I love a neat and tidy game, when the good guys win, the stars do their thing, and all the problems are little ones.
This one starts and ends with the Stroman. What can you say about him that hasn’t already been said? When he came back last September, the big new thing was his sinking repertoire that had turned him into a ground-ball pitcher. So how’s that workin’ out for him now? Well, try this: In the first five innings, 15 outs, he threw 12 ground-ball outs, and notched three strikeouts. All three of the Ks were breaking pitches in the dirt. His final score for 24 outs was 17 ground balls, the three Ks, one popup and three fly balls. Two of the fly balls were in the seventh, and one in the eighth, which would suggest that he was losing a bit of sharpness toward the end, except that the other two outs in the eighth were ground balls again.
Stro had one bad inning, the fourth. What happened then? At the outset, the Yankees had become so desperate to change the channel that Gardner, leading off, tried to bunt his way on. Marcus fielded it cleanly, planted, and threw him out smartly at first, without a thought for last spring’s ACL tear that had happened during pitchers’ fielding practice on exactly the same play. Then he goes 2-2 on ARod, who had grounded meekly to short the first time up, before having a pitch get away and graze ARod’s jersey. He came a bit undone after that—he’s still young, eh? A difficult play that Goins didn’t make contributed to the problems, and a wild pitch by Stroman didn’t help, and the Yankees picked up two, with only one solid hit, a Texeira single. In the fourth his pitch count climbed from 35 to 68 in one gulp.
A lesser kid pitcher might have been done at that point, but from the fifth through the eighth he retired 12 of 13 on one walk, throwing 37 pitches over the four innings.
All else that was needed was for Josh Donaldson to do his MVP encore bit with a three-run homer to take the lead for good in the bottom of five, not coincidentally extending his season-opening hitting streak to a Jays’ record ten games. Tulo rifled a cannon shot to left in the sixth to pick up his drooping spirits and provide an insurance run, and Osuna mopped up like he was playing wall-ball in Sinaloa, no big deal.
So, where are we on the question of Stroman as the new Price? In Price’s last outing for Boston, in which Kimbrel took the loss for the Sox, Price struck out 8 . . . in five innings, throwing 104 pitches, giving up 5 hits, 5 earned runs, and walking two. Just sayin’.
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