DUNEDIN – Buck Martinez tells the story best. Earlier this spring, Miguel Castro and Roberto Osuna walked in to see Toronto Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker. Listing off the names of some of the premier hitters in the American League East, the pair of 20-year-old pitchers wondered: would Walker mind terribly if the two youngsters made all the Grapefruit League road trips? Especially against the AL East.
Osuna and Castro are scheduled to travel to Tampa Tuesday night to face the New York Yankees. They’ll come on after Drew Hutchison starts, and while everybody down here spends all their time telling everybody else it’s only spring training and nothing matters, yadda-yadda-yadda – well, let’s just say that the Blue Jays brain trust will be taking notes.
Lots of notes.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Watch the Blue Jays play the Yankees on OLN at 7 p.m. ET Tuesday
Castro and Osuna have pitched themselves into position to make the Blue Jays bullpen – read that carefully. There’s no guarantee that both will make it because it’s getting to the point in spring training where the regulars have 20 at-bats and are on the cusp of zeroing in on the regular season, but if they both continue to throw strikes they’ll be in the mix. While Hutchison’s ability to figure out left-handed hitters could get an acid test, because the Yankees at home usually run out their top lineup of switch and lefty hitters.
The Blue Jays will open the regular season with a three-game series at Yankee Stadium, and it’s no secret that Marcus Stroman was tentatively penciled in to start the season opener.
“Probably, he was the guy,” the Blue Jays manager said Sunday. Now that Stroman is out for the year, what is ‘Plan B?’ “I don’t know,” Gibbons remarked. “A sacrificial lamb, maybe?”
Sportsnet Magazine’s Toronto Blue Jays Special: From the heart of the order to the bottom of the bullpen, we’ve got this team covered in our preview issue. Download it right now on your iOS or Android device, free to Sportsnet ONE subscribers.
Bless Mark Buehrle, but you don’t want him near the Yankees, especially in Yankee Stadium where he is 0-7 lifetime with an earned run average of 6.22. Overall, he’s 1-14 against the Yankees. R.A. Dickey has done reasonably well in the Bronx, but after that – well, how does Gibbons sort things out in that three-game series between a rotation that could very well include Aaron Sanchez and Daniel Norris, as well as Hutchison?
Hutchison had horrible numbers against the Yankees last season, posting a WHIP of 1.500 and an EWRA of 5.17. In three games at Yankee Stadium, the 24-year-old righty gave up 16 hits in 15 innings and walked 10, going 1-2 (4.80.) There are people in this organization – and those outside it, such as me – who think Hutchison is the key to the season in Stroman’s absence. After tossing 184.2 innings last season, he’ll be counted on that at a bare minimum in 2015, and figuring out how to handle left-handed hitters will be crucial. There is a reason that the Blue Jays unusually had a left-handed batter stand in during Hutchison’s bullpen session on Saturday — a message.
The good news for Hutchison is that Derek Jeter, who wore him out last season, has retired. But the Yankees still have switch hitters such as Mark Teixeira, Chase Headley, Carlos Beltran around while Brett Gardner, Jacoby Ellsbury, Stephen Drew, Didi Gregorius and Brian McCann all bat left. Hutchison’s walks per nine innings pitched against lefty hitters in 2014 was 3.79, compared to 1.91 against right-handers. Forty-two of the 60 walks he issued last season came to lefties, who hit .256 against him compared to righties hitting .222.
A veritable cottage industry sprung up in the second half of last season when Hutchison appeared to have made an adjustment on his slider that confounded lefty hitters. It was a counter-intuitive thing that had the Yankees talking after an Aug. 30 start when he allowed one hit over seven innings at the Rogers Centre. Three weeks later in the Bronx, Hutchison was gone after four innings in which he allowed five hits, two of them home runs. The Blue Jays believe Hutchison needs to regain the feel and confidence in his change-up.
“I need to work on my change-up consistency,” Hutchison said earlier this spring. “I know that to have a very good year, I’m going to need that pitch.”
So, yeah, the games down here don’t mean anything in terms of sum total. But some of the stuff going into the sausage is prime meat for baseball folks.
Castro has a change-up that general manager Alex Anthopoulos says is “Fernando Rodney quality.” But he’s hardly thrown it, because he’s chain-sawed his way through opponents this spring. He’s a teasing, power arm for the back of a bullpen that lost that commodity when Stroman’s injury moved Sanchez very much into the picture for a rotation spot and the Blue Jays want to see him as well as Hutchison and Osuna challenged Tuesday night – under the lights, against a big crowd (by spring standards) and against pinstripes.
Don’t read anything into this. But don’t read nothing into it, either.