BALTIMORE — Any starting pitcher will tell you the worst part of a bad outing is the four days that follow it. Because, what can you really do? You can kick things, you can scream and yell, you can blame everyone from umpires to teammates to yourself. You can obsess over the video, you can sit down with coaches to dissect your performance, you can lie awake at night, replaying each and every pitch in your head.
But you can’t actually do anything of any true consequence to wash the taste of disappointment from your mouth until your next start, when you finally get to pitch again. Marcus Stroman knows that feeling well these days. With an ERA of 7.59 over his last seven starts, including Sunday’s 11-6 loss to the Baltimore Orioles, Stroman’s had plenty of letdown to dwell upon. He’s been doing everything he can between starts to put that adversity behind him, to figure out what’s going wrong, to be better next time. And sometimes, maybe, even to his own detriment.
“I feel like I’ve been doing a little over analyzing,” a disheartened Stroman said, after allowing seven runs on 10 hits in 3.2 innings against the Orioles. “When I’m out there I usually don’t think at all. I usually just let my instincts take over. And that could be something that I’ve been playing into. Maybe I’m doing a little too much thinking as I’m trying to get back to being right.”
What’s not right is Stroman’s location, which at some point in mid-May shifted from being consistently down to regularly up and over the plate. Stroman’s most important pitch, a lively two-seamer, absolutely has to be located towards the bottom of the strike zone, where he can use it to sustain his MLB-best 59.6 per cent ground ball rate, but when it’s up it can be awfully hittable, not to mention causing an adverse impact on the effectiveness of his secondary pitches.
The Orioles were the latest lineup to prove that, knocking Stroman’s stuff all over Camden Yards Sunday afternoon. Baltimore hitters put 15 balls in play, seven of them at 99 mph or higher. No major leaguer has given up more balls hit that hard this year than Stroman, who’s now allowed 104.
“I just lost the feel a little bit. I’m just waiting for it to click. I feel like when it clicks again, then I’ll get rolling,” Stroman said. “It’s just been kind of in and out lately in the past few starts. I’m just kind of searching for it. It’s in there. It’s just a matter of finding it and being way more consistent with it.”
It started early as Stroman allowed soft singles to the first two batters he faced Sunday, before getting Mark Trumbo to ground into a double play to get within an out of escaping the inning. But Chris Davis beat the Blue Jays infield shift with a ground ball up the middle to cash one, and then Stroman left an 0-1 change-up up in the zone to Matt Wieters, who didn’t miss it, driving it 432-feet to centre field for an early 3-0 Orioles lead.
The Toronto Blue Jays bats briefly turned the score around in the top of the second, beating up on Chris Tillman, one of the American League’s best starters whose kryptonite has consistently been the Blue Jays. Coming into the game, Tillman held a 5.65 ERA in 21 career starts against Toronto and eight of the nine hitters in the Jays lineup Sunday boasted an OPS of .900 or higher against him. The only exception was Darwin Barney, who had never faced him.
And those numbers quickly rose as Russell Martin hit a long double in the second before Troy Tulowitzki jumped all over a change-up down in the zone for a two-run homer. Kevin Pillar was next and beat out an infield single in front of Devon Travis, who battled his way through eight pitches before getting a slider out over the plate that he drove 409-feet to right-centre to put the Blue Jays ahead, 4-3.
But the Orioles tied it in the bottom half of the inning, as Ryan Flaherty drove in Pedro Alvarez’s lead-off single with a liner over Tulowitzki’s head at short. And they regained the lead in the fourth, when Wieters drove a curveball into right field for a leadoff double before Jonathan Schoop hit the very next pitch, an elevated fastball, up the middle to drive in Wieters.
Stroman got two outs after that, but then surrendered back-to-back hits to Flaherty and Adam Jones, which brought in another run and ended his day. It was the first time this season Stroman didn’t pitch into at least the sixth inning, and the seven runs allowed tied his season-high.
“I think our guys did a really good job swinging the bats. And it was plenty good enough to get a win,” Stroman said. “So, it’s extremely frustrating not being able to do my job. It was a tough one.”
From there, Baltimore went to work on the Blue Jays bullpen, getting a run off Joe Biagini, another off Chad Girodo, and two off Jesse Chavez. Drew Storen loaded the bases with one out in the eighth, but sidestepped his way out of the jam.
Tillman left after five innings, giving way to an under-appreciated Orioles bullpen that boasts the second-best ERA in baseball. The Blue Jays got a couple runs in the seventh off Orioles reliever Odrisamer Despaigne when Tulowitzki hit a leadoff double and scored on Travis’ second double of the game.
Travis came in, too, when Justin Smoak shot a grounder off the glove of J.J. Hardy at short, which hopped into left field. But that was as far as the Blue Jays would get, ending a streak of five-consecutive series victories against AL East opponents. The Blue Jays actually outscored the Orioles in the series, 21-18, but Baltimore made their runs count, taking two of the three games.
“These guys elevate the ball. They get the ball in the air. Just about everybody through that lineup. And they’ve got the left-right balance, which is very tough. And they play in a great hitting park,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said of the Orioles. “So, when the summer heats up, you don’t even really have to catch it all and you’re going to hit some homers. So, you really gotta go toe-for-toe with them.”
But while the Blue Jays offence is finally beginning to click after a prolonged early-season slump, Stroman’s results have moved in the opposite direction. His ERA has now climbed to 5.23 in 15 starts, after it sat at 3.89 through his first 10 outings.
If the Blue Jays don’t adjust their rotation, Stroman will make three more starts before the all-star break, all against opponents outside the AL East. That could be a good thing, as his ERA against the American League East is now 6.53 across 62 innings pitched. In 34.2 innings against the rest of baseball, it’s 2.88.
But no matter who he’s facing, Stroman has to resume operating down in the strike zone. After recent poor outings, he’s obsessed over his performance, poured over video and had lengthy talks with Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker in an attempt to fix that He’s done an awful lot of thinking.
This time around, he plans to get away from the game of baseball completely during the Blue Jays off-day Monday in order to relax his mind and decompress from the world of over-analyzing he’s been existing in. Then, on Tuesday, he’ll go to Rogers Centre and try to get back to where he was through his first ten starts of the year.
“I’m fine mentally. It’s just a matter of getting back to where I need to be and then just carrying that start by start and being consistent with it. I’m in a good place. I’m going to be fine and I’m going to grow form this,” Stroman said. “I’ll be fine. I know the type of individual I am. This is a bump in the road and I know that I’m going to be stronger from it in the future.”