2:25pm: The Marlins have now formally placed Luzardo on the 15-day injured list with left elbow tightness and recalled Maldonado from Jacksonville. Luzardo tells Christina De Nicola of MLB.com that he feels this IL stint is precautionary and that he’ll only miss one or two starts.
9:35am: Right-hander Anthony Maldonado is being recalled from Triple-A Jacksonville to start tonight’s game, the team has now announced. It’ll be his major league debut. Maldonado is a reliever who’s only pitched 11 2/3 innings over eight appearances this season, so while he could probably give the club multiple innings, it seems the Fish will go with a bullpen game today.
9:22am: The Marlins announced Friday that lefty Jesus Luzardo has been scratched from his scheduled start today and will instead undergo testing on his left elbow. The 26-year-old southpaw experienced discomfort in his most recent bullpen session.
It’s an ominous development for Miami’s Opening Day starter, who’s gotten out to a dreadful start to his season. Through his first five trips to the mound, Luzardo carries a 6.58 ERA in 26 innings. His velocity has held up from last year, but his strikeout rate is down four percentage points (from 28.1% to 24.1%) and his walk rate is up by roughly the same amount (from 7.4% to 11.6%). It’s a far cry from Luzardo’s 2022-23 form, wherein he pitched to a combined 3.48 ERA in 279 frames.
The news is all the more worrisome when considering Luzardo’s injury history. Although he made 32 starts and tossed a career-high 178 2/3 innings last year, that’s hardly been the norm for the talented southpaw. Luzardo had Tommy John surgery during his senior year of high school. The Nationals selected him in the third round of the 2016 draft anyhow and ultimately traded him to the Athletics as part of the package to acquire relievers Ryan Madson and Sean Doolittle. Luzardo continued to climb the minor league ranks and draw considerable prospect fanfare, but he also missed nearly two months of the 2019 season in the minors with a shoulder strain. Oakland flipped him to the Marlins in a 2021 trade for Starling Marte. Luzardo wound up being limited to 18 starts in 2022 because of a forearm strain.
Miami’s rotation has already been devastated by injury. Ace Sandy Alcantara, the 2022 NL Cy Young winner, underwent Tommy John surgery in October and won’t pitch this season. Top prospect Eury Perez, who debuted last season with 91 1/3 innings of 3.15 ERA ball at just 20 years of age, had Tommy John surgery earlier this month. Left-hander Braxton Garrett, who broke out with a 3.63 ERA in 247 2/3 innings from 2022-23, has yet to pitch this season due to a shoulder impingement.
Luzardo now joins that growing list of injured arms, leaving a Miami rotation that projected to be the team’s strength in tatters. Right-hander Edward Cabrera and lefties Ryan Weathers and Trevor Rogers are the team’s three healthy big league starters at present.
Right-hander Sixto Sanchez just made his first start since 2020 but lasted only 2 2/3 innings after opening the season in a bullpen role. He once ranked as an elite pitching prospect but has seen his career derailed by a series of shoulder injuries. He pitched one minor league inning from 2021-23 and is surely on an innings cap this year as a result. Top prospect Max Meyer, who was recently optioned to Triple-A Jacksonville despite a dominant start to the season, will also have his workload managed in 2024 — his first season back from his own Tommy John procedure. It stands to reason that he’ll be back in the Miami rotation at some point — likely sooner than later now — but it’s unclear how many innings can be expected of the former No. 3 overall draft pick.
The Marlins’ season already looked to be effectively over before the first month had drawn to a close. The team currently sits with a 6-20 record and a -47 run differential. The offense ranks 27th in the majors in batting average, 28th in on-base percentage and 29th in slugging percentage. They’ve gotten just five hits from their catchers all season. Any small chance of the Fish climbing out of this hole would’ve required things to break just right for them — including and arguably led by a return to form for their top starter. The obvious hope is that Luzardo will receive a clean bill of health and miss minimal time, but a lengthy absence would only serve as a further nail in the coffin on a catastrophic 2024 season in South Florida.
