MIAMI — He made his way from the dugout to the field with three cameras and expectations following him. He circled the loanDepot park mound and stopped briefly as his foot touched the dirt before he began throwing warm-up pitches. His long-awaited Major League Baseball debut is here.
“It means everything to me,” Edward Cabrera said a day earlier. “I’ve been waiting for this moment since I was a little kid, and I also know that I have a family supporting me and waiting for this moment, as well.”
Cabrera’s moment, finally, arrived on Wednesday.
And Cabrera’s Miami Marlins debut against the Washington Nationals lived up to the hype for six innings before two bad pitches ended his night on a sour note.
His final line in Miami’s 4-3, 10-inning win: 6 1/3 innings, four hits, three earned runs allowed, three walks and two strikeouts. Cabrera threw 78 pitches, 50 of which went for strikes.
All three runs he allowed came on a pair of seventh-inning home runs.
Jorge Alfaro hit a walk-off single that scored Jesus Sanchez from third base and ended the Marlins’ eight-game losing streak. Miami is now 52-75 on the season. The Nationals are 54-71. It was Alfaro’s second walk-off hit of the season.
Of Cabrera’s 78 pitches, he threw 30 four-seam fastballs (topping out at 98.8 mph), 24 change-ups, 12 curveballs and 12 sliders.
It was a needed first step and one the Marlins hope he will build on over the final five-plus weeks of the regular season.
“Now seems to be the right time,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said, “because our plan would be [for Cabrera to] be part of the mix now and moving forward.”
Breaking down the start
Cabrera, the No. 2 prospect in the Marlins’ system and the No. 30 overall prospect in baseball according to MLB Pipeline, gave the Marlins a lot to be excited about moving forward.
His first pitch: A 97.7 mph four-seam fastball on the lower inside corner of the strike zone to Nationals center fielder Lane Thomas. The at-bat ended with a ground ball to Brian Anderson two pitches later.
Cabrera needed just eight pitches — all strikes — to retire the side in the first inning on a pair of groundouts and a soft lineout and threw just 17 pitches to get through two innings.
He then worked around early jams.
After Luis Garcia hit a first-pitch single to right field to lead off the third, Cabrera struck out Riley Adams looking and Josiah Gray on a fouled bunt attempt with two-strikes before Bryan De La Cruz made a running grab at the wall in center field to rob Thomas of a hit. Cabrera pointed his index finger toward De La Cruz as he walked off the mound.
The Marlins then erased an Alcides Escobar’s infield single in the fourth, a Carter Kieboom hit-by-pitch in the fifth and an Adams walk in the sixth with double plays.
But his outing unraveled in the seventh when Josh Bell and Yadiel Hernandez hit back-to-back home runs on elevated change-ups. Bell’s went a projected 413 feet to straightaway center field and barely left the outfield. Hernandez’s went an estimated 396 feet to left field.
“I’m sure he has never felt anything like what he’s going to feel here, and we’re going to work through those,” Marlins pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. said. “We know he’s got great makeup, great work habits. His aptitude has been there, so there’s a lot of things that he does and brings to this level that we hope that he can kind of cut to the chase so to speak and and get through some of those roadblocks. It’s not an easy transition for guys to come up and have to go through some struggles, but we’re pretty confident with how he’s wired and things that he’s worked through.”
‘It wasn’t an easy process’
The Marlins were hoping Cabrera’s debut would have come sooner than this. Cabrera did, too. It has been his dream since he started playing at 13 years old in the Dominican Republic.
Cabrera, who signed with the Marlins as an international free agent in 2015, had a breakthrough minor league season in 2019 and showed even more strides during spring training before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered MLB for four-and-a-half months.
“It was something that I wanted to do very much,” Cabrera said.
But a pair of injuries over the last two seasons delayed his call-up to the majors.
First, it was a minor shoulder injury while he was at the Marlins’ alternate training site during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. He was off the mound for a bit but rebounded to the point where he was on the Marlins’ taxi squad for their final road trip of the season and for both playoff series even though he didn’t get the call at that point.
And then he missed all of spring training this year while dealing with right biceps nerve inflammation. He didn’t make his first minor league start until June 6, just over a month after the season began.
The physical rehab also took a toll on him mentally.
“It wasn’t an easy process,” Cabrera said. “It was something a little bit hard that I needed to trust my trainers and everybody in the organization. ... I put my head down and was always working hard.”
‘It’s time to give him another test’
His hard work paid off this year.
Cabrera compiled a 2.93 ERA in 13 starts spanning three minor league levels — two with Class A Jupiter, five with Double-A Pensacola and six with Triple-A Jacksonville — before being told Sunday that he would be making his way to Miami. He struck out 92 batters over 61 1/3 innings in the minors, holding opponents to a .205 batting average.
“It’s time to give him another test here,” Stottlemyre said. “He’s done enough things down there and kind of pitched his way out of that level. He has earned the right to come here.”
His first test on Wednesday went well until the seventh inning. Now, the focus shifts from getting to the big leagues to figuring out what he has to do to stay in the big leagues. Assuming he stays healthy, Cabrera should get five or six more starts this season.
It’s a similar situation to the one Sixto Sanchez and Trevor Rogers were in last season.
Stottlemyre mentioned specifically how the Marlins watched how Rogers learned from his seven starts in 2020 and went into the offseason with “a better understanding of how his stuff plays at this level.” Rogers won a job in the starting rotation out of spring training for the 2021 season, became the Marlins’ lone All-Star representative and is still a contender to win the National League Rookie of the Year award despite missing the past month of the season.
Cabrera, Stottlemyre said, “needs to see that and feel that.”
“There are going to be some bumps in the road,” Stottlemyre said. “It comes with every young pitcher who’s ever gone through this level. I look forward to working through those, but this is a guy that obviously with his pitch package and what he brings — not to put too much pressure on him — but he has a chance to impact a game.”
