Mariners revive piggyback strategy -- this time with all 6 starters 

SEATTLE -- The piggyback strategy is returning to the Mariners’ rotation, but with quite a significant change.

The club is bringing back the tandem tactic, but it will now feature all six of their starters -- as each among that group will appear in the front end or back end of a piggyback from now through the All-Star break.

“Each guy will be a participant for one day,” Mariners general manager Justin Hollander said on Tuesday. “So roughly everyone will sacrifice an inning or two innings over the next 30 days, and it keeps everybody on normal rest.”

The schedule and off-days between now and then -- just under a full month -- slot out so there will be three such outings, the first coming this Friday vs. the Red Sox at T-Mobile Park.

And based on rest schedules, it just so happens that the original tandem will have the first go, as Bryce Miller will start and Luis Castillo will follow in relief. Bryan Woo will start Thursday’s series finale against the Orioles and remain on his regular turn, the last spot among the straight six-man rotation.

That would leave a combination of Woo, Logan Gilbert, Emerson Hancock and George Kirby to account for the other two piggyback outings -- though the Mariners haven’t said yet who will go when and how on those.

“You have to structure it in advance to know what you're doing,” Hollander said. “But if someone were to get sick or something happens, like yeah, you can alternate.”

Tentatively, each piggyback will feature one starter pitching five innings, and the other, four innings. But this can also be in flux -- if, say, one guy doesn’t have it that day. It’s also likely that they’ll use a pivot reliever, if the starter is pulled in the middle of an inning.

“I don’t think we’re going to revolutionize pitching in any way ... but for this group that we have right now, I think it’s the right thing to do,” Hollander said. “And I think everybody landed on that unanimously for this group, and I think the starters began to understand and embrace it when we talked to them.”

This represents a shift from a straight six-man rotation that the club deployed two turns through beginning on June 1, and it wasn’t completely unexpected, as the front office said all along that it intended to reassess after the road trip ended on Sunday.

“It was nothing against the six-man,” Hollander said. “But we have just a bushel of off-days coming, so now they're not pitching every five days or even six days. Now we're on seven-day programs, which is too much.”

Including Monday, the Mariners have four off-days in the 28 days leading into the All-Star break. While that might not sound like much, consider that each of those would have a trickle effect of pushing each starter to a once-per-week-outing.

Had they stayed with a six-man, Hollander said: “Now we're limiting their ability to stay on any kind of normal routine. We're limiting their ability to develop a pattern from a [high-performance] perspective of like build up, express your energy and then taper down and build back up, because it's seven days one time and it's five days the next time. And that's really hard on your body.”

Though this wasn’t officially locked in until a pregame meeting on Monday between all six starters, Wilson and pitching coaches Trent Blank and Pete Woodworth, the conversation was jump-started on Sunday in Washington.

At that time, the rotation was collectively presented with two different options for how the piggyback could play out, pared down from the roughly 12 that Blank had initially mapped out. From there, Blank, Woodworth and Wilson encouraged the six starters to marinate on it for the long flight home and during Monday’s off-day, then reconvene before Tuesday’s series opener against Baltimore with feedback.

“They are our partners in this, and we don't want to forget that they should have a voice,” Hollander said. “If [the pitchers] have options that make more sense for them, or they feel strongly about, we were open to that.”

Essentially, it was an extra effort of transparency, after the first time led to some very public frustration among Miller and Castillo -- largely rooted in how it was communicated.

“That's 100 percent on me,” Hollander said. “There's no reason I shouldn't have either been there or followed up directly afterwards. I think that just making sure that the expectations are clear about what the role is and what we ask for them.”