How Have the Marlins Had One of MLB’s Best Pitching Staffs in June?
As June comes to a close, the Miami Marlins have boasted one of MLB's best pitching staffs this month, and it's been a complete team effort.
There were many Miami Marlins fans, myself included, who were worried about the departure of Mel Stottlemyre Jr after the conclusion of the 2024 season. Now, here we sit on June 26, and the Marlins pitching staff may be better than ever. They have been a big reason why this has been one of the hottest teams in the month of June.
Don’t believe me? Well, I would not be putting together this article if it weren’t the truth.
Image courtesy of FanGraphs
Per FanGraphs, since the start of June, the Marlins are currently sitting atop the leaderboard in team ERA and only a tick behind the Seattle Mariners and New York Yankees in FIP. Not only that, but the Marlins are only 0.2 fWAR behind the Yankees, Mariners, Boston Red Sox, and Texas Rangers for the top spot in this category, too.
What makes this month impressive is the smorgasbord of pitchers that they have been using to piece together a pitching rotation.
Much has happened to the starting five-man rotation that the Marlins opened up the 2026 season with. Headlined by their Ace, Sandy Alcantara, the rest of the pitching staff was Eury Perez (who only just returned from the IL), Max Meyer (recently placed on the bereavement list), Chris Paddack (just DFA’d by his second team), and Janson Junk (Injured List).
The New Guys Are Eating a Ton of Innings
We are about to enter play on Friday, June 26, and the Marlins are scheduled to have Ryan Gusto start for them against the Rangers. This is going to be just his seventh appearance this year with the big league team after making 10 for Triple-A Jacksonville in the first two months of the season.
What makes all of this even funnier is what you see when you look up the Marlins’ current starting rotation on Roster Resource.
The Marlins’ pitching staff as a whole has been pieced together by names that not many baseball fans even knew existed before their names were called on their Major League debuts.
Piggybacking off that, the Fish have called upon four different pitchers to this point to grace a big league mound for the first time in their careers. Dax Fulton, Robby Snelling, Josh Ekness, and William Kempner were all called up in early May to debut for the team.
It’s Not Just the Rotation
Ready to break it down even more? Well, remember the fWAR stat I referenced a little bit ago? The Marlins bullpen alone has accumulated 1.4 fWAR to this point, only behind the Yankees (1.6) in that category. The Marlins are also in the top-four in both reliever ERA and FIP this month.
Remarkably, this is the case right now after many considered that part of the team to actually be the detriment and main cause of their struggles early in the year. It seems as if Clayton McCullough has finally dialed up the right call down to the bullpen when he needs a reliever.
The Marlins came into this season relatively short-handed in the bullpen after their best reliever last year, Ronny Henriquez, went down with elbow surgery prior to the year. While closer Pete Fairbanks was signed to presumably lock down the backend of the bullpen for the team, his 6.75 ERA is not living up to the expectations anyone had. Thankfully, they have had other relievers step up and shut down opposing teams when they have needed it.
Miami had two relievers entering their third season with the team, and they have continued to provide them with valuable innings in whatever role they are called upon.
The Standouts
Lake Bachar may sound like a “create-a-player” type of name, but there is little denying that he has been one of the more dependable relievers in the National League. Out of the 26 appearances for the club thus far, he has made four starts, pitching to a 2.98 ERA in 42.1 innings, and just tacked on his first save of the season. In June alone, Bachar has pitched to a 1.32 ERA in 13.2 innings. All four of his starts this year have come this month as well.
Now, you can label him as an “opener” all you want, but that shouldn’t deter anyone from shunning the performance to date.
Calvin Faucher is the other pitcher who has simply continued to be one of the more consistent pitchers for the Marlins since he made his debut with the team back in 2024. So far this season, Faucher has appeared in 33 games, 32.2 innings pitched, tallied one save, and is doing so at a 3.58 ERA. While he has not generated the strikeout numbers you’d typically expect from a reliever, his 4.5% barrel rate and 51.1% groundball rate would are both in the 87th percentile in the majors.
Then there’s Tyler Phillips.
I went into great detail about just how good Phillips has been for the Marlins in this article just last week, but I would be doing him a disservice not mentioning him again. Especially after coming off his best start of the season so far, qualifying for his first quality start of the year against the Texas Rangers.
While the bullpen has seemed to do a lot of the shouldering of the Marlins’ pitching success this month, failing to mention the actual starters remaining wouldn’t be fair.
The season has been quite a rollercoaster ride for Sandy Alcantara, but his 2.60 ERA in his five June starts is surely a sight for sore eyes. This is coming off the month of May, where his ERA was over 7, allowing five home runs in those five starts. Despite pitching deep into games this season, the length has been more about primarily filling innings for a team that has been desperate for innings eaters.
Max Meyer is truly the star of the show and should be recognized for it far more than he has been.
I touched just on how well he has been pitching this season in an article published last month, but the right-hander might actually be getting better as the year goes on. Meyer has a 2.80 ERA in 16 games this season, striking out 102 batters in his 90 innings pitched, and still hasn’t recorded a loss all year.
After recently going on the bereavement list, he likely pitched in his last game this month, just three days ago against the Giants. He produced a 2.31 ERA in his four June starts, allowing no more than two runs in each start, and continuing to strike out over a hitter per inning, ending the month with a 10.8 K/9.
Closing Thoughts
It has been death by a thousand paper cuts when opposing teams go up against the Marlins pitching staff. To have produced the numbers they have, at the rate they have been doing so, is a true testament to just how far the Marlins’ pitching development and overall scouting have come over the years. Even more so with the addition of Peter Bendix to the front office and the complete overhaul that came with the hire.
While the team as a whole might still be a year away from being a true contender, the pieces are surely in place for this team to continue to create some noise in the Wild Card standings up until the very end. Just as they did at the end of the 2025 season.
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Cristian has been at Just Baseball since 2021, when he first started writing about prospects. He spent eight years working in Major League Baseball with the…