If MLB doesn’t want fans to second-guess umpires on balls and strikes it should remove the graphic charting of pitches from the TV screen.
In last night’s 5-1 Blue Jay loss to the Texas Rangers, the FanGraph consistently showed home plate umpire Mark Wegner squeezing the strike zone on Marcus Stroman, but not on Rangers’ starter Mike Minor.
Maybe the fact that Stroman’s a righty and Minor’s a lefty meant that there was something skewed about how Wegner was seeing the ball cross the plate. I would hope that it wasn’t because Stroman is rather well known as kind of a bratty little kid in the baseball world, whereas Minor is a veteran journeyman with a longer service record who’s put up with a lot of adversity to get the chance to join the Texas rotation.
In any case, Minor was getting the calls on the edges that he needed to survive, and Stroman wasn’t. And when we say that he wasn’t getting calls, we’re not talking about pitches that might’ve touched the black, but pitches that were clearly on the black.
Combined with the surprisingly frigid weather in Arlington, with a game time temperature of 5 degrees (Celsius), wind-chill down to zero, which would cause more “feel” problems for Stroman than Minor, because of the amount and variation of spin that Stroman normally uses, the debatable strike zone created a lose-lose situation for the Toronto right-hander.
It’s a simple matter, really. If you don’t get the calls on the edges, you have to come in more with your pitches, which is just what the hitters want to see. The more of the plate you get, the fatter the pitch; the fatter the pitch, the harder it’s hit.
It’s remarkable that Stroman got through to the fifth inning without the roof falling in on him earlier.
After giving up a lone single to the hot-hitting Elvis Andrus in the top of the first with two outs, Stroman came out for the second and proceeded to throw eight pitches in a row that were called balls to Joey Gallo and Jurickson Profar. Then he got the ground ball he was looking for from catcher Juan Centeno, but it was a slow dribbler to Devon Travis at second that might as well have been the sacrifice bunt that he had failed to lay down on the previous two pitches.
Were it not for a marvellous catch in the gap in right centre by Randal Grichuk off Ryan Rua, the game might have broken open right there. Grichuk raced back to his right and reached up and stabbed the ball with his glove just when it looked like it was past him. Of course, Gallo tagged and scored from third, but if the hit had fallen Profar would have scored as well, and Rua would have been on second with a double with one out. Stroman escaped with most of his skin intact when he induced number nine hitter Drew Robinson to bounce an easy one to Justin Smoak at first.
In the third inning Stroman’s defence came to his rescue again. The Rangers had Shin-Soo Choo on third and Andrus on first after a nicely-executed one-out hit-and-run. It was Andrus’ second hit of the night after 3 hits on Friday night. Nomar Mazara smoked one to the left side of Travis. This time he came up with the ball, and brilliantly spun around to fire to second for the force, where Aledmys Diaz, back in the lineup, was crossing the bag to blister it to first for the double play. It was slick, lightning-fast, and not to be forgotten, but it did not obscure the fact that Stroman had dodged another bullet.
In the fourth inning Stroman had to pitch out of trouble again, and for the only time all night he may have gotten a little help from Wegner behind the plate, though Joey Gallo led off and walked on a 3-2 pitch that appeared to have caught the high inside corner of the zone. Profar followed with a single to right.
But Stroman swiftly dispatched the Rangers in order, leaving the two runners stranded, by punching out catcher Juan Cedeno for the first out and Drew Robinson for the third. In between, the suddenly-dangerous Ryan Rua hit a harmless short fly to centre. The thing is, the called third strikes on Cedeno and Robinson were both in almost exactly the same place, barely on the inside corner to the left-handed batters, the one on Robinson if anything a little iffier than the one on Cedeno.
While these two calls that Stroman got from Wegner put paid to any conspiracy theories about umpirical partiality, it does raise the question of quality, and quality control, if you will. The inconsistency of ball and strike calls can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of a game. If the plate umpires can’t get it right, isn’t it time for technology to take over?
If you’re wondering why I haven’t said anything about the Jays’ hitters, it’s because there’s nothing to say.
Mike Minor is a 30-year-old with a career record of 45-43 and an ERA of 3.91, reasonable enough numbers turned in primarily for the 2010 to 2014 seasons with Atlanta, followed by a stint with the Royals in their bullpen last year before catching on wiith the Rangers as a starter this spring.
If you’re wondering about the gap between 2014 and 2017, it was caused by major shoulder surgery in May of 2015, while he was on the 60-day disabled list with the Braves, who released him at the end of the season. The Royals signed him in February of 2016, but he still didn’t pitch for them for an entire season.
Minor’s not an overpowering guy. Like Marco Estrada and Jaime Garcia he survives on location and guile, and in this game that was good enough, especially with the odd break from Mark Wegner. Minor walked Pearce leading off the game, struck out Donaldson, and walked Smoak. After Smoak, he retired 11 Toronto batters in a row, which took him to the top of the fifth, one out, facing Kevin Pillar, with the Jays still looking for their first hit.
Pillar finally picked up that hit, ripping a double down the line into the left field corner. Unfortunately for Texas, left fielder Ryan Rua over-charged the ball as it came off the wall, and it bounced past him, allowing Pillar to turn his Platonic ideal of a double down the line into a tainted triple.
If there was a turning point in this game, it did not come in the bottom of the fifth when Stroman’s inability to get the calls where he needed them finally resulted in a 4-run rally during which the cocky right-hander’s start imploded once and for all. For me, the turning point in this game came in the top of the fifth, when the Jays failed to score Pillar from third with one out to tie the game. If Stroman, and the Rangers, had gone into the bottom of the inning in a tie game, maybe something might have turned out differently.
But behind Pillar Aledmys Diaz struck out, and the slump-riddled Grichuk lofted an easy fly to left on the first pitch to end the inning.
When Stroman came out for the bottom of the fifth, he wasn’t even close enough to talk about Wegner. He walked Choo on five pitches, one of which might have been a generous strike, and then Odor on four, none of which were particularly close. Still, with Stroman, there’s always the double play. But not this time.
It had to be a sign of his total distraction, but what happened next was almost incomprehensible. After Andrus flew out to centre, and with runners on first and second, he went into the stretch facing Mazara, started his delivery, and then did his hesitation hitch, an obvious balk. So the runners moved up and the double play was negated. He fanned Mazara for the second out, getting tantalizingly close to another miraculous escape and bringing Joey Gallo to the plate.
Gallo, who goes big or, more often, goes home, for the first time in the series went big, ripping a double to right to plate both Choo and Odor. Jurickson Profar then delivered Gallo with his own ground double into the right field corner. That made the tally 4-1, and was the end of the line for Stroman, though he was still responsible for Profar at second.
Danny Barnes came in and gave up a sharp grounder to Travis’ left that eluded him and went for the single scoring Profar. This was another play when Travis moved smartly to his left, went to his knees, but somehow had the ball skip past him. Not an easy play, and certainly not an error, but yet another crucial play that needed to be made to stop the bleeding. On plays like this, it’s almost as if he goes to his knees a step too soon, then can’t quite reach the ball.
Rua followed with another base hit moving Centeno up to second, but Robinson took a called third strike to end the bleeding with the tally Texas 5, Toronto no score and only one hit.
And that was basically it, folks. Barnes for another inning, Clippard for the seventh and Axford for the eighth kept the Rangers off the board.
Meanwhile, Steve Pearce finally got to Minor in his last inning, the sixth, with a shot into the seats down the left-field line. So Minor finished with 1 run and 2 hits over 6 innings, the 2 walks, and 7 strikeouts, over 93 pitches. Kevin Jepsen pitched the seventh and eighth for Texas, walking 1 and striking out 1, and Jake Diekman pitched a clean ninth, with one strikeout.
So there you have it, folks. Marcus Stroman struggled and struggled with a strike zone he just couldn’t understand, until the Rangers finally got to him in the fifth with enough punch to put the game away.
On the other hand, Mike Minor threw a fine six innings, and Toronto ended up with the weird stat of amassing 7 total bases in the game on only two hits off the bats of the P-P Boys, with Pillar hitting a triple and Pearce the home run.
The good thing about winning the first game of a series is that if you lose the second game you can still win the series, so it’s up to Jaime Garcia on Sunday, and we shall see.
Still over .500 with the loss. Never reached .500 last year. Just sayin’. Again.
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