Two of SF’s pitchers with parallel comebacks
Moronta, Sanchez looking to take next step
For the first two full seasons of his major league career, righthander Reyes Moronta looked like the Giants’ future closer.
He whipped 98 mile per hour fastballs past hitters, racked up strikeouts with a tough slider and earned a reputation as one of Bruce Bochy’s most trusted relievers.
Three appearances into the 2021 season, Moronta has been an effective option for manager Gabe Kapler, but it’s clear the right-hander is a different pitcher. A shoulder injury that required surgery in August, 2019 forced Moronta to miss the entire 2020 season and while he made it all the way back to the big leagues, he admits he still hasn’t cleared some mental hurdles.
“I’m a little bit scared after this shoulder injury that I have still fresh in my mind,” Moronta said through Spanish langauge interpreter Erwin Higueros. “So I have to lose it, I have to trust myself and not be afraid anymore about the injury.”
Moronta tossed a clean 1-2-3 seventh inning against San Diego in Tuesday’s 3-1 loss, but his fastball velocity maxed out at just 95.1 miles per hour and it’s increasingly obvious he prefers his slider to his four-seamer. A fastball that averaged 97.2 miles per hour in 2019 is averaging just 94.2 miles per hour so far this year, but he isn’t ready to concede that his velocity is gone forever.
“Fear is going to go away as I keep pitching,” Moronta said. “As I keep throwing the baseball and I realize that my arm isn’t going to hurt anymore.”
The fear Moronta feels isn’t all that different from what the Giants pitcher who preceded him on the mound Tuesday night at Petco Park experienced last summer.
After undergoing season-ending shoulder surgery in 2019 and becoming a free agent, Giants starter Aaron Sanchez was left to rehab from a major operation on his own. He wondered if he’d ever make it back to a major league mound, particularly when Sanchez felt healthy enough to pitch late last summer but couldn’t find a team willing to sign him.
“You definitely don’t know after an injury like that what the outcome holds,” Sanchez said Tuesday. “You work tirelessly for a goal, but you don’t know what the outcome is going to be.”
Sanchez, who went 15-2 in 2016 and finished seventh in American League Cy Young voting that season, hadn’t been an effective major league starter since 2017 when he signed a one-year, $4 million deal with the Giants this February. He knew there would be skepticism about his ability to step into a rotation after such a long layoff, but with five innings of one-run ball against the Padres on Tuesday, Sanchez showed the type of promise and potential that could make him a strong fifth starter for the Giants this season.
Like Moronta, Sanchez’s fastball velocity —which topped out at 92.8 miles per hour against San Diego— is down from when he last pitched in the majors. It’s a long ways from the 95.4 miles per hour he averaged in his fantastic 2016 season, but it’s also down from the 93.4 miles per hour he averaged when his ERA hovered above 6.00 in 2019.
Sanchez isn’t particularly concerned as he thinks his velocity will return as his stamina builds, but it can’t hurt his confidence to see that he didn’t need to overpower the Padres to have success.
“I’m already feeling better about that, so I see that tick coming hopefully sooner rather than later,” Sanchez said. “But if I’m effective like I was (Tuesday), it just shows execution over stuff.”
Giants manager Gabe Kapler expressed optimism that both Moronta and Sanchez will see improvement in their fastball velocity as they continue to throw, but for now, each right-hander has a reliable secondary weapon that will help keep hitters off balance. Opponents are 0-for-4 with four groundouts against Moronta’s slider this year while Sanchez threw his curveball 22 times on Tuesday, generating whiffs on five of them which is in line with his career average.
“I thought (his curveball) was effective and it was better than it was in camp,” Kapler said postgame. “In camp we saw that pitch bounced quite a bit and he had better control and command of that pitch.”