Cardinals must look into the Marlins' groundbreaking pitching usage innovation

The Miami Marlins are captivating the baseball world with their innovative way of deploying starting pitchers as relievers between starts, and it's something the St. Louis Cardinals should monitor closely.

If you haven't seen this year, the Marlins have been sending some of their starting pitchers out of the bullpen between starts, using their scheduled side sessions as actual relief appearances in Major League games. This has allowed them to leverage Sandy Alcantara, Eury Perez, and Janson Junk as high-leverage arms late in games, while still keeping them on a starter's schedule.

Are we seeing the next big innovation in baseball right before our very eyes?

This has drawn so many different opinions around the game, with some seeing it as the future of managing big league staffs, while others see far too much injury risk and confusion on how that impacts working through things in there aresnal like a pitcher can normally do during a side-session.

I can't tell you if this is a good idea or not, but I'm certainly intrigued by it, and it would behoove the Cardinals, and every other Major League team, to at least research and consider the pros and cons of this experiement.

Cardinals could get really creative with their pitching staff moving forward

The Cardinals have almost been on the other side of the spectrum this year when it comes to handling starting pitchers - opting to skip starts, limit pitch counts, and pull pitchers early in order to keep them healthy over the long haul.

The bet the Marlins are seemingly making is that, if the starter was already going to be throwing anyway on the side, why not use those "bullets" in a real game, rather than "wasting" them in a bullpen session. It really is a fascinating thought.

What if next season, the Cardinals had arms like Kyle Leahy, Quinn Mathews, Andre Pallante, and Cooper Hjerpe giving them one inning in between starts to help out the bullpen? In theory, you're adding 2-5 arms to your bullpen, something that would be a major advantage over the course of a 162-game season.

Obviously, it's not that simple. We just don't know the health impacts of that, which could be overstated or could be very real, and it's also fair to say that some starters may not be able to handle it while others can, or sometimes a starter is going to need that side session to "get right" rather than throw in a game that has real stakes.

With all of the talented young arms the Cardinals have coming up through their system, it is really fun to imagine a world where Liam Doyle, Tanner Franklin, Brandon Clarke, Jurrangelo Cijnteje, Yhoiker Fajardo, Mason Molina, and more are sprinkling in relief appearances to optimize their production over the course of a season. And if Major League Baseball does incentivize moving toward a six-man rotation in the future, this may be even more feasible.

For now, it's an interesting experiment led out by the Marlins, but like we've seen with openers, shortening outings for starters, six-man rotations, and other innovations that were scoffed at to start, sometimes these ideas turn into movements around the game. We'll see if any other organizations decide to adopt this and turn it into a trend.

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