After using 10 pitchers in two days, Tulsa Drillers Manager Scott Hennessey had to send a shortstop to the mound Monday night and watch him blow a 5-4 lead to the Arkansas Travelers in the top of the ninth.
The Tulsa Drillers' bullpen was empty, used up due to the Los Angeles Dodgers' minor league policy to hold its pitching prospects to individual pitch count limitations.
The Drillers beat Northwest Arkansas 8-6 on Sunday, despite removing right-handed starter Yadier Alvarez after 3⅔ innings of no-run baseball.
Monday night went differently.
Right-hander Dennis Santana was relieved after the fourth inning with the Drillers leading the Travs 2-0.
Five innings later, shortstop Mike Ahmed walked three batters, including the game-winning run with the bases loaded.
Santana said afterward that starters are limited to 75 pitches until they surpass four starts, when the limit is increased to 85 pitches. The limit increases to 100 pitches later in the season.
The strict rules directly correlate to the Drillers' losses: When Tulsa uses four pitchers or fewer, it is 7-2; When Tulsa uses more than four pitchers in a game, it is 1-5.
"It sucks," Hennessey said. "Each organization is different, and we have so many prospects here. It's just for their protection, and we just ran out."
Santana is the Dodgers' No. 10-ranked prospect, according to MLB.com, and he has ascended to Class AA since signing with L.A. as an 18-year-old out of San Pedro De Macoris, Dominican Republic.
"They try to save our arms because we're young. They try to do best for us, you know?" said Santana, who is 0-1 with a 1.50 ERA. "Sometimes you feel mad because you want to keep throwing. I get out in four innings with 75 pitches, and I want to keep throwing, you know? But they say, 'No, you can do nothing else. Get ready for the next start.' "
The Seattle Mariners do not have the same rules that pertain to the Travs, but right-handed starter Chase De Jong said some pitchers are kept from pitching after a certain amount of days to help them adjust when they move from level to level.
De Jong (1-1, 3.75) spent part of the 2015 season and all of the 2016 season with Dodgers' affiliates, and he said he didn't remember being placed on any pitch limit.
"I remember I went pretty deep in a lot of those games that year," said De Jong, who was named Texas League Pitcher of the Year in 2016 after going 15-5 with a 2.82 ERA and 147 innings pitched.
De Jong said "there's something to protect there for sure" with prospects such as Santana, and he could "see how the pitch count would be something that would definitely work."
"'It's April, you're good now at 75 pitches, we want you to be good in August and September,'" De Jong said. "I ran into that last year. It's like, man, I go to big league camp, I come off 170-something innings, and I gotta go do it again. It's like, man, I was hurting. So, that might be a way to combat kind of a dead-arm scenario later."
Drillers left-handed starter Caleb Ferguson (1-0, 0.87) left Tuesday's game against the Travs with a 1-0 lead in the fifth, and the Travs eventually came back to win 6-3.
Hennessey said the Drillers are "skating by" until the pitch limitations increase as the year goes on.
"It's so early in the year," he said, "and there's nothing we can do."
Sports on 04/25/2018