Bryce Miller’s ‘eye-opening’ start helps quiet Mariners’ rotation questions
ANAHEIM, Calif. – They huddled close, just the two of them, just inside the right-field line here Friday afternoon.
Bryce Miller, on one knee on the outfield grass, mostly just listened for the better part of a half-hour.
Mariners pitching coach Pete Woodworth, fiddling with a football in his right hand, knelt and leaned forward on his outstretched left leg. He talked.
Almost 48 hours later, Miller ended what might have been the best start of his rookie season – and we’d submit here, the most important performance of his young career – with a strikeout of Shohei Ohtani on Sunday at Angel Stadium, setting the stage for the Mariners to finish their first four-game sweep of their divisional rival in 18 years.
Miller, after back-to-back rough outings that prompted questions about his place in the Mariners rotation, struck out 10 Angels over five sharp innings. He gave up only one run, didn’t allow a walk and induced 22 whiffs on 85 pitches.
“Eye-opening” is how Woodworth would describe the rookie’s performance:
“This kid can pitch,” Woodworth said in the visitors clubhouse afterward, emphasizing the last word. “He has the ability. He proved that to himself today.”
At 60-52 the Mariners have matched their 112-game record from 2022.
They are in the thick of the American League wild-card race. They are the hottest team in baseball. And they are starting to believe – really believe – they have what it takes to get back to the postseason for a second year in a row.
Which also struck at the heart of Woodworth’s conversation with Miller on Friday.
He wanted his young pitcher to believe in himself. To have conviction in every pitch. To keep it simple. To trust that who he is, and what he has, is good enough.
“You have good (stuff),” Woodworth told him. “You need to trust your (stuff).”
Miller had, in Woodworth’s words, “a magical” first month in the big leagues in May, when he burst on the scene with a seemingly untouchable fastball that carried him through five consecutive quality starts.
After getting hit around by the Yankees on May 29, Miller tried to make some changes, tried to add some new pitches, tried to be more and do more.
Ultimately, Woodworth believed, Miller had strayed from what got him here, from what made him distinct.
“He’s not gonna beat around the bush with nothing,” Miller said. “He tells you like it is, and he tells you what you gotta do. Going through this for the first time, there’s obviously going to be a learning curve. It’s different in the minor leagues. So he’s been able to help me move through that learning curve and make adjustments on the fly.”
The Mariners’ top decision-makers have been working through various pitching scenarios in recent weeks. Woodworth and manager Scott Servais had a closed-door meeting for nearly an hour in Anaheim over the weekend.
With Robbie Ray out for the season, and with Marco Gonzales (forearm strain) unlikely to return soon, the Mariners have had to ask a lot of their two rookie starters – Miller, 24, and Bryan Woo, 23, who was sensational himself in Anaheim on Thursday night.
But the Mariners knew they could push them only so far for so long. Miller has thrown 106 total innings this season after throwing a career-high 133⅔ last year.
Woo, two years removed from major elbow surgery, has thrown 99 innings after throwing a career-high 57 last year.
At some point, will the Mariners need to call up Emerson Hancock, their top pitching prospect, from Class AA Arkansas?
Should they turn again to veteran lefty Tommy Milone for a spot start or two?
Is a six-man rotation a possibility?
How much more can they ask of the rookies?
How much more do the rookies have left to give?
Entering the weekend, the last question was a particularly pointed one for Miller, who had allowed six runs in each of his previous two starts ( against Minnesota and Boston), giving up six home runs over 11⅓ innings.
His fastball velocity was dipping. His secondary offerings were, well, meh. And there was growing concern that he was starting to wear down.
His start Sunday was setting up to be something of a pivot point, for him and for the team.
A third consecutive rough start might have forced the club to seriously consider an alternative option over the next week.
Instead, Miller delivered what he considered his best start of the season.
The numbers bear that out: His four-seam fastball averaged 96.1 mph – the fastest in any of his 16 starts – which marked a notable increase from his 94.5-mph average in his previous start at home against Boston. (It helped, he said, that it was a humid 90 degrees in Southern California.)
“I had to bounce back,” he said Sunday afternoon. “I felt probably the best I’ve felt all year today.”
Two days before that start against the Red Sox in Seattle, Miller had a particularly arduous bullpen session, some 40-45 pitches, he figured. He was trying to work on some tweaks to his off-speed pitches; he wanted them to be perfect.
In hindsight he might have worn himself out a bit, which he thinks might have contributed to his velocity dip two days later.
In Anaheim on Friday, during his usual between-starts bullpen session, he was mindful to not overdo it. He threw between 20-25 pitches in the ‘pen that day.
“Just trusting the process,” he said. ” … The focus in the bullpen was: get ahead; throw strikes early; and get the slider down. And that’s what I did (Sunday). When I do that, when I have command of all my pitches, it makes things so much easier, obviously.”
Miller threw first-pitch strikes to 15 of the 20 Angels batters he faced (75%), which is always an emphasis for Mariners pitchers, and especially so for Miller in this start.
As Woodworth noted, Miller wasn’t just throwing his elite four-seam fastball and trying to blow it past hitters. With Cal Raleigh calling the game behind the plate, Miller was pitching with purpose, which is what was most encouraging for his pitching coach.
In the series opener Thursday, Ohtani reached base in all four of his plate appearances, with two walks (one intentional), a single and his 40th homer of the season.
In the final three games of the series, Ohtani was 2 for 12 with one walk and seven strikeouts.
Miller threw four consecutive sliders to Ohtani in the fifth inning Sunday, getting a swing and miss on the last one in the dirt for his final out in the most meaningful start of his season.
“This is the standard now,” Woodworth said afterward. “You can do it. And this is what you need to do every five days.”