TORONTO – A week and a half ago, Trent Thornton discarded the sport glasses that are such a familiar part of his look in favour of contact lenses. The Toronto Blue Jays right-hander was seeking more comfort on the mound, and amid the summer’s peak heat, readjusting the frame each time he took off his cap to wipe the sweat from his brow impacted his rhythm. Try something different, he figured.
Contacts, however, can be finicky, and they made his eyes itchy and dry. He couldn’t wait to pull them out that first night he wore them in Baltimore and they were bugging him again last week against the Tampa Bay Rays. Before leaving the dugout for the first inning, he was adjusting the lens in his right eye when Vladimir Guerrero Jr., brushed up against him, knocking it out. “I couldn’t see much of anything,” said Thornton, who pitched the frame with a missing lens. “I was seeing one-and-a-half of Ji-Man Choi in the box. It was kind of scary, honestly.”
That’s why Sunday the glasses were back for Thornton, the most obvious of several adjustments he made before throwing six innings of one-run ball in a 1-0 loss to the New York Yankees. More substantive were some mechanical fixes aimed at realigning a complicated delivery that had gone awry, caused by his arm slot creeping upwards.
All the pieces fell into place for him on an idyllic afternoon, the only damage against him set up when Teoscar Hernandez misjudged a Gio Urshela shallow fly, breaking back a couple of steps only for the ball to drop in front of him for a double. Brett Gardner cashed that in with a legit ground-rule double of his own moments later, but Thornton otherwise kept the Yankees under his thumb, helped immensely when Justin Smoak and Reese McGuire turned a slick 3-2-3 double play to escape a bases-loaded jam in the sixth.
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“It was just getting back to my natural arm slot,” explained Thornton. “When I’m there, everything is on time and my stuff generally plays a lot better.”
Regardless of the outcome, these are important learning moments for the young Blue Jays who continue to experience new things or are being challenged in new ways as they either approach or surpass previous workload highs.
Take Bo Bichette, for example. After a historic and unconscious start to his career, he’s inevitably cooled down, taking an 0-for-7 into Sunday’s game before a generously scored infield single in the first inning ended that rut. He was promptly thrown out trying to steal when he over-slid second base, the third time he’s been caught in four attempts, but in the ninth, he fought back from 0-2 down against Aroldis Chapman to work the count full and single on the eighth pitch of the at-bat.
Impressive stuff, and as closely as the Blue Jays are watching how he handles things when he plays well, they’ll be even more vigilant in monitoring how he handles the dry spells every player goes through.
Bichette’s ninth-inning single came after a tremendous 13-pitch faceoff between a pinch-hitting Guerrero, and Chapman, who finally induced a double-play grounder on a 99.6 m.p.h. fastball. The remnants of a crowd of 27,790 applauded Guerrero as he returned to the dugout, drawing the awe of manager Charlie Montoyo.
After Bichette’s single, Cavan Biggio struck out on a full-count slider to end the game, but Chapman had been forced to throw 27 pitches to a trio of Blue Jays rookies to get it done.
“You’re just doing it on a bigger stage,” Biggio said of learning on the fly in the majors. “In the minors you’re making adjustments, trying to get better, the cameras aren’t on you every day. Up here you’ve got to make adjustments and then produce after that.”
For Thornton, he’s now at 114.2 innings this season, not only inching closer to the career-high 140 innings he logged last year between triple-A Fresno and the Arizona Fall League, but also carrying that workload over a condensed period of time.
The Blue Jays tried to slow the pace of that increase by placing him on the injured list July 21-31 – elbow inflammation was the official reason – and they’ve seen him bounce back stuff-wise since his return.
“I’m listening to the trainers, doing what my body tells me I need to do,” said Thornton. “It’s pretty much the same stuff routine-wise, it’s just consistently getting soft-tissue (treatment), stuff like that. I need to take care of my body and be ready to go out every fifth day.
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That’s why in discussing Thornton’s work between starts, pitching coach Pete Walker says "it’s a combination of a lot of things, to be honest with you," and managing workload is no small piece of that.
There are mechanical fixes and pitch-usage improvements, but managing workload is no small piece of that, too.
"Sometimes it’s taking a day off from throwing the day after a start, lessening the load during his bullpen sessions, there are certain days where we might even long-toss more," explained Walker. "Obviously when you get into uncharted territory as far as innings and an amount of work you’re not accustomed to, you’ve got to talk daily and make sure the pitcher, in this case Trent, is feeling strong, feeling good.
"You make sure they don’t get out of their delivery, because fatigue can set in and you want to minimize that and you really need to go through the checklist of things they need to do to be successful."
After falling off a cliff last time out against the Rays, allowing three two-run homers in the fourth inning after throwing three shutout frames to begin the day, Thornton maintained through two trips through the lineup against the Yankees.
“One of my main focuses is on being able to make adjustments when I need to, especially in-game,” said Thornton. “Being quicker and not waiting for after the game.”
For the third consecutive start, he relied on his cutter more often, throwing it 28 times in 89 pitches, generating three of his 11 whiffs with the offering. Several Yankees took awkward or defensive swings against him, often the best indicator of how a pitcher’s stuff is playing on a given day.
With his glasses back on Sunday, he saw it all clearly, too.
Are they staying?
“It’s probably a start-to-start thing, dependent on weather,” Thornton replied. “If it’s extremely humid or it’s raining, I’ll probably wear contacts. But I’ve always been comfortable with glasses, but when it fogs up, it’s kind of annoying having to take them off, getting sweat all over them.”
In the big-leagues, adjustments big and small never stop.
