Borucki ready for the big-league bump
Jays call up lefty who is a quick study in learning how to handle adversity
Just a month ago, Ryan Borucki was spouting lines commonly heard from minor-league players who hope to one day make the jump to The Show, but aren’t there quite yet.
Getting to the big leagues and staying there, he told the Star on the last day of May, was the ultimate goal, obviously. But whatever happens, happens. Thinking about what is going on at the major-league level would only wear on him, cause him to overthink and dampen what he was trying to do with the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons — win.
So while Borucki watched and rooted for the Blue Jays, the club’s No. 8-ranked prospect didn’t pay particular attention to what the rotation was up to, despite injury worries for Marcus Stroman and Jaime Garcia around that time. He was just trying to figure out his stuff in Triple-A, he said, and control what he could control.
That said, there was still one eye on the prize.
“If the opportunity presents itself, I’ll try to take advantage of it as much as I can,” Borucki said.
The 24-year-old left-hander, a native of Mundelein, Illinois who was selected by Toronto in the 15th round of the 2012 MLB draft, is expected to get that chance on Tuesday night versus the defending World Series champion Houston Astros, filling in as a spot starter for an injured Aaron Sanchez (finger). While Borucki’s big league debut hasn’t been made official by the Blue Jays, he was scratched from his start for the Bisons on Sunday.
Borucki’s time in Triple-A began with one start for the Bisons last Aug. 31, when he pitched six scoreless innings. He began the 2017 season with the Class A Advanced Dunedin Blue Jays, his “ultimate goal” for the year to get to the Double-A New Hampshire Fisher Cats. Borucki was in New Hampshire by late July, posting a 1.94 ERA at that level before his late call-up to Buffalo.
It was a “crazy, wild ride,” Borucki reflected.
“I just really was riding on confidence,” he said. “I was pitching really well once I got to Double A, I started out really hot and just kind of rode that on. I came up here (to Buffalo) and just brought that confidence right to here. Nothing really changed. It was a fun way to end the year.”
Maintaining that confidence was key during the off-season. Borucki struggled this past April, not the first slow start in his career. He found it difficult to get into his routine thanks to a number of rain delays in the first month of the season. His ERA ballooned as high as 6.23, an anomaly compared to the 3.32 number has put up over five years in the minors. But by the time he spoke to the Star late last month at Coca-Cola Field, he was starting to feel more and more comfortable on the mound and more consistent with his pitching. Sensing his stuff getting better and better with each outing, the confidence that served Borucki so well last year started to return.
“When you struggle a little bit, you always are trying to figure out ways to get better and stuff like that,” Borucki said. “When you’re going good, sometimes you can plateau a little bit when you’re just kind of riding on your same stuff but once you struggle a bit you’ve got to make little adjustments and focus a little bit more on just the little things about different pitches, your delivery, things like that.” He hoped having ups and downs in the minor leagues would teach him how to react to, and deal with, adversity in the future.
“Obviously when you get to the big leagues you’re going to struggle a lot,” he said. “You’ve got to learn how to be able to get through that. I think that’s the biggest point, is just learning. If you’ve never struggled in your life and you finally struggle, you kind of hit the panic button and you don’t know what to do. If you struggle a little bit throughout the steps of your career, I think it does help. Helps you when a big struggle might happen.”
In Borucki and right-hander Sean Reid-Foley, manager Bobby Meacham said he believed it was possible Buffalo was get- ting a first look at the future of the Jays’ rotation. Reid-Foley, who joined Buffalo in late May, has his ERA down to 5.46 since allowing eight earned runs in 2
1⁄ innings during his first start 3 for the Bisons.
For the pair — good talents who throw hard and possess good, sharp breaking balls, according to Meacham — it’s now a matter of growing into wellrounded pitchers.
“What gets outs? How do I set up hitters? How do I read swings to be able to set up hitters? Things like that. Have poise. When things are going good, everything’s easy. When things go bad, when I don’t have my best stuff, what do I do? That’s the kind of things they have to iron out when they’re in the minor leagues here. Hopefully if they do those little things, the talent will come out easier and they’ll be able to show that talent at the big league level.”