TORONTO — So, you come to the ballpark to write a story about how consistently excellent Dustin McGowan has been pitching out of the bullpen. You talk to him before the game, rudely interrupting a tense round of Candy Crush Saga, and he says he’s feeling great. He’s never been so comfortable with his role.
You talk to his manager, John Gibbons, who’s restlessly gnawing on pieces of Nicorette gum as he attempts to quit chewing tobacco. He tells you how much confidence he has in the reliever and how he won’t hesitate to go to McGowan in any situation, regardless of leverage. He’ll use him to protect leads in close games or, if it’s really necessary, in long relief to keep deficits under control.
You write your story. It’s alright, you guess. McGowan enters that night’s game against the Yankees in the seventh with a 6-3 lead and a runner on second. He’s stranded 16 of the 17 baserunners he’s inherited over his 14 relief appearances this season and allowed just nine baserunners of his own. Things are looking pretty good.
And then it all falls apart. McGowan can’t find his control and the defence behind him fails fantastically, making errors on back-to-back plays. He labours through four batters without registering an out, standing on the mound as New York scores three runs to tie a previously 6-0 ballgame. He gets sarcastic applause from the Rogers Centre crowd for managing to throw a strike; he gets caustic boos when Alfonso Soriano smokes a single. And there’s Gibbons, slowly emerging from the dugout to lift his trusted reliever from a game that’d gotten out of hand.
What can you say? Sometimes it’s just not your night. “That’s been rare—he’s been on a nice little roll,” Gibbons said after the game, which his Blue Jays eventually won, 7-6. “You get a groundball and we could’ve been out of there still up two. But that didn’t happen.”
Six hours earlier, in a more hopeful time, filled with the promise of a tidy story about a clutch reliever and a Mark Buehrle start that surely couldn’t last longer than three hours, McGowan sat at his stall in the Blue Jays clubhouse with his head buried in an iPad, crushing that candy.
The efficient grouping and swift elimination of red jelly beans and green chicklets is the biggest of McGowan’s concerns ahead of games these days, which differs greatly from earlier this season when he was a starter and spent his time before games going over matchups with his catcher and mentally preparing himself to take the mound in the first inning.
The McGowan-as-starter experiment was one that provided mixed results, as the right-hander looked sometimes dominant and other times mediocre. It came to an abrupt end on May 15, when McGowan admitted to Gibbons that his arm wasn’t recovering fully between starts, and was promptly returned to the bullpen, where he’d spent all of 2013.
Gibbons had always thought McGowan was best suited for a relief role, but was willing to entertain the idea of featuring him in the rotation when J.A. Happ went down to injury during spring training and McGowan told him he wanted the job. “We were hoping it was going to play out,” Gibbons said, “but we were just throwing up a prayer.”
Gibbons, a keen manager, is usually right about these sorts of things, so it shouldn’t come as a tremendous surprise that McGowan took incredibly well to his new role. Even after Tuesday night’s hiccup against the Yankees, McGowan has surrendered just two earned runs in his 16.2 innings out of the bullpen, striking out 10 and allowing just three walks. That’s good for a 1.08 ERA (the 10th best among all relievers with at least 10 innings pitched) and leaves opposition hitters with just a .158 batting average against him as a reliever.
“His stuff plays a lot better down there because he knows he’s not going to be out there all day,” Gibbons said. “He can just come in and air it out for a couple innings.”
Sure enough, McGowan has been throwing harder. His four-seam fastball, which was averaging 93.9 mph when he was a starter in April, has been coming out of his hand at 95.8 mph so far in June. Assumedly, that would be one of the reasons why batters have been swinging and missing at more than twice the amount of McGowan’s breaking and off-speed pitches in June than they were in April or May.
He’s also working with a narrower repertoire, which is improving his execution. When McGowan was starting he’d use five different pitches to try to keep batters on their toes, but now he goes to the mound with just his two fastballs (a four-seamer that stays fairly straight and a two-seamer that sinks) and a slider. He throws his changeup rarely and has completely eradicated the curveball from his game.
And a final, oft-overlooked difference that has helped spur some of McGowan’s success is his ability to better manage his diabetes when pitching out of the bullpen.
McGowan, a type-1 diabetic, has to regulate his blood sugar levels throughout games in order to avoid highs or lows, which can lead to lightheadedness and blurred vision. That can be a tricky balancing act when you’re a starter—just ask Brandon Morrow—as blood sugar levels can fluctuate throughout games, especially during long innings. Earlier this season when McGowan was experiencing fatigue in the middle innings, the Blue Jays thought his blood sugar could be the reason and sewed a makeshift holster for his insulin pump into the belt loop on the back of his pants so he could pitch with it on.
Now that he’s in the bullpen, McGowan will check his blood sugar once in the third inning and again in the fifth, to make sure he’s level before he’s called on to warm up. If his reading is high he’ll take some insulin to bring it back down, and if it’s low he’ll reach for his trusted candy bag and crush an Airheads strip or two.
With Sergio Santos still battling to regain form after missing more than a month with a forearm injury and Steve Delabar exiled to triple-A Buffalo after a string of rocky outings, McGowan has quickly become Gibbons’ second-most trusted bullpen arm after his closer, Casey Janssen. And if Janssen were in need of rest and the Blue Jays were in need of a save, it’s likely that McGowan would get that opportunity.
Assumedly, those things are still true despite McGowan’s precarious outing Tuesday night. He remains on an excellent run since he was transitioned back to the bullpen. Sometimes it’s just not your night. “I feel good. I’m comfortable,” the ever-low-key McGowan said. “I’ll be ready whenever they call my name.”
