Guardians' Parker Messick Debuts New Pitch In First Spring Start

For the first time in Parker Messick’s career, he enters Spring Training with a chance to break camp as a member of the Cleveland Guardians starting rotation.

He’ll have to earn a spot on Cleveland’s roster, and that journey began on Sunday with Messick making his first start of Spring Training.

Stats aside, Messick was just happy to pitch in a live game instead of facing his own teammates in live batting practice sessions.

“Everyone's been saying, you get tired of facing your own uniforms, and you're just ready to go face someone else in a different uniform. You're just in that competitive mindset, get to showcase everything you've been working on all spring. It was a lot of fun,” said Messick.

“Just consistency of the delivery. I felt like everything was good; shapes were sharp today.”

The left-hander faced an Athletics lineup that included some of the team’s top young hitters in Nick Kurtz, Tyler Soderstrom, and Jacob Wilson, along with veterans Brent Rooker and Jeff McNeil. 

Messick wasn’t his sharpest on the mound, but he ended up throwing 39 pitches over 2.0 innings of no-hit baseball. He struck out one batter, but also issued three consecutive walks in the second inning before a mound visit from Carl Willis settled him down and helped him get out of the inning. 

Spring Training is the time to not only get ramped up for the season ahead, but also test out what a player has worked on over the offseason. Messick added a cutter to his arsenal over the winter and finally had a chance to use it in live action on Sunday.

“I threw one cutter today, which is fun. It ended up being taken for a ball, but it served its purpose in the at-bat, so it was fun to see a new pitch in game-like action."

Messick's goal in adding the cutter to his arsenal was to add a weak-contact pitch. He knows it’s not something he’ll miss a lot of bats with, but that’s not the point of it. 

“Just to help out the arsenal, just another look for hitters... The more I can mix up sequences and just show hitters different things, it helps you go deeper into games," said the Guardians pitcher.

That said, Messick also admitted that he’s not sure if he’ll end up keeping the cutter in his sequence, or if it’ll be a pitch he ends up falling back on quite a bit. Either way, now is the time to play around with it and see what works and what doesn’t.

All in all, Messick said he felt sharp on the mound, and combining that with the ability to throw a new pitch, the Guardians would probably say this was a successful first start of spring training for the 25-year-old. 

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