For now, Morales focuses on Rockies bullpen
By Jack Etkin 
| July 15, 2009 | 12:04 PM
Franklin Morales has pitched well for the Rockies since making his debut as a reliever last week against the Washington Nationals. (Photo by Dustin Bradford/Icon SMI)
It’s been two weeks since Franklin Morales started a game, July 2 to be exact for Triple-A Colorado Springs against the Salt Lake Bees. Since then, Morales has given the Rockies tantalizing glimpses of an intriguing weapon: a left-handed reliever with a power arm. He has pitched effectively in short spurts — all situations with weighty implications — and no longer harbors aspirations of returning to the Rockies rotation.
“I don’t think of starting right now,” Morales said. “I’m thinking, ‘Do my job for a reliever.’ That’s the only opportunity I have. I need to take it.”
So far, Morales has seized the opportunity. Admittedly, the sample size is small — four relief appearances at Coors Field in a six-day stretch leading up to the All-Star break. That’s too few games to reach any definitive conclusions about Morales’ future in the Rockies bullpen, but it’s enough of a glimpse for those above him to be very encouraged.
“I think he has less to think about in that role,” pitching coach Bob Apodaca said. “And because of the competitor he is, he is strictly focused on the first guy he faces. I think it has taken a lot of excessive baggage off of his shoulders.”
Bullpen coach Jim Wright, who was the Rockies’ roving pitching coordinator before this season and, hence, has the longest history with Morales of anyone in the organization, sees relieving as his destiny.
“I think it’s his niche,” Wright said, “because not everyone is cut out to be a starter where you (must) remember your sequences and you face the hitter three at-bats and (must) remember how you pitched him and you (must) maintain your command.”
Morales, 23, who became the lone left-hander in the Rockies bullpen when Alan Embree suffered a broken leg Friday, said his concentration on his pitch location and on the hitter he is facing has been better coming out of the bullpen. Indeed, in his most recent relief outing Sunday, he entered the game with one out in the eighth, the Rockies trailing Atlanta 7-6. Morales retired the first batter he faced but walked the next two, bringing up Chipper Jones. The switch-hitting Jones is a future Hall of Famer and a player who has thrived in clutch situations.
“I don’t think about that,” Morales said of the situation. “I think about making my pitch.”
As a reliever, that task seems easier for Morales. He tended to think about making pitches over a period of time during a game as a starter, losing track of the moment and the necessity to take a one-pitch-at-a-time approach. Relieving is all about the here and now, the confrontations in a compressed time frame with no regard for what might unfold the next time through a lineup.
“I think it will accentuate his ability to make adjustments quick,” Wright said, “because he’ll have to out of the bullpen. He’ll learn not to overthrow those one and two pitches and let the hitter back in the count, knowing as a starter he’s got more time to get it going instead of getting it going right now.”
In his four relief appearances, Morales has pitched 3 1/3 scoreless innings, allowing one hit, an infield single that initially was ruled an error on shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, in 11 at-bats, with three walks and two strikeouts. Morales threw first-pitch strikes to five of the first 10 batters he faced before failing to do that to any of the four Braves batters Sunday.
“He’s raised the bar with his velocity, since we’ve seen him in these relief appearances,” Apodaca said. “His velocity is consistently higher, This whole year, I don’t know if I’ve seen a 94 mile-an-hour fastball out of him as a starter. He has hit it (relieving), and he’s consistently 93 (mph). So the fastball seems harder, seems sneakier. It’s probably the direct result (that) his delivery is much better. He’s much more on line.”
Morales has offset his fastball with a curveball that can be 18 to 20 mph slower. He broke out his changeup Sunday, a pitch Wright said is his best, when needed, for getting his delivery back on line because it forces Morales to slow the lower half of his body down and prevents his arm from getting too far in front.
Apodaca and Wright have begun doing rudimentary work with Morales on a slider, which will break down and in on right-handed hitters and down and away on left-handers. Morales has thrown a slider while playing catch in the outfield and on a bullpen mound with the catcher in front of the plate, focusing more on the rotation of that pitch and seeing the difference between it and a curveball.
A slider would be “specially designed for Coors Field, because his curveball’s going to be much more effective on the road,” Apodaca said. The reason, of course, is at lower altitude, a curveball will have more break.
Apodaca said Morales “could be a couple weeks away” from starting to seriously focus on a slider. Better to let Morales get fully acclimated and not subject him to any sensory overload. Or as manager Jim Tracy said, “Because of the impact of the situations he’s involved in, I don’t want a lot of tinkering right now.”
Tracy said that rather than ease Morales into relieving with a few low-stress outings, “His first opportunity, we threw him right in the fire.”
That was against Washington on July 7 in the sixth inning with the game tied at 4, when Morales came on to face Nationals leadoff hitter Nyjer Morgan, who bats left-handed, with two out, the bases loaded and the game tied at 4. Morales got ahead of Morgan 0-2, both called strikes, let the count reach 2-2 and then struck him out on a called third strike, a 93 mph fastball inside.
“You could see in that situation, he’s not going to get overwhelmed,” closer Huston Street said.
Before finishing off Morgan, Morales threw a borderline pitch that could have been called a strike but wasn’t. Morales simply plowed on, undeterred.
“He just continued to make pitches,” Street said. “He didn’t lose it. He didn’t give in. He challenged the guy. He forced the issue on the hitter.”
In his second game July 9, Morales relieved starter Aaron Cook with two out in the sixth, runners on first and second and the Braves leading 5-4. Morales was brought in to face veteran left-handed-hitting Garrett Anderson, of whom Apodaca said, “He’s been in baseball forever and seen everything a left-hander can throw at you.” Morales threw a ball, a called strike and, on his third pitch, got Anderson to line out to left.
“The biggest thing for him,” Street said, “is going to be making the adjustment from starting pitching as far as your mental makeup is concerned. Because as a starter, you’ve got four days to prepare, a team you know you’re going to face, a sequence of hitters.
“And as a relief pitcher, you’re pretty much on edge from the fifth inning on. And it’s being able to control that emotion a little bit and learning how to focus that energy, because you can get worn out down there if you’re too high-strung because whether you pitch or whether you don’t pitch, you cannot stay as alert as you have to be for a full season. I think that’s going to be the biggest adjustment, learning how to hone in on where Tracy’s going to use him.”
Tracy said he’s not ready to have Morales warm up hard and sit down a couple times during a game and will avoid using him on consecutive days “because this is completely new to him.”
After using him Saturday night to retire the two batters he faced on four pitches with the bases empty, Tracy did use Morales on Sunday. But that was because Joel Peralta had to leave the game with a fingernail problem and because Morales would have the next three days off during the All-Star break.
Looking ahead, Tracy said Morales would pitch on consecutive days “occasionally,” and on the second day would likely be used to face just a specific hitter.
Morales’ situation has made Tracy harken back to spring training 2002 when Tracy, beginning his second season as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, informed Eric Gagne that he was no longer a starter but would pitch out of the bullpen.
Gagne became a closer and thrived immediately that season. While that isn’t where Morales is headed in the second half of the 2009 season, Tracy sees a basic similarity to Gagne.
“Getting through a lineup three times early in his career was very difficult for him, because of the underdevelopment of his third pitch,” Tracy said. “And the other thing that I saw was periodically, his concentration would waver. It seemed to me that 2 hours, 30 minutes to concentrate — and if you’re pitching well, you’re out there that long — that seemed to me to be a little bit of a challenge early on at times.”
Apodaca sees an analogy between Morales and Jason Isringhausen, a starter when he was coming up in the Mets system where Apodaca was a pitching coach, and a hugely successful closer — he has 293 career saves — after leaving the Mets.
“Talking to Jason afterward, because we were very close,” Apodaca said, “he said this was the best thing that ever happened to him. ‘My arm always bounced back. I was just able to focus on going out there and getting three outs or however many outs I was asked to get.’
“No matter what you say, the starting pitcher is always worried about longevity during the ballgame. That I have to get deep into the ballgame. That I have to have two or three pitches in order to be effective over a longer period of time. (Relieving) simplifies everything. Even though a starter should only be looking at the pitch in front of him, now literally this is all a reliever has to focus on.”
Morales made two relief appearances, the first a disaster, the second quite good, for the Rockies in the 2007 World Series. In the minors, he made one relief appearance at high Single-A Modesto in 2006 and six relief appearances in 2005 at low Single-A Asheville. But the latter weren’t relief appearances in the strictest sense, since Morales was piggybacked with another starter and splitting a game with him. His role and his mind-set were those of a starter, unlike now.
The Rockies don’t know how Morales will respond to an inevitable poor relief outing. He is maintaining his delivery better pitching out of the stretch, but for how long? Will he be able to work on consecutive days? All questions aside, Apodaca drew a comparison between Morales and Dave Righetti, a power lefty who began his career as a starter with the New York Yankees but moved to the bullpen in his fourth season and became a successful closer.
“If the bullpen is a position he relishes and he excels at,” Apodaca said of Morales, “this role in the bullpen might be more long-term. This might be Dave Righetti. Nobody has a crystal ball.”
bob apodaca, bullpen, colorado rockies, dave righetti, franklin morales, greg gagne, jason isringhausen, jim tracy, jim wright
