ARMS RACE FOR THE BLUE JAYS
Rotation in question after Stroman
As Blue Jays pitchers and catchers assemble in Dunedin this week, there is but one absolute certainty about the staff: Marcus Stroman will be the opening day starter.
Given recent history, perhaps the Blue Jays want to give that a second thought. After the departure of Roy Halladay six years ago, Toronto has opened its season with Shaun Marcum, Ricky Romero (twice), R.A. Dickey (twice) and Drew Hutchison.
Marcum was traded the following off-season, Romero’s career fell apart, Dickey was a microcosm of the failed expectations of the 2013 and ’14 seasons and Hutchison lost his starting job even as the team romped to the playoffs last year.
We jest about the second-thoughts thing: of course Stroman is the opening-day guy, just like it is obvious he enters this season, at 24 years old, as the staff ace. A 1.67 ERA in four September starts will do that for you.
After Stroman, though, things become decidedly less clear. There are a few questions to be answered about the lineup this spring, such as who will bat leadoff, who will play left field and who will back up catcher Russell Martin, but this all amounts to tinkering relative to the uncertainty with the pitching staff. There are plenty of arms, to be sure, but the biggest task for John Gibbons this spring will be figuring out who does what.
Hutchison happens to provide an excellent cautionary tale. An improved slider keyed a strong finish to 2014, and he began last season by shutting down the Yankees in New York. And then he regressed mightily. He was still recording wins thanks to Toronto’s potent offence, but by late summer he had the ignominy of the best-ever winning percentage (85 per cent) for a pitcher with an ERA over 5.00. He was sent to Triple-A Buffalo and was left off the playoff roster. Hutchison’s miserable season underlines the risk inherent in putting faith in small sample sizes, which unfortunately for the Blue Jays happens to describe two-fifths of their starting rotation. J.A. Happ, 33, is coming off a career year that is in fact a career two months — his ERA was 4.64 over 20 starts in Seattle and then 1.85 over 11 starts in Pittsburgh. But that was good enough for a $36-million, three-year deal from the Jays, who obviously don’t intend for him to be the parttime starter he was in his previous tour with Toronto. Marco Estrada, 31, didn’t make the rotation in his first spring in Toronto, but he ended the season as the Blue Jays’ most reliable starter, not counting the mirage that was David Price. His success last year was attributed to more confidence with his fastball, thanks in part to his caddy, Dioner Navarro. He still has the fastball, but Navarro is gone. Maybe they will keep in touch. But if Estrada continues to scatter hits — he led the American League in fewest allowed per nine innings — he can survive his modest strikeout rate and high home-run totals.
R.A. Dickey, 41, can be expected to continue to be R.A. Dickey, which means 200-plus innings and an ERA somewhere around 4.00. His value on this team is best exemplified by an August start last year in Los Angeles, where the Angels bashed him around for five runs in the first inning, and then he kept a clean sheet for five more innings as the Blue Jays piled up 12 runs. Gibbons infamously did not place great faith in the knuckleball during the playoffs, but in the regular season he has the luxury of waiting for Dickey to sort it out and let the offence take it from there.
The last spot in the rotation could go to either Jesse Chavez, who was a decent starter for most of the last two seasons with Oakland, or Toronto could leave him in the bullpen and give the job to a high-upside candidate like Aaron Sanchez. The 23-year-old made 11 starts last year before he was sent to help a seriously leaky bullpen, where he became a reliable setup man.
Sanchez has spent the offseason training with Stroman, who insists his pal isn’t putting in all this work just to go back to the bullpen, and the Jays say they are inclined to try him in a starting role in the spring. But Gibbons was also decidedly non-committal in talking about Sanchez last month as he was, well, about pretty much everything. That’s kind of his thing.
Will Sanchez start this season in the rotation? “Don’t know.” Who’s your leadoff man? “Don’t know that either.” Who’s your closer? “Don’t know that either.” I suspect he would have given the same response if he was asked if his name was John Gibbons.
Sanchez would seem to have much more value as a starter than a short reliever, but there is no doubt a part of Gibbons that relishes the prospect of using him, Roberto Osuna and new acquisition Drew Storen — who saved 29 games last year for Washington — as a late-inning three-headed monster in the mould of the Kansas City Royals.
Last season, the Blue Jays broke camp with a pile of kids — Sanchez, Osuna, Miguel Castro, Daniel Norris — in key pitching roles, because they didn’t have much choice but to try them. None stayed in the same role and two were traded.
This year, Gibbons has options. And he has a whole spring to make his decisions.