Jays send bad signal with Sanchez relief line
PHILADELPHIA— Aaron Sanchez is either No. 1 or No. 1a in the Toronto starting rotation.
His ERA, at 3.38, is second only to Marco Estrada among the front-end five, and it jumped to that, from 2.91, last Sunday afternoon, smacked around for six runs on 10 hits yet still coming off the bump with a W against Baltimore.
A 6-1 record in 13 starts, his curveball developed into a thing of beauty that might now be the equal of Brett Cecil’s.
And still the Jays are going to send their strapping right hander to the ’pen at some point this season. It’s non-negotiable.
“Oh yeah, we’re going to do it,” manager John Gibbons confirms. “Otherwise we’ll have you sign his Tommy John cast because I sure as hell won’t.”
Matters not that Sanchez — who turns 24 on Canada Day — is the fittest he’s ever been, the strongest he’s ever been, having added 20 pounds of muscle before reporting to spring training, and the most pitching-dominant he’s ever been. Or that he clearly has little appetite for returning to the ’pen for the third time in three years, when that eventuality comes about, as Gibbons avows it will.
The strapping right-hander’s days as a starter are numbered, which makes little baseball sense for a team that utterly intends to be in the pennant race through the late summer and will need their sturdy rotation — hugely responsible for the Jays sticking this close to the division leaders — to continue being just that.
As composed, Sanchez is at least a co-ace, having elevated himself from No. 5, the job he fought furiously for and would not be denied, coming out of Dunedin. He beat Drew Hutchison for that spot. But he’ll concede the hill to Hutchison in the short strokes of summer, whether before or after the all-star break still undetermined.
“There’s a lot riding on those guys,” says Gibbons, and he’s referring to Marcus Stroman here too, best friend to Sanchez, and the guy who persuaded him to embark on the fitness regimen that transformed his lanky, poor posture frame. “They’re commodities.”
So this is what the commodity had to say about his imminent future, after being informed he’d been the subject of discussion for a good 20 minutes during the afternoon scrum-the-skipper session before Wednesday’s return engagement here with the Phillies. “My preference has been to start since spring training. You guys all know that. But I can’t change the fact that they want me to go back to the ’pen, to look after me in the long run.’’
To baby him, because that’s what baseball teams do in this era, when a complete game is as rare as a blue moon. (Toronto doesn’t have any this season.) When young arms are cosseted through the minors and into The Show with rigid pitch counts and innings counts, thus preventing pitchers from building up the stamina — the muscle memory, the fatigue resistance — which would extend durability, stiffen their pitching spine.
What Sanchez thinks about his starter-in-training-wheels status doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, corporately.
Probably what Gibbons thinks of sending Sanchez back to the ’pen won’t count for much either when weighed against ownership, executive management, quantum analytics geeks and the highperformance cabal brought in this year.
Everybody’s freaked about the prospect of blown arms and Tommy John surgery.
“What answer are you looking for?” Sanchez asks the reporter who asks about his displeasure over what looms ahead. “There’s been plans since the beginning of the year on what we were going to do. What that time comes, we’ll figure it out. I don’t think that I’m going to the ’pen in the next week.’’ That’s sarcasm, by the way. “When the time comes, that’s when I’ll worry about it.” Never too early to suggest this plan blows, I say. Sanchez has thrown 851⁄ innings
3 this season and never gone more than 1331⁄ (combined minors and
3 majors) — and that was in 2014, when he was still mostly a two-pitch hurler, fastball and sinker.
Last season, of course, he began in the starting rotation, got knocked out by a strained back muscle just below his pitching shoulder, and was deposited in the bullpen upon his return — where he excelled the previous season and did so again.
But had Sanchez not further groomed his starter chops, that dazzler of a curveball would likely never have been coaxed out of his arm. (And a changeup, too, though that’s still very much a work in progress.)
“It’s always been a good pitch for me,” Sanchez counters. “It’s just the fact that I’m doing it with more consistency, that’s what’s been most beneficial for me. And I think that just came with time, with mound time, game situations. Now that I’ve got more innings under my belt and I’ve been throwing it more in games.”
Pitches that might very well go into hibernation when Sanchez is dispatched anew to the bullpen, summoned as — presumably — setup man to Roberto Osuna, expected to throw hard for one inning rather than cleverly, as required when pitching through a rotation three or four times.
Some observers believe the club will pull the plug on Starter Sanchez when he gets around the 175-inning mark.
At every possible juncture, the team has tried to give him extra rest — which will be the case next week, with two off-days. So he’ll pitch this Friday and then not again until the following Friday. The all-star break also offers a known respite period.
“This year our plan was always to go past the 133 mark anyway,” says Sanchez. Now, where that number is to where they’re going to shut me down, I have no idea. That has never been discussed. But what has been discussed is that at some point in time I do go to the bullpen.
“When that time comes we’ll figure it out. There’s so many scenarios that could happen as far as numberwise. That’s stuff they’ll figure out. All I can do is just go out there and pitch. That’s what I’m going to do until something else comes up.”
Gibbons: “The plan all along was Hutch is going to come up. When Sanchy’s down in the ’pen it’ll make the ’pen that much better, too.
“It’s a roll of the dice, but we’re going to try it.’’