TORONTO – For seven innings Marcus Stroman was as good as he’s been this season. His two-seamer was on point. His cutter and slider, too. He needed only 92 pitches to cut through a Boston Red Sox team that is rather definitively showing itself to be baseball’s best club.
But as he took the mound to warm up for the eighth inning Tuesday night, an old foe had re-emerged. During the seventh frame he tore through a blister on his right middle finger. As he returned to the field to get loose, his command was gone. Trying to nurse a 3-1 lead, the right-hander thought better of chancing it.
“I didn’t want to run into me throwing two balls, three balls and walking the leadoff guy,” Stroman said afterwards.
Once he departed, everything unravelled for the Toronto Blue Jays in what finished as a 10-7 loss in 10 innings to baseball’s first 80-win squad this year. Ryan Tepera gave up four runs in the eighth and was ejected by home plate umpire Ed Hickox as he walked off the field. After the Blue Jays rallied to send the game into extras, Ken Giles gave up five runs to settle things.
And in the wake of the setback, there was Stroman, vowing to be ready for his next outing Sunday against the Tampa Bay Rays, trying to brush off concerns the blister troubles that have on occasion flared up on him since last year will prevent him from making his next start.
“It’s most prominent on my sinker, but I feel it on the other pitches,” said Stroman. “This is not going to be something that I’m going to continue to talk about. I’m going to make my next start. I’ve been dealing with it, it’s not that serious.
“I’ll figure it out.”
Stroman said “there’s a process,” for him to follow between starts and that he simply needs “to be good these next four days on staying up on doing everything I can to make it heal.”
Against the Red Sox, Stroman was back in the form that made him a pillar in the Blue Jays rotation, against a lineup that has often given him trouble.
He threw 32 two-seamers for 12 called strikes and two whiffs, complemented by 29 sliders (four called strikes, three whiffs) and 24 cutters (three whiffs). He induced 15 groundballs for outs, a couple of them leading to double plays, versus one out in the air, with four strikeouts.
“Explosive,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons. “I thought his fastball had more pop than we’ve seen. Good breaking ball. He really shut them down.”
The only run against him came when a Devon Travis error eventually led to a J.D. Martinez RBI single that cut the Blue Jays lead to 2-1 in the fourth. Stroman didn’t allow another run, working around a Martinez leadoff double in the seventh.
“He was tough today,” said Red Sox manager Alex Cora. “His ball was all over the place. It was moving. Cutters, sinkers. It seemed like whenever we were ahead in the count, he threw his best sinker and we couldn’t get under it.”
When the Red Sox couldn’t get to him, the blister did, the latest turn in a sideways season for Stroman, who went on the disabled list with a 7.71 ERA and has shaved it down to 5.20 in the nine starts since.
“I think so; I think so,” he said when asked if Tuesday was the best he’d felt on the mound this season. “But to be honest with you I felt pretty good in Oakland (last week when he allowed seven runs on 11 hits in five innings), too, and a bunch of balls found holes there. It’s just a matter of keeping the same mindset. Baseball is tough sometimes to go out there mentally.
“My mentality is pretty good, but yeah, I felt great. My sinker and my cutter combination was pretty good today and that lineup is unbelievable one through nine. You can’t take a single pitch off. There are no get-me over pitches. You have to be on it. J.D. Martinez is unreal right now. He’s the hottest hitter I’ve ever seen live. It’s tough to navigate that lineup.”
Once again the Red Sox, against whom the Blue Jays are now 3-11 this year, showed why.
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