Last Tuesday, Marcus Stroman had his best outing in recent weeks against the Phillies, earning the win with 7 innings of work during which he gave up 6 hits and 2 earned runs. This performance allayed the fears of many Toronto fans concerning the trajectory of Stroman’s 2016 season. Today’s outing against the Orioles put the whole question of what’s going on with Marcus Stroman firmly back on the table. In retrospect, was the good outing against the Phils a harbinger of things to come, or just a blip on the horizon, compounded by how desperately badly the Phillies were playing at the time?
A little Blue Jays history might be instructive here. Though a case could certainly be made for Dave Stieb, Roy Halladay was arguably the best starting pitcher in Blue Jays’ history. His leadership of the staff, his start-to-start dominance, his consistency, and his numbers all attest to his status in the modest pantheon of Toronto baseball heroes. His arrival on the scene in 1998 had all the earmarks of Roy Hobbs, the “natural” of Bernard Malamud’s brilliant baseball masterpiece of the same name. In his second career start, against the Detroit Tigers on the last day of the 1998 season, Halladay lost a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth, but held on for a one-hit 2-1 Toronto win.
Halladay’s actual rookie season in 1999 confirmed the promise he had shown in that one brilliant performance the previous fall. He went 8 and seven in 18 starts with an ERA of 3.92, while racking up 149-plus innings, both as a reliever and a starter. But his career hit a wall the next year, as he posted the highest ERA in major league history for any pitcher who pitched more than 50 innings, at 10.64. By the spring of 2001, it was obvious that something drastic needed to be done. Not only was he relegated to the minors after spring training, but the fall was drastic, as he remained in Dunedin with the Class A team for the start of the season. Working under the direction of Toronto’s major league pitching coach Mel Queen, his mentors in the Jays’ system rebuilt his entire delivery and approach, and converted him from a power thrower to a complete pitcher. When he came back to the Jays in mid-season he was an entirely different pitcher, and his performance showed it. 2002 was his major breakout year, as he went 19 and 7, with an ERA of 2.93, in 239-plus innings (how times have changed in only 14 years!)
I am not suggesting here that Marcus Stroman needs a complete rebuild like Halladay. He arrived on the scene in late 2014 as a far more complete pitcher than Roy Halladay was in 1998. And his performance in September and October last year, after his unexpected early return from surgery, showed that he was the real deal. But he is struggling now. Today’s outing was the worst, three and two thirds innings, 7 runs, 10 hits, and 2 wild pitches. After Adam Jones’ leadoff bloop single to right in the first, every hit he gave up was solid contact, and the Orioles treated him like a batting-practice pitcher, not the putative ace of the Toronto staff, though that status had evaporated a number of outings ago.
It’s not as if he needed to be perfect today. The Jays put up six runs, four in the second on two homers, enough for decent pitching to secure a win. R.A. Dickey, for one, would be delighted with six runs of support; on Saturday he would have settled for just the four. The Orioles have a high-octane parade of hitters, especially in their own park, but they only scored two off Aaron Sanchez Friday night, plus one off the bullpen, and another two earned runs off Dickey Saturday, plus one off the bullpen. Six runs per game would lead the league at the moment, and should be enough to win most games. It would have swept this series for the Jays. And Stroman had his chance to stop the Orioles in the first, as he was a strike away from ending the inning with no runs scored and Jones on third. Nobody is asking Stroman to be superhuman, just ordinary. Having given up more base hits than any pitcher in the American League, his work qualifies as considerably less than ordinary.
I realize that it would be very difficult for the Jays to take the drastic action that I think may be needed, given the hype that has surrounded Stroman since his arrival on the scene, pumped even more by the miraculous story of his return to the rotation last fall. In the publicity-driven, media-absorbed, world that is major-league baseball today, it is almost unthinkable that Stroman, who was the centre of the team’s entire off-season marketing campaign, might be sent down to Buffalo for a period to sort himself out. It’s a real measure of the nature of baseball as a business that I would even write about this aspect of the problem. These days, sadly, what happens on the field is not the only issue.
But the present situation is not good for the team as a whole, and it must be particularly hard on him. For a team that’s trying to claw its way into the middle of a pennant race in the most competitive division in baseball, it seems either self-destructive or delusional on the part of Jays’ management to keep running him out there every fifth day just to get shelled. And for such a confident and upbeat young man as Marcus Stroman, the pressure to sort himself out under the glare of this unforgiving spotlight must be excruciating. Sending him to the bullpen is simply not an option. He needs to be kept stretched out, obviously, but also his chances for bullpen success wouldn’t be good, given how quickly opposing hitters have jumped on him. Giving up base hits to the first two batters you face is never good when you’re pitching out of the bullpen.
I would propose sending him to Buffalo, keeping him on his same schedule, and closely monitoring his progress. Let him sort out what he can away from the hype and the glare of the major-league atmosphere. It’s not like the Jays don’t have other options for filling what has now become the last slot in the rotation. By all accounts Drew Hutchinson is primed and ready to go, and has the tools to do the job. As well, both Jesse Chavez and Gavin Floyd provide good backup for the fifth spot, keeping in mind that they have been for the most part effective out of the pen, particularly in the longer assignments.
As for today’s game, you already have the main lines of the story. The Jays hit well enough to back up a decent pitching performance, while the Orioles piled on Stroman and put too much air between themselves and the Jays for any realistic hope of a comeback. And when the Jays’ relievers took a step back from their recent respectable performance, giving up four add-on runs, there was no hope of putting any lipstick on Stroman’s performance.
If I were to pick out one at-bat that sealed Stroman’s fate today, curiously, it would be a single pitch that was not hit hard by the Orioles. In fact, it wasn’t hit at all. After the Orioles had put up the three-spot in the bottom of the first, the Jays’ sluggers stormed back off the O’s top (only?) starter, Chris Tillman, to vault into the lead. With one out, Russell Martin spanked a double to left, and Troy Tulowitzki announced his return to the lineup by hitting a screamer out to left. Kevin Pillar followed by beating out a dribbler to third, bringing Devon Travis to the plate. In an epic nine-pitch plate appearance, Travis fouled off seven pitches trying to shoot one of his trademark base hits to left to move Pillar up. Finally giving up on that idea, he solved his problem by hitting one over the centre field fence, and suddenly the Jays had vaulted into a 4-3 lead.
We know what the guide book for successful baseball says here, right? Pitcher needs a shutdown inning to legitimize the claim to the lead. However, leadoff hitter Pedro Alvarez, after falling behind no balls and two strikes to Stroman, worked the count back to even before bouncing one through the right side of the infield for a base hit.
Jay Hardy then rocked one to the fence in left that stayed in the park for Michael Saunders. It was just the first out, but left us all shaken. Including Stroman, who bounced one to Ryan Flaherty that Martin couldn’t keep in front of him, allowing Alvarez to move into scoring position. For all his confidence, I suspect we need to recognize that Marcus Stroman is as vulnerable to stress as anyone else in the game, or out of it. Look at the progression here: leadoff single, smash to the wall, wild pitch, RBI single to number nine hitter hitting in the .220s. At the end of two, it was a new ball game, and Stroman had to be sitting on the bench thinking it was all on him.
After a quick third inning the Jays went quickly and quietly again in the top of the fourth as Tillman found his groove. But the Orioles returned relentlessly to the attack against Stroman in their half of the inning, Five of their first seven batters reached base, and a sixth—Hardy again—drove Pillar to the wall in centre for another loud out. Stroman contributed to his own demise with a second wild pitch at a crucial moment, and the Orioles had put up three runs on the board and driven Stroman from the game.
For the rest of the game the Jays tried, and failed, to play catch-up, and eventually ran into the wall of the back of the Orioles’ bullpen. After the Orioles’ rally in the fourth, Devon Travis raised our hopes with a leadoff double in the fifth, but Tillman managed to finish off his last inning by foiling the Jays’ hopes of moving Travis to third via small ball. In the bottom of the inning, it was the O’s who added on against Joe Biagini, and we went through to the seventh down 8-4.
In the seventh the pattern repeated itself, as the Jays crept back within two, only to see their opponents answer with three and put the game out of reach. Doubles by Tulowitzki and Travis, who carried the Jays at the plate between them today, scored one run, and then Travis scored from second when Jay Hardy gloriously booted a grounder by Justin Smoak into no-man’s land. But after Chad Girodo came in and failed at his assignment to retire the left-handed-hitting Chris Davis, Jesse Chavez came in to give up an RBI single to Matt Wieters and the two-run homer to Jonathan Schoop that drove the stake into the Jays’ heart once and for all.
Ever the optimist, I might close by mentioning once again that the Orioles’ starting pitching as it’s currently constituted won’t keep them in the race, and today’s performance by their supposed number one starter, Chris Tillman, did nothing to change my opinion on that score.
Off-day tomorrow, then two inter-league games with the Arizona D-Backs. We’ve got tickets for Wednesday afternoon. Hope we can score a couple of Ed-Wing tee shirts!
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