A healthy Shaun Marcum is crucial for the Jays to stay above .500, much less battle for a wild card.
It took him four starts to get back to where he once belonged - apologies to Lennon & McCartney - but Shaun Marcum was masterful over his seven innings of work as the Jays sent the Athletics to a ninth-straight loss Wednesday night.
Spotted a three-run lead in the first by his battery mate Rod Barajas, Marcum took a no-hitter into the sixth before Bobby Crosby lined one into the bleachers in left. All told, Marcum went seven strong allowing just three hits while striking out seven, including five-straight in the fourth and fifth innings when his change-up was spectacular. The start was reminiscent of six of his earlier starts where held opponents to one earned run or less.
Sporting the stuff that had him holding opposition hitters to a microscopic .198 batting average through his first 15 starts before a wonky elbow sent him to the disabled list for a month and a day, Marcum is just what Cito Gaston ordered as he tries to piece the Jays above-average rotation back together with David Purcey and Scott Richmond still getting their feet wet at the back end.
With Roy Halladay acting like the Cy Young candidate that he is, and A.J. Burnett finally putting together a string of starts to show what all the fuss has been about, Marcum is needed to be solid in the three-spot if the Jays are going to continue drafting behind the main pack looking to secure the Wild Card spot. With the Jays now having 48 games remaining into Thursday's finale with the A's, winning 60 per cent of those games would give them a projected 87 wins at season's end. Likely not good enough with the Red Sox and Yankees both vying for the Wild Card at the same time for the first time ever. (Not that I've ever claimed in this space that the playoffs were possibility anyway.)
But without a healthy and effective Marcum, the Blue Jays would be hard-pressed to even finish .500, something that a lot of you thought was a lock when the team broke camp at the end of March. With him back, and the likely return of Vernon Wells early next week after a weekend of rehab in the minors to help the under-achieving offence, the Jays are poised to make some noise over the final eight weeks.
And with 24 of their remaining games against teams ahead of them in the Wild Card, they have a chance to get back in this all on their own, although a little help from others would be appreciated. It's a tall order, especially when you factor in the 10 games also left against the East-leading Rays and Central-leading White Sox. Starts like Marcum's against the Athletics can go a long way to keeping the team confident, moving forward, as the New Age G.M.'s like to put it.
NO TEARS FOR THE A's
When you trade away quality arms like Dan Haren, Joe Blanton and Rich Harden to restock your farm system then you can expect to go through the rough patch that the Oakland Athletics are currently trapped in. They realized that they had gone about as far as they could with their current group - refreshing thinking, really - and sent several of their young veterans packing over the past year and a bit. But in return, they received the likes of Wednesday night's starter Gio Gonzalez, a 22-year old left-hander making his Major League debut. Sure he gave up the first inning bomb to Barajas, but after that he only allowed two base runners over the next 5.1 innings before Adam Lind chased him with a lead-off single in the seventh. What I saw was a young pitcher with a live arm and a good-looking curve. A quick glance at his minor league numbers shows that he was a strikeout guy at all rungs of the ladder, striking out 712 hitters over 624 innings - or roughly 10.3 every nine innings. Gonzalez did not look out of place and was cool and composed after the rough start. That's a lot to ask for from a youngster hoping to win his first start for a team that hadn't won in over a week, thanks, in most part, to a horrible offence saddled with Frank Thomas in the middle of it. At 5'11" and 185 pounds, he reminded me a little of Scott Kazmir, whose minors strikeout totals were in the same ballpark.
