MIAMI - The Marlins spent all 162 games in 2026 doing something no other big league club had done for a full season: calling pitches from the dugout.
At the center of it was first-year assistant pitching coach Rob Marcello, who carried the same duty with Triple-A Jacksonville in 2025 before taking it to the majors. MLB.com spoke with Marcello about what the experiment looked like day to day, and the picture that emerges is part strategy session, part constant problem-solving.
The club built its evaluation process around regular review meetings. Early in the season, those sessions lasted about 30 minutes and focused on the previous day’s game.
By the end of the year, they were happening roughly three times a week. A dozen people were involved, including Marcello, president of baseball operations Peter Bendix, general manager Gabe Kapler, director of pitching Bill Hezel, pitching coach Daniel Moskos, bullpen coach Brandon Mann, assistant director of baseball operations Jordan Jackson and vice president of baseball solutions Ryan Plunkett.
The hard part, Marcello said, was separating the pitch call from what happened after it. A pitch could be the right one and still get punished because of execution. Or the other way around.
“It was eye-opening in a way,” Marcello said. ‘‘Is it the right pitch?’
And I think we always would revert back to, ‘Was it his best stuff if we're trying to get a punchout? Is it his best strike pitch?
Is it all this in these counts?’”
Marcello said he generally thought pitch by pitch once games started. A lot of the preparation, though, was about avoiding obvious traps - making sure the team wasn’t going to keep leaning on a pitch in a count where the opponent was already sitting on it.
Inside the dugout, the conversation could shift based on what pitchers and coaches were seeing in real time, whether that meant a swing clue from the batter or something about a pitcher’s stuff. That could lead to changes in the plan on the fly.
The amount of shaking varied from pitcher to pitcher, but Marcello said it usually happened no more than 10 times a game, with 10 being the high end.
Tyler Phillips shook the least. Ryan Gusto had some early issues with sequencing.
Calvin Faucher would sometimes shake and then explain afterward that he didn’t have that pitch working while warming up in the bullpen. Eury Pérez, who was trying to build confidence in some of his secondary pitches, shook more than others.
Marcello said a later conversation with Pérez helped explain that.
“‘When you call a pitch and I throw it for a ball, and you call something else,’” Marcello recalled Pérez saying, “‘I lose confidence in that you think I can't throw the sweeper for a strike.' I was like, 'Oh, OK, that makes sense. That's a real emotion.’”
To get buy-in, Marcello and Moskos leaned on objective data to show pitchers why certain pitches were being called.
When a pitcher did shake, the next pitch became a decision for the catcher and pitcher.
“That's another talking point of mine this offseason,” Marcello said. “I don't think it'll happen, but do we give the pitcher a PitchCom so he can just click the next [pitch]?”
The Marlins also had to keep changing their numbers and hand signals so opposing teams couldn’t decode them.
Marcello said the workload of doing this for an entire season was real. Since no team had done it before, he couldn’t lean on a blueprint from others.
He did reach out to 11-year veteran catcher A.J. Ellis for advice.
“Obviously from last year you understand it's going to be a lot,” Marcello said. “It's not just coaching, and then I think just being on the Major League level, it just adds in so much mental wear knowing every game does matter. … I think about a long winning streak, and even those are draining, and then losing 12, those were just as draining.”
As for responsibility, Marcello said he owned the misses and gave the pitchers the credit when things went right.
“I'll take all the blame when they do bad, and they took all the positives when they did good,” Marcello said. “That’s honestly how I felt at the end of the day.
'Where did I mess up? Where could this have gone wrong?'
They do good, it's them. At the end of the day, it comes down to pitch execution.
I'm not throwing the ball. Eury’s really good when he throws his offspeed for strikes.
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