TORONTO — Russell Martin was in Aaron Sanchez’s ear all night.
Stick with it. Stick with it.
Your stuff’s good tonight. Don’t be afraid of the zone.
Stay on top of the ball. Throw it through me, not to me.
Those words of encouragement, delivered in the Toronto Blue Jays dugout between innings, weren’t the only reason Sanchez was able to turn around a start that looked to be heading in a disastrous direction early on. He still had to go out and make pitches. He still had to execute.
But the pep talks played a part. And they served as a leitmotif running in the background of yet another encouraging outing for the youngest starting pitcher on the Blue Jays staff.
“Not the way I wanted to start but I’ll definitely take the way it finished,” Sanchez said, after throwing seven innings of three-run ball in the Blue Jays’ second-consecutive walk-off victory. “Obviously, those first couple innings weren’t ideal.”
No, they certainly were not. Sanchez came out of the gates Wednesday night leaning heavily on his two- and four-seam fastballs, which is something he likes to do but also something that can bite him.
Hitters like to hit fastballs and that’s clearly what the Texas Rangers were looking for in the early going as the first five Texas hitters reached base in a two-run first inning. Nothing Sanchez threw was particularly scorched—outside of Rougned Odor’s leadoff double—but everything was falling in.
“I’m a guy that likes to stick with the heater, and I felt like they weren’t really doing much with it when I did,” Sanchez says. “Just a couple broken-bat hits. A couple flares. [Ian] Desmond beat a ground ball that could’ve been a double play.”
That’s true, but in the second inning it was more of the same, as Sanchez continued to feed fastballs and the Rangers continued to stick with their approach. His first nine pitches of the inning were fastballs, and the first time he went to his curve Odor sent it into right field for a single that scored Texas’ third run. That brought Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker out to the mound to tell Sanchez what he was seeing.
“I just wasn’t really finishing my pitches,” Sanchez says. “You just have to tell yourself to get down in the zone. I think I was living in an area where I didn’t need to. When I started to get the ball down, they started hitting the ground.”
And there was your adjustment. Sanchez started locating his elite two-seamer more effectively, striking out Nomar Mazara with two runners on and then getting Adrian Beltre to ground out softly to end the second inning threat. He retired nine straight after Walker’s mound visit, and didn’t give up another hit until the sixth, which he quickly eliminated with a double play.
Throughout that stretch, Martin and Sanchez constantly discussed strategy and began incorporating more change-ups, especially to the four left-handed batters the Rangers had in their lineup. While Sanchez’s curveball is his go-to secondary offering against right-handed hitters, the change he’s been working patiently on since spring training is emerging as a primary weapon against lefties.
What makes the change-up so effective is how Sanchez disguises it to look like one of his fastballs. He throws it from the same release point, with the same arm action, but the pitch comes in at 88-90 mph, instead of the 95-97 that his fastball travels at.
“When you throw that hard and you have that late movement, guys have to commit early,” Martin says. “So, when you’re able to throw a change-up off that same plane, as a hitter it’s really tough. You have to commit to one speed or the other. And that’s how guys get out front. It gets weak contact for him when he executes it.”
That was the case during the heart of the game, as Sanchez earned 10 of his 12 outs from the third inning through the sixth via groundballs. In the seventh, he walked the lead-off batter, Ryan Rua, and let the entire crowd know how he felt about it with a screamed expletive that rang around the stadium. But he came back to strike out Bobby Wilson with a filthy curve before he got Odor and Mazara to both fly out to centre field as he walked off the mound having turned a potentially disastrous outing into a strong one.
Sanchez ended up throwing 16 change-ups in all, the most he’s used the pitch in a start this season. Even more importantly, he threw more than 60 per cent of them for strikes.
Adding in the 14 curveballs and 71 fastballs he threw, Sanchez got a strike 69 per cent of the time on Wednesday, the fourth outing in a row he’s had a strike rate over 62 per cent, which is incredibly encouraging for a pitcher who’s battled command issues throughout his young career.
“He just kept attacking the zone,” Martin said. “The fact that he gave up a couple runs early and was able to settle down and keep making pitches, keep us in the game — he showed some poise out there.”
But if the change-up is that effective of a weapon for Sanchez, why not throw more of them early in games?
It’s tough to say. For Sanchez, it could be a matter of feel. If the pitch isn’t working well for him in his pre-game bullpen session, he may be reticent to throw it on the mound when the pitches actually count.
Or for Martin, it could be a case of setting hitters up, showing them nothing but fastballs in their first at-bats of the night, before incorporating Sanchez’s change-up and breaking ball more often during their second and third trips to plate, in order to keep them off balance.
Sanchez and Martin obviously aren’t going to share their game plans publicly. No good would come from that. Plus, sometimes a game plan can be a fluid thing, constantly changing and shifting shape. That’s where all those dugout conversations come in.
“There’s so many different things that go on throughout the course of the game,” Sanchez says. “We communicate a lot between innings.”
What everyone seems to be certain about when it comes to Sanchez is that he’s growing into himself on the mound. He’ll turn 24 this summer, and with a 2.82 ERA over his first six outings, he’s establishing himself as not just a reliable major league starter, but a dominant one.
An outing like this one against Texas, when Sanchez falls behind early and struggles to stay down in the zone, may have gone in a different direction a year ago than it did on Wednesday.
“He’s starting to mature,” Martin says. “He’s really making progress. He just seems like he’s more in control out there — more in control of his emotions, more in control of his mechanics. We see it almost every time he goes out there. His command’s better, he’s using his off-speed pitches more effectively. He’s a special pitcher and we’re really starting to see it.”
Blue Jays manager John Gibbons agrees. He’s seen plenty of young pitchers with power stuff who take the mound with too much raw energy and emotion, and don’t pitch within themselves. He’s seen them struggle with their command and overthrow, when the best thing they can do is repeat a calm, effortless delivery that lets their pitches move the way they’re meant to, while staying in the zone.
Sometimes, when you start your night by allowing six hits and three runs in the first two innings, a cool head and a communicative catcher can make the difference.
“They were on him early — he could have imploded,” Gibbons said. “But he didn’t. That’s a big step in the right direction.”