MINNEAPOLIS – The loss hurts, for sure, especially after Marcus Stroman finally found himself back in the strike zone consistently, and good things happened. Seven innings of work marked a season-high. Two earned runs against and one walk were both season-lows. Reintroducing his cutter to the mix, he legitimately gave his team a chance to win, arguably for the first time this season.
The Toronto Blue Jays didn’t win on a bright Wednesday afternoon at Target Field, falling 4-0 to the Minnesota Twins, who avoided a three-game sweep on the back of 5.2 shutout innings from touted prospect Fernando Romero in his big-league debut.
But if Stroman’s performance marked the beginning of a correction for the right-hander, who began the day with an ERA of 8.88 and had allowed six earned runs in each of his last two starts, that will be a far more significant development for the 17-13 club.
“It was a difference-maker,” catcher Russell Martin said of Stroman’s cutter. “It’s the kind of pitch that plays well off the sinker. The hitters, they can’t really differentiate what’s coming, by the time they swing it’s moving one way or the other. When he’s throwing it the way he did today, it makes his sinker that much better because they can’t just cheat to the sinker. The cutter plays off that fastball plane perfectly.”
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Martin can’t remember the last time he called a cutter for Stroman, who in their pre-game chat said he wanted to start throwing the pitch again. The Twins weren’t the only ones to be caught off guard by the pitch, as Statcast didn’t recognize it, likely binning the pitch into the two-seamer and slider categories.
Stroman estimated that he threw 20-25 of them, and it helped pull his sinker back down into the zone after Brian Dozier and Eduardo Escobar sent two-seamers deep into the outfield – far enough to perhaps be homers in Toronto – before Eddie Rosario’s solo shot opened the scoring in the second.
Once Max Kepler’s run-scoring groundout with the bases loaded and one out in the third made it 2-0, Stroman settled in as his two-seamer dropped back into the zone’s lower half, where it’s most effective.
“(The cutter) is in between my slider and curve and it’s something that allows me to get extension and allows me to put my sinker in a better spot. I’m excited,” said Stroman, who allowed two runs on six hits and a walk with five strikeouts. “It helped balance everything out, it helped get me back down in the zone.
“It’s a pitch I threw a lot in 2015 and I’m always changing and tinkering and doing whatever I can to help. It’s a pitch I’ll start to use effectively going forward.”
The Blue Jays rotation, expected to be a strength, opened the day with a 5.34 ERA that ranked 14th in the American League. J.A. Happ, in particular, and Aaron Sanchez have served as stabilizing forces and if Stroman gets going, there are trickle-down benefits across the roster.
The seven innings he threw provided the bullpen with a bit of a breather ahead of Thursday’s doubleheader at Cleveland – the Blue Jays will recall Joe Biagini to start the second game there – but Aaron Loup made a bit of a mess of that. The lefty managed only two outs while surrendering a Robbie Grossman sacrifice fly and leaving the bases loaded for Carlos Ramirez, who walked in a run to push things further out of reach.
With the Twins not gifting baserunners and runs the way they did in the first two games of the series, the Blue Jays found the sledding much tougher, especially with Romero zipping in a two-seamer that topped out at 98.4 m.p.h. with a complementary wipeout slider.
Kevin Pillar was the only batter to see him well, collecting a pair of singles and a walk against him before getting rung up by umpire Dan Bellino in the ninth.
“For a guy making his major-league debut he was poised out there,” said Pillar. “I don’t want to say he was effectively wild – because he was throwing a lot of strikes – but his ball was just moving all over the place. Sometimes he had cut, sometimes he had run, sometimes he threw a straight one.”
Pillar made a tremendous diving catch on a Dozier drive to end the seventh, his glove hitting the ground awkwardly in the process. Though it looked like he may have jammed his thumb or wrist, he said there was no issue afterwards.
“From the dive to running into the fence (chasing the Rosario homer), I’m sure he’s going to have a few bruises but nothing serious,” said bench coach DeMarlo Hale.
Another worrisome moment came in the eighth when Teoscar Hernandez was tagged on the head while unsuccessfully trying to steal second, and was briefly attended to on the field. He finished out the contest.
Bellino drew the ire of the Blue Jays in the third, when he ruled Hernandez failed to check his swing on a 3-2 pitch and Aledmys Diaz, running on the pitch, pulled up thinking it was ball four and was easily caught stealing to end the frame.
Manager John Gibbons came out to argue and was ejected for the 45th time in his career, but first this season, for his troubles.
Amid all that Stroman shook off his unsteady start and kept the game from unravelling there.
“He was the Stroman we were used to seeing,” said Martin.
Said Stroman: “I felt my slider I wasn’t aggressive enough with, and my cutter is a pitch I’m extremely aggressive with, and it helps me get extension. Just trying to adjust, trying to do everything I can to get my game better.”
On Wednesday his game got better, and if the Blue Jays can take that with them along plus two wins from their series in Minnesota, that will make for a pretty good haul.
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