and baseball pants rolled up to his knees, displaying ankle socks. From about 35 feet in front of home plate, he continued to throw fastballs and sliders as hard as a 37-year-old former minor league catcher could. When he was finished, Vitale did the math: He had thrown 250 pitches at full intensity.
It’s what the job — this one in particular — requires.
“The closer we get to the game, the more we want practice to look like the game,” Vitale stated. “You want the players to step in the box, step on the field, and have some sort of game repetition and practice so that the first time they fail is not the game. You want them to fail in practice so they can slow the game down and practice under the same conditions they’re gonna see in the game.”
For about as long as baseball has been played, coaches lobbed pitches in as hitters loosened up and worked on their mechanics before game time. The Marlins don’t subscribe to that practice. Their hitters are constantly challenged with spin and velocity, either through Trajekt, high-velocity pitching machines or, often, their own coaches trying desperately to get them out.
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At a time when pitchers are leveraging modern technology to throw harder and nastier than ever, this, the Marlins believe, is the only way.
“The feel-good BP, sometimes that’s not the best thing,” Marlins outfielder Kyle Stowers stated. “Sometimes you need to come up with solutions. The more you can do that in practice, maybe the quicker you can come up with a solution in-game.”
A small handful of coaches take part in what is called “mixed BP,” but Vitale is the main source of it. He throws what he describes as “more of a gyro-slider” that he seems quite proud of. Eventually, a competition element will be baked in, consisting of prizes for those with the highest launch angle and fastest exit velocity.
Most important this year, though, is swing decisions — not just discerning balls from strikes, but also determining which pitches hitters can inflict the most damage on. Every single rep should lead to a decision, the Marlins believe. And hitters should get feedback on every one of them, even in batting practice.
“Not swinging at a good pitch that you shouldn’t swing at is incredibly important to your offensive success,” Bendix stated. “But that is not trained. You train just swing, just swing, just swing.”
Like most teams, the Marlins believe pitch velocity and bat speed are crucial to success. What sets them apart is how they chase a different type of speed — on the bases. In short: Their minor leaguers run wild.
“I think a lot of people say baserunning is important,” Marlins director of player development Rachel Balkovec stated, “but having a true system around it is something that our organization has done really well.”
On July 4, 2024, the Marlins’ rookie-ball team in the Florida Complex League stole 13 bases in a single game, a number that hasn’t been matched in the major leagues since 1914. That team accumulated 208 steals that year, 64 more than the runner-up. The following year, the Marlins’ five domestic affiliates combined for 1,233 stolen bases. No other organization came close. One of their prospects, Class A Beloit outfielder Emaarion Boyd, stole six bases without recording a single hit that April.
“We basically have kind of a green light for a lot of people,” Balkovec stated. “We believe baserunning and base stealing is a skill that you can develop. It’s not just, ‘You’re fast.'”
Taking chances often leads to making outs, and Marlins minor leaguers have been no strangers to that. Their five affiliates were caught stealing a whopping 324 times last season. Among the 150 minor league teams that dot the United States, three Marlins affiliates ranked within the top eight in most times picked off.
It’s all part of a larger organizational mantra: Don’t be afraid to fail.
The Marlins are not completely fearless, Kapler notes. They merely understand the need to constantly overcome it. He and Bendix have worked to create a culture of experimentation, believing that if something fails — like postgame practices, which were tried a handful of times with minor leaguers last year but didn’t catch on — they’re operating with the right aggression. It’s not just a mantra.
In their minds, it’s a requirement.
“If you want to see what it looks like when the Marlins play Yankee baseball, we’re going to get destroyed by all the teams that have more resources, have more payroll, etc.,” Moskos stated. “We have to level the playing field somehow, and that’s winning in the margins. And if you find enough margins to win in, you can level the playing field a lot. You look at what we paid for a win versus what the Mets paid for a win last year, I think the proof is in the pudding.”
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