Miami Marlins ready to give Sixto Sanchez a shot

With nothing to gain pitching elsewhere this year, the Miami Marlins will give Sixto Sanchez a shot.

No minor league season this year means top MLB prospects not on the big league roster can only work at team’s alternate training sites. So a lot of guys who might have had to wait otherwise are getting a chance. According to Jon Heyman of MLB Network, the Miami Marlins will call up top pitching prospect Sixto Sanchez.

According to Heyman, Sanchez has been regularly hitting 100 MPH on the radar gun at the Marlins’ training site. The benefit of working in that environment, beyond getting stretched out in preparation for a looming call-up, had surely run its course.

Sanchez was the centerpiece of the return from the Philadelphia Phillies in the trade that sent All-Star catcher J.T. Realmuto to Philadelphia in February 2019. He immediately became one of Miami’s top prospects, and between High Class-A Double-A last year as a 21-year old he had a 2.76 ERA with an 8.1 K/9 and a 1.7 BB/9 (114 innings; 103 innings in Double-A).

Sixto Sanchez just might be major league-ready

Entering this year, Sanchez was ranked as the No. 16 prospect in all of baseball by Baseball America. MLB.com (No. 22) and Baseball Prospectus (No. 27) weren’t quite as high on him, but it says a lot that Sanchez was “merely” ranked as top-25 or top-30 prospect by those outlets.

Heyman added, however obviously, that Sanchez is a “candidate to pitch this weekend.” The Marlins have a five-game series coming against Washington Nationals from Friday to next Monday, with a double header on Saturday. One of the doubleheader games seems primed to be Sanchez’s major league debut, but it’s a foregone conclusion it’ll happen sometime in the next few days,

Barring an injury or confidence-depleting epic struggles, Sanchez should be starting games for the Marlins from here on out this season.