Is Marlins Pitcher Jose Fernandez Hitting A Wall?

To be fair, his team didn’t give him a lot of help last night. The Marlins left eight men on base, didn’t have an extra base hit, Dee Gordon was picked off the basepaths for the second game in a row, and Christian Yelich made one of the stupidest decisions not to be scored an error that I can recall seeing on a baseball field.

But after last night’s 3-2 defeat at the hand of the Chicago Cubs at the Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field, Marlins staff ace Jose Fernandez has lost consecutive decisions for the first time since the first month of his first season. So with the calendar now turned to August, and the club entering its stretch fun for the third playoff berth in franchise history, it seems like a great time to ask a vital question:

Is Jose Fernandez hitting a wall?

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At first glance, the very idea seems crazy. Maybe even at second glance as well. How can a player that is leading all of baseball in strikeouts, and sporting a sub 3.00 ERA possibly be viewed as showing signs of fatigue? Even yesterday, in defeat, he turned in a quality start. Six innings pitched, with just 3 ER and 8 Ks? You’d take it eleven times out of ten from most major league pictures, and be grateful for the effort.

But Jose Fernandez is Jose Fernandez precisely because he is NOT most major league pictures.

If Andrew Cashner makes five starts like that the rest of the way, the Marlins will probably make the playoffs. But only if Jose pitches like Jose, the guy you count on to raise his game to another level in those big games and dominate. He’s done it his whole career. Not last night though, and certainly not in that previous start against top NL Wild Card rival St. Louis. You’ve come to expect him to throw shutouts in those spots, or rather log shutout innings until his pitch count tops out.

The concern here runs deeper than the two losses though,especially as only one of them, again, was a genuinely poor effort. If you look at the last four outings for Jose, you’ll see a simultaneously impressive and concerning first. The current four-game stretch of giving up 2 ER or more is a career long within a season, with the only time you can even technically it say happened before being if you combined the last three starts of 2015 with this year’s ugly opener against the Tigers.

He has never given up more than 2 ER in three straight, a prospect he’ll face next week against the San Francisco Giants.

To me, this seems like the perfect time to give Jose that August skipped start we’ve been told for months is in the offing. San Francisco is almost certainly winning that division, and even if they do slip, the Marlins would need to sweep to claim the tiebreaker. Save for two random AL Central matchups, one of which Fernandez would miss by skipping his next turn in the rotation, the rest of the month’s schedule comes against either bottom feeding NL opponents or fellow Wild Card contenders.