Mariners determined to make piggyback pitching plan work

SEATTLE – When the Mariners’ brain trust met recently to hash out a strategy for their six-man starting staff, someone threw out a suggestion that maybe the club should call up elite pitching prospects Kade Anderson and Ryan Sloan and go all-in with an eight-man rotation featuring four piggyback tandems.

It was a playful idea, intended as a joke.

The Mariners, to be clear, aren’t going to that extreme. (At least, not yet).

But the team has committed to a new version of the piggyback plan that includes participation from all six starters for the next few weeks. The pitchers had a voice in how the plan was to be executed during multiple meetings with the coaching staff and follow-up conversations with front-office executives.

“We’re all on the same page,” Logan Gilbert said.

Trent Blank, the team’s director of pitching strategy, went through a dozen or so versions of the piggyback plan, trying to come up with a creative solution that worked well for all six starters.

“It put my head into a pretzel,” he said.

Blank said there wasn’t going to be one perfect option that made everyone happy, and he’s not sure if he loves the piggyback as a general concept. But for the Mariners’ situation right now, he said it’s the best plan.

“Emotionally, it feels right,” he said.

During their last East Coast trip, with a schedule that featured 16 games in 17 days, the Mariners paused the piggyback plan and turned to a six-man rotation, with each starter getting their own full-go day to start.

Blank said the six-man rotation presented a new set of challenges, largely because of the limitations around a seven-man bullpen (as opposed to a typical eight-man ’pen) and specifically with the use of Eduard Bazardo and Jose A. Ferrer, two of the M’s most effective bullpen arms.

“When we lost (the piggyback), I wanted it back right away, because it did make it feel like we were using Bazardo and (Ferrer) too much,” Blank said.

Up to this point, Bryce Miller and Luis Castillo have been the two pitchers involved in the tag-team effort, with generally positive results. The one glaring exception was the Mariners’ 6-2 loss to the Red Sox on Friday, when Miller was pulled after five sharp innings and Castillo was tagged with five runs (four earned) in four innings of relief.

The Mariners haven’t announced a detailed schedule of which pitchers will piggyback next, but it won’t be during their upcoming series in Pittsburgh, beginning Tuesday. George Kirby, Bryan Woo and Miller are the scheduled starters, in order, against the Pirates, and they won’t have any predetermined pitch-count restrictions. They’ll be normal starts.

The piggyback is expected return when the Mariners play in Cleveland over the weekend.

As the club sees it, one key benefit of the piggyback is giving the bullpen effectively a full day off.

In their four tandem games, Miller and Castillo have combined to throw 36 of 37 innings, needing only one inning in total from the bullpen (and that happened during the first piggyback game on May 19 against the White Sox).

Miller and Castillo each expressed their frustration during a May 25 piggyback game against the Athletics, a 9-2 win in Sacramento. The issue largely stemmed from uncertainty around what was expected of them; the next day, manager Dan Wilson spoke with each pitcher, and club president Jerry Dipoto followed up separately to make sure expectations were communicated clearly.

Since then, the front office has been more proactive in communication. In a typical situation, the coaching staff meets with players to go through day-to-day plans.

“The concerns the players had, we should have answered those more clearly,” general manager Justin Hollander said. “I think if they had to do it over again, they would have expressed, like, ‘I’m not really sure, can you come explain this more?’ We didn’t do a good-enough job on Day 1, and I take responsibility for that. It’s one thing if we’re flopping two guys in the rotation; I probably don’t need to sit in that meeting. But I probably should, or Jerry, or both of us should have been there when you’re doing something this different and made sure that everybody walked out of the room with a clear understanding.”

Gilbert praised improved communication from coaches and executives, and he said the staff is determined to make the piggyback effective.

“Right away, everybody was just bought in like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re going to do; we’re not going to complain; we’re going to find a way to do it and try to step up and help the bullpen, because they’re a man down,’ ” Gilbert said. “… We’ve got six really good starters, so if you have to face two of us in the same game, I think I think we like our chances.”

• NOTE: For the second time in his career, Gilbert was named the American League Player of the Week on Monday, making him just the second pitcher to win the AL award this year.

The Mariners’ 29-year-old right-hander went 2-0 in two starts last week, posting a 1.35 ERA with two runs allowed on five hits and an 18-3 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 13.1 innings.