Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin feels 'pretty confident' staff is ready for season to start

Oscar Marin knows being a new pitching coach amid a pandemic is less than ideal, but feels “pretty confident” about the progress the Pittsburgh Pirates staff has made preparing for baseball’s return.

“Everything is new to us, new to myself,” Marin said Saturday on 93.7 FM. “I’m working through a pandemic, just like every other pitching coach in the league.”

Marin believes the Pirates are ready to resume playing baseball, if MLB owners and the MLB Players Association can come to an agreement on the length of the season. The expectation is for teams to return for a three-week training camp at their own stadiums before the start of regular-season games.

“What needs to happen is what’s been happening already for us,” said Marin, who arrived in Pittsburgh last Sunday. “We feel pretty confident in whatever timeline they would give us that we would be ready to get in games in that stretch. … Everybody has heard the three- to four-week timeline, possibly, that we would get (for training camp). That would be sufficient for our guys, where we are at and where we’ve been building them up to be.”

When MLB stopped spring training March 12 because of the coronavirus crisis, Marin said it took “about a week or so” for Pirates pitchers to find a facility to throw and do workouts. By the second week, they started throwing again. They built up from throwing two side sessions a week to live batting practice, with starters throwing simulated three-inning games on a five-day progression with a bullpen session in-between.

“We feel pretty confident about where our guys are at,” said Marin, who was hired by new manager Derek Shelton to replace Ray Searage. “They’ve already touched some multiple-inning benchmarks.”

Marin said the expectation would be that pitchers could throw five or six innings, with a pitch count in the 90-100 range. Marin said he worked with the Pirates’ performance staff and bullpen coach Justin Meccage to come up with a detailed plan for the pitching staff during the downtime.

Pirates left-hander Derek Holland told 93.7 FM that Marin “has done such a good job of communicating with us” to keep the pitchers in their routines that the staff should be ready for training camp.

“Honestly, I don’t think it’s going to take long at all,” Holland said. “I feel like our group, the Pirates staff, is going to be ready to go.”

The key, Marin said, will be how the Pirates use their pitching staff in an abbreviated season. The expectation is that rosters will be expanded, giving him more options. But he also suggested strategies could change dramatically from series to series.

“That’s the beauty of our sport, just baseball in general, is just finding ways to get things done and formulating plans as you go, making sure you’re diving into every possible thing you can to come up with the best-case scenarios for the team, as well,” Marin said. “This happens throughout the season, too, playing the cat-and-mouse game between matchups in a certain division. You might have the right plan in the first series against a team. The next time out, they might be planning to attack the strength you had last time. That’s the beauty of the game. That’s what makes it fun.”