Where do SF Giants stand on Marlins' innovative pitch-calling practice?

SAN FRANCISCO - Buster Posey remembers the numbers.

The numbers screamed for Madison Bumgarner, with the 2014 World Series championship on the line, to throw Kansas City’s Salvador Perez a breaking ball in the dirt. Posey, though, knew Bumgarner had a good feel for his four-seamer. Fastball was the call, Perez popped out and the Giants won their third title in five years.

This was the art of pitch calling. For all the publicly available numbers, pitch calling is one of the few areas of the game that can't quite be calculated. The Miami Marlins, though, are taking a calculated bet that they can revolutionize the practice.

Last September, the Marlins began outsourcing pitch calling to their dugout, putting the responsibility in the hands of a coach. They carried that strategy into this season, and the Giants will see it this weekend when they host Miami for three games.

Miami's brain trust firmly believes in the strategy. The Giants, meanwhile, haven't had conversations about implementing this system. Posey, who will have a plaque in Cooperstown due in part to his game-calling, has his reservations.

As for Patrick Bailey, the two-time Gold Glove award winner and the game's best defensive catcher? He summarized his stance in three words:

"Not a fan."

Is this system too radical to ever become mainstream outside of Miami? Or, could the Marlins set into motion a system that the Giants, as well as every team in baseball, adopt down the line?

"I hate to say it, but I think success brings people following," Marlins assistant pitching coach Rob Marcello, who calls Miami's pitches, said in a phone interview. "If the Marlins go out and have success this year, I think people will look into it a lot deeper. There’s a lot of people that say, ‘Hey, this is dumb,' but they’re not here and they don’t see what goes on behind it."

The Marlins started testing this strategy in the minors at the beginning of the 2025 season, working through the kinks before debuting it in the majors in mid-September. Last year, Alon Leichman, who is now the Rockies' pitching coach, called the pitches. This year, Marcello performs the job.

To relay a sign, Marcello holds up his hand and flashes a sequence to the catcher with his fingers. The catcher receives the signal, checks his wrist band, then punches the command into his PitchCom.

Pitchers can still shake, and it's up to the catcher to make the next call if he does. While pitchers have that power, Marcello said the Marlins are already seeing fewer shakes since the start of the season.

"Honestly, the main thing was we felt pretty strongly that this would put us in the best position to pitch really well," Bill Hezel, the Marlins' director of pitching, said in a video call. "We thought if we did this, we thought we would pitch better - straight up."

Hezel and Marcello are aware that there are misconceptions, one of the biggest being that the Marlins strictly adhere to the numbers. Like catchers, Marcello is still reacting to the game, still making adjustments on the fly, still communicating with his pitchers and catchers. If one pitch isn't working or another pitch is dominating, Marcello adjusts accordingly.

“The old-school catching philosophy is, ‘What pitch is on that day?’ That’s a lot of our conversations in between the innings. The industry thinks we don’t believe in that stuff, and I think they’re 100 percent wrong in that aspect,” Marcello said.

Posey, who has caught more than 10,000 innings, doesn't outright reject the validity of the Marlins' system. That said, he does have legitimate counterarguments. His main one: There's a world of difference between standing in the dugout and squatting behind the plate.

"I can definitely answer that it is a big difference because I’ve stood (in the dugout) and watched, and I’ve also been behind the plate and watched," said Posey, now the Giants’ president of baseball operations. "You can ask the catcher in between innings, ‘How is this pitch? What’s the action on this pitch? Is it backing up? Does it have good depth? Does it have good side-to-side? What’s the spin look like?’"

Veteran catcher Eric Haase, who has caught nearly 400 games in the majors and was called up by the Giants this week to replace injured backup Daniel Susac, shares the same perspective. So does Alex Burg, the Giants' catching coach and field coordinator who caught 102 games in the minors.

“There’s a lot of nuance to it,” Haase said. “I don’t think you should scrap it. I’m honestly curious to see how it goes, but I also don’t know how that would not be predictable. If I have a scouting report made up against me by our offensive department, theoretically, I would know a lot of those pitches that they’re going to be attacking me with.”

"Ultimately, the ideal situation is a guy like Buster or Patty that's really good defensively, and they put in the time and the preparation to know who the pitcher is, know who the opponent is, and get a flow of the game," Vitello said.

Hezel and Marcello both argued that this practice removes some mental load from their catchers, allowing them to focus on their other responsibilities. Hezel argues that Miami's pitching coaches don't just know their pitchers best, but they also have all the data right at their fingertips.

Burg, however, points out something rather simple: catchers chose to play that position and everything that comes with it.

"If you think about, just in general, if you took away something that somebody took a lot of pride in and said, ‘I can do it better,’ what does that do to them?" Burg said. "If they were open to it and wanted it, we would figure out a way to do it. As of right now, they love calling the pitches."

"They’re essentially saying they feel like they’re better at it than the catcher is," Posey said. "If they’re not strictly following the numbers and they’re reading swings and pitches from over here on the side, that’s the message: They’re better at it than the catcher is."

The Marlins believe their system will give them a competitive advantage, but it's hard to truly approximate, at least publicly, how much of an advantage it actually brings.

Miami's pitching staff is having a solid year, ranking ninth in the majors in strikeouts and 12th in ERA. How much of that success is because of the system? How much of that success is the product of having pitchers like Sandy Alcantara and Eury Pérez, a pair of uber-talented right-handers who will both take the mound at Oracle during this series?

Miami is not alone in the crusade to take pitch calling from the catcher’s hands. The Colorado Rockies are also suggesting pitches from the dugout, while the New York Mets experimented with it in spring training.

Earlier this millennium, the team that formerly called Oakland home revolutionized the sport. Across the country, the Marlins could be ushering in their own paradigm shift.

"You do want to watch trends in the league and see what teams are trying new things," Vitello said. "I'm never a fan of boxing yourself in."

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This story was originally published April 24, 2026 at 8:32 AM.