Dickey knuckles down for Jays, silences Angels between homers
The frustrating detail about R.A. Dickey is not solely the number of home runs he gives up. Mix that with a more flattering stat — his performance on batted balls in play — and you can see how good Dickey might be if he could just stem those homers.
Dickey gave up homers in the first and ninth innings against the Los Angeles Angels on Thursday, padding his already over-inflated homer stats for this season, and since he joined the Jays in 2013.
The homers didn’t hurt the Jays — Toronto won 8-4 on the strength of Edwin Encarnacion’s three run homer and a two-for-two, two-walk night from No. 9 hitter Steve Tolleson before 19,014 at Rogers Centre.
Dickey surrendered his 10th and 11th homers of the season, which vaulted him into a tie for first place among American League pitchers; more significantly, the homers increased his total to 72 since he joined the Jays for the 2013 season. Over that span, a run of 77 starts with Toronto, Dickey leads the majors in that department. Marc Kraus hit the first one Thursday, marking the 12th first-inning homer in Dickey’s To- ronto pitching log.
But Dickey still worked a complete game, giving up only four other hits, and flirting with mastery over a knuckleball pitch that can never be truly mastered.
“Home runs come with the turf when you’re a knuckleball pitcher,” Dickey said. “It can be a bit of a meatball out there, but I was determined it wasn’t going to take away from my start.:
Dickey had allowed 13 earned runs, which included four homers, over 11 innings in his previous two starts. The difference Thursday?
“The simple answer is late movement,” Dickey said. “I had late movement tonight and it’s something I haven’t had in more than a month. You try and change speeds and try to get a lot less rotation on the knuckleball . . . try and hold on to the proper mechanics I came into the this knuckleball journey with.”
Dickey often confronts the homer theme, both with the media and with his pitching coach. But he is one of the better pitchers in baseball when it comes to BABIP. Entering Thursday’s game, Dickey had the 13th lowest BABIP rate in the game at .247.
That stat became the feature of Dickey’s pitching after he surrendered the long ball in the first inning. He put the ball in play 23 times out of the next 29 batters he faced. He struck out four and allowed two walks — and a David Freese two-run homer with two out in the ninth — on a mostly rhythmic night where he got the knuckler over for strikes and let it do its work.
The damning fact in his 2015 season, and his Jays tenure, remains the home-run ball. Dickey and pitching coach Pete Walker have slowed up his delivery, taken three to five miles an hour off the pitch, and tweaked things in bullpen sessions to get more action on the pitch.
“I can’t say enough about Pete (Walker),” Dickey said. “He’s catching stuff on video, and he’s working hard on my bullpen outings. If it weren’t for him, I’d never have caught it on my own. A lot of it is slowing down tempo, but a lot of it is stuff I can’t talk about.”
For Dickey, the complete game led to just his second win (2-5) in nine starts.