Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports
Don’t look now, but the Miami Marlins are actually generating some positive buzz in the baseball world again.
Just not in the win-loss column, of course. Losers of five straight and still dead last in the NL East (though the Philadelphia Phillies might give them a run for their money soon), the fish are still not what you’d call a good team. However, with newcomers like Christian Yelich there lighting it up with core players like Giancarlo Stanton and Logan Morrison, it’s not as if there are no good players on the team either.
And Jacob Turner is adding to that quickly-growing list.
Though a relative unknown now that he’s no longer a Detroit Tigers top prospect and thanks to the NL ROY-worthy season that Jose Fernandez, the 22-year old is showing that the future of the Marlins may have finally arrived … in the starting pitching department, anyway.
No, he’s not as lights out as his fellow phenom, but you know, a 2.68/1.20 ERA/WHIP through 77.1 innings in his age-22 season isn’t anything to scoff at either.
If there’s one word that might be best served to describe Turner’s season, it might be “quality”. That’s going to seem a bit self-evident, but the fact that that he’s been consistently good in just about each one of his starts. Of his 12 turns, nine have been of the quality variety (including his last three), and he’s yet to allow more than four runs in any of them.
Perhaps most impressively however, is that he’s consistently pitched into the at least the sixth inning, with just a pair of five-inning outings being his shortest on the season.
That’s not something that even Fernandez can say he accomplished, and the steadiness of Turner despite being just a little over a year older than his Cuban teammate speaks volumes as to just how far his development has come as a former top pitching prospect.
And while his underwhelming strikeout ability (6.40 K/9) may hold him back from giving the Marlins a duo of aces — a potential long-term no. 2 is not at all a bad thing, yes?
