"If you are used to going five innings and then go six or seven, you won't have your good stuff. They need to start that from the minor leagues and give pitchers strong arms"
About this Quote
Marichal is pushing back on modern pitching as a managed resource, not a craft. The surface read is old-school advice: build endurance early, stretch outings, create “strong arms.” The real target is the inning cap culture that treats five innings as a successful template and asks bullpens to finish the story. When he says “you won’t have your good stuff,” he’s not talking about toughness as a moral virtue; he’s describing a predictable physiological and psychological mismatch. If a pitcher’s whole identity is calibrated to sprint, the body and mind don’t suddenly become marathon-ready on command. The “stuff” disappears because the pacing disappears.
The subtext is a generational critique of how baseball now manufactures pitchers. Marichal came from an era where starters were expected to solve a lineup multiple times, improvise through fatigue, and win with guile as velocity faded. Today’s development pipeline often optimizes for max effort: higher velo, sharper breaking balls, shorter bursts, heavier specialization. That can be rational given injury risk and analytics, but it also produces a pitcher who hasn’t learned the late-game skill set: reading swings, stealing outs, managing contact, surviving without the peak version of himself.
His insistence that it “start…from the minor leagues” is the key tell. This isn’t nostalgia for complete games; it’s an argument about training incentives. Teach durability and you get different pitchers. Teach five-and-dive, and you get a sport built around planned exits and expensive bullpen depth. Marichal is defending an older definition of mastery: not just dominance, but endurance.
The subtext is a generational critique of how baseball now manufactures pitchers. Marichal came from an era where starters were expected to solve a lineup multiple times, improvise through fatigue, and win with guile as velocity faded. Today’s development pipeline often optimizes for max effort: higher velo, sharper breaking balls, shorter bursts, heavier specialization. That can be rational given injury risk and analytics, but it also produces a pitcher who hasn’t learned the late-game skill set: reading swings, stealing outs, managing contact, surviving without the peak version of himself.
His insistence that it “start…from the minor leagues” is the key tell. This isn’t nostalgia for complete games; it’s an argument about training incentives. Teach durability and you get different pitchers. Teach five-and-dive, and you get a sport built around planned exits and expensive bullpen depth. Marichal is defending an older definition of mastery: not just dominance, but endurance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Training & Practice |
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