MIAMI — For the second straight day, Jazz Chisholm Jr. was the first Miami Marlin out on the field Friday, well before the rest of his teammates trickled out of the clubhouse. It was just him, James Rowson, a tee and a bucket of balls, just like it was the day before. The middle infielder was tired of grounding out to second base and tired of being part of a losing offense, so he called upon his hitting coach and went out to the field early Thursday to get in some extra work before the beginning a four-game series against the Washington Nationals.
He took swing after swing at the stationary balls, trying to train himself to stay through the ball against the inside fastballs opposing pitchers were testing him with. On Thursday, it helped him snap an 11-game homer drought and put together his first multi-hit game in nearly a week, so he did the same thing Friday before the Marlins snapped a four-game losing streak with an 11-2 win in Miami.
“I’ve been hitting a lot of ground balls. Even when I square it up, it’s on the ground,” Chisholm said Thursday after his eighth-inning, three-run home run singlehandedly gave the Marlins their first multi-run game since Saturday. “I was getting out, rolling over to second base a lot. ... That’s what we worked on.”
The 23-year-old Bahamian had been stuck in one of his worst slumps of the 2021 MLB season, hitless in five of seven games before he busted out with two hits and the homer Thursday. He knew what was going wrong — 10 of his last 18 batted balls were groundouts and even two of his three hits had a negative launch angle — but he actually needed some help from Miguel Rojas to find a fix. The shortstop, Chisholm said, noticed the left-handed hitter wasn’t staying through the ball when opponents were pitching him inside. The result was his frustratingly steady diet of ground balls to second base.
Rojas pointed it out to Chisholm on Wednesday. A day later, Chisholm recruited Rowson for some extra early work and, in the eighth inning, the work paid off. Nationals relief pitcher Justin Miller fired Chisholm one of those inside pitches, hoping to get the infielder to ground out again. Instead, Chisholm mimicked the swing he spent the afternoon working on, and launched his ninth home run of the year 414 feet and over the fence in right-center field.
“It’s not hard to tell when everybody’s throwing inside fastballs. It’s not hard to tell when they’re throwing outside fastballs. You see how they pitch you and then you make your adjustment from there,” Chisholm said. “It’s not really knowing how they’re pitching you. It’s knowing what you are doing with those pitches and knowing if that’s the way you should be approaching those.”
The homer was a needed punctuation to another otherwise frustrating loss. The Marlins were six outs away from getting shut out for the second time in four games before Chisholm’s blast and Chisholm, who has positioned himself as a hopeful for the National League Rookie of the Year this season, is one of Miami’s best hopes at a spark. Of his 17 multi-hit games, 10 have coincided with wins, including a stretch from June 8-11 when Chisholm had two hits in four straight games and the Marlins went 3-1.
“His work’s been pretty good. I think it can always improve as far as just the focus on it, but I think adjustments for him are, in general for a young guy, pretty good,” manager Don Mattingly said Thursday. “The biggest thing is he’s confident and he’s not going to let one or two bad games deter him from thinking he can play here. That’s the good thing. ... The better his work gets — the more consistent it gets, the more defined it gets — the better he’s going to be.”
While Chisholm went just 1 for 5 on Friday, the Marlins (32-43) used his late homer as a springboard to beat Washington (36-37) in front of 4,749 at loanDepot park and head into the weekend with some offensive momentum. Miami chased Nationals starting pitcher Jon Lester after only 2 1/3 innings, scoring four runs in the first inning and two more in the third. The Marlins finally gave starting pitcher Pablo Lopez some run support, and Lopez (4-4) went six innings and allowed two runs on on six hits with nine strikeouts to get only his fourth win of the year.
Miami tagged Lester (1-3) for seven earned runs with five hits, three walks and a three-run home run by Rojas — his first since returning from the injured list last Friday. Slugger Garrett Cooper, who returned from the IL ahead of the game, went 3 for 4 with two doubles, a homer and a walk in his first game since June 7.
