ST PETERSBURG, Fla. — With six days off between his last start and his outing Wednesday night against the Tampa Bay Rays, Marcus Stroman says he lost a bit of feel for his pitches.
“My body feels great, arm feels great,” Stroman said, after the Blue Jays beat the Rays in a slugfest, 7-6. “My pitches just weren’t doing exactly what I wanted them to do at the end. But that’s baseball.”
And if that’s the only reason Stroman was off Wednesday night, that’s good news for the Blue Jays, because Stroman has been pitching through a finger issue for nearly two months now since developing a blister on a humid afternoon in New York early this July.
Both Stroman and his manager, John Gibbons, said his finger wasn’t limiting him Wednesday night. But Stroman stared down at his pitching hand a number of times throughout his start, and his two-seamer clearly wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do, especially at the end of his outing.
In his final inning, the sixth, Stroman didn’t look comfortable at all. He missed badly with several of his warm-up pitches and called catcher Raffy Lopez out to the mound for a conference before he even threw a pitch to the first batter of the inning. Meanwhile, reliever Danny Barnes stood patiently on the bullpen mound over Stroman’s right shoulder, ready to enter the game at a moment’s notice.
Five of Stroman’s next eight pitches went for balls as he struggled to find the zone. After getting a hard groundout, he gave up back-to-back singles, and that’s when Gibbons came to get him. At only 87 pitches, it was Stroman’s fourth-shortest outing of the season.
“It was a battle for him tonight. I don’t think his ball was sinking like it normally does,” Gibbons said. “That’s just my eyes telling me. The ball was cutting more. And that’s where he ran into trouble.”
It’s important to remember that since that day in the Bronx, Stroman hasn’t missed a start. He’s thrown eight outings and he’s been rather good, posting a 2.17 ERA and pitching beyond the sixth inning seven times.
It’s hard to imagine just how lost this lost season — Baseball Prospectus estimates Toronto’s playoff odds at 0.8 per cent — would be without Stroman taking the hill every five days. He’s been Toronto’s best pitcher and one of the top five in the American League. He’s poked at his finger at times during starts; he’s wiped his hand on his pants as all pitchers do. But, for the most part, he’s been himself on the mound.
Until Wednesday, when he allowed three home runs after coming into the night having given up only one over his last 10 starts, a stretch of 66.2 innings. It was also a night that saw him give up eight hits, the second-most he’s allowed on the season.
Before he left the game, Stroman allowed a pair of runs in the third, when Kevin Kiermaier jumped all over a first-pitch sinker and hit it over the wall in centre for a two-run shot. And he gave up another in the fourth when Steven Souza Jr. took a mislocated curveball for a ride to deep centre.
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Kiermaier hit another long ball off Stroman in the fifth (the two teams combined for nine homers on a loud evening under the dome) and one of those two back-to-back singles in the sixth was allowed to cross the plate by Barnes, who eventually stranded the other.
“I didn’t make particularly good pitches,” Stroman said. “Those balls should have left. Kiermaier had my number today. I felt like he was right on time for all of my pitches. And then I hung a pitch to Souza that he put a good swing on. So, those are my fault by far.”
Barnes issued back-to-back walks to open the seventh, and Ryan Tepera let the first of those walks cross the plate when he gave up an infield single to Evan Longoria on his first pitch of the game.
That completed an unraveling of an early Blue Jays lead that stood at five runs after the second inning as Toronto emptied the clip on Tampa Bay starter Austin Pruitt.
Steve Pearce, making only his fourth career start as a leadoff hitter, doubled off Pruitt to open the game before Josh Donaldson went down for a slider and drove it 403-feet into the left field seats to put two early runs on the board. Donaldson’s now hit 13 home runs in his last 24 games after hitting only one in 36 coming into that stretch. Coming into the month of August, he had 11 home runs on the season. In the 23 days since, he’s doubled that total.
That set the stage for the Blue Jays to tee off in the second, as Ryan Goins, Lopez and Pearce took turns launching solo homers off of Pruitt. Goins’ set a new career high with six on the year. Lopez’s was the first of his major-league career. And Pearce’s was merely hit a very long way, nearly scraping a Tropicana Field catwalk at as it arced deep into the left-field seats.
“I think we fed off of it,” Pearce said of his early hits. “We have a good offence. We were able to put it together tonight. It would’ve been nice to hit some homers with runners on base but that’s just the way it happens.”
Things quieted down for a while after that until the fifth when Justin Smoak hit his 34th home run of the season — another solo shot — off Rays reliever Chase Whitley.
And with the game tied in the eighth, Kevin Pillar took a hanging breaking ball from Rays reliever Tommy Hunter for a ride to left, which won the game, gave Pillar a career-high 13 long balls on the year, and made it the first time the Blue Jays have hit six homers in a game since September 19, 2012.
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