Tough inning starting point for Pearson
Young pitcher isn’t perfect in his spring debut, and that’s just part of the process
Nate Pearson didn’t give up a hit last spring until his fourth outing, with the Blue Jays playing in Bradenton in that weird vortex of time between Major League Baseball announcing that it was suspending spring training and the end of the games that had started before the announcement.
This spring, it only took four batters for the young phenom to be touched up. Pearson hung an 0-2 slider to the Pirates’ Phillip Evans on Monday, who rocketed it back up the middle for an RBI single that tied the game 2-2, which ultimately wound up being the final score between Toronto and Pittsburgh.
Evans had come to the plate following a two-out walk to Brian Goodwin, with a runner already aboard thanks to Austin Martin’s second error of the game. The Jays’ first pick in last year’s draft bobbled a ground ball by Hunter Owen.
Pearson, the Jays’ second pick in the 2017 draft, using a compensatory pick awarded for the loss of Edwin Encarnacion in free agency, wasn’t nearly at his dominant best. The 24-yearold laboured through a 28pitch inning, throwing 12 balls and 16 strikes. He faced six hitters, and only threw a firstpitch strike once.
“I just wanted to simply attack the zone and throw a lot of strikes,” Pearson said. “Obviously I didn’t throw a lot of strikes, but the outcome was still pretty decent.”
It was a massive difference from his 2020 spring debut, when Pearson struck out the side in order against the Yankees, needing only a dozen pitches.
“Last year went really well,” he said, in a massive understatement.
“This year, this is the first outing, we have somewhere to work with. We’ve got a starting point and we’ve got all of spring training, so I think we’re going to move in the right direction, but it’s the first one of the year so can’t really put too much into it.”
It’s not terribly fair to compare what Pearson did last spring to this spring, though. He may never have a run like that again. No hits over the first three outings, striking out six of the first seven batters he faced and retiring the first 10 before even issuing a walk. The first of the two hits he allowed all spring was a ground-ball double to the Pirates’ Jose
Osuna, the 19th batter he faced.
The kid set the bar pretty high.
Truth is, though, spring training isn’t really a time to go out and blow the doors off, even though it’s always nice to do that. The Jays expect Pearson to be one of the first three starters out of the gate when the season opens for real a month from now in The Bronx. He’s not fighting to make the team, though he’s taking nothing for granted.
“All that matters is that I get outs and attack the zone and throw strikes,” Pearson said. “If I do all those, I think I’ll find myself in the rotation. Either way, I think just filling the
zone, throwing strikes, only good will come of it.”
Unlike his first few spring outings a year ago, the strike zone didn’t get filled up as much as anyone would have liked. The error behind him didn’t help, but when Anthony Alford came to the plate with two on and two out, and Pearson already having thrown a couple dozen pitches, manager Charlie Montoyo had a man up in the bullpen, ready to come in had Alford not been retired.
It will be a surprise to see the Jays allow anyone to throw as many as 30 pitches in a single inning. They understand well that pitchers are more prone to injury when they’re fatigued, and long, arduous innings ramp up that fatigue factor, even if it’s early in a game. The point was made moot when Pearson struck out Alford on four pitches, the last one a fastball at the top of the zone at 98.3 miles per hour.
That’s the young man’s calling card, the big-time heat. A fastball that lights up the radar gun in the triple digits, which we saw on multiple occasions last season, including a couple of times in the playoffs.
Pearson didn’t reach those lofty heights in his first sortie of the spring — but then, he didn’t hit 100 on the gun until his third outing of last spring. His biggest fastball of the day, the fourth pitch he threw, clocked in at a mere 99.9 miles per hour. The rest of the heaters ranged from 96.9 mph to 99.6 mph, with 16 of the 22 fastballs he threw coming in at 98 miles an hour or better.
“I felt good,” he said. “Velo was pretty good. I wish I was able to get into better counts so I could throw more off-speed.”
That’s what the rest of the spring is for, a very different spring than the last, when Pearson was on top of the world before a rude awakening once the regular season started, as he tried to pitch through an elbow issue.
“Sometimes (when) you think you’ve got the game figured out, the game will let you go through some troubling times,” Pearson said. “But I think I’m figuring stuff out with my delivery, my mechanics, my pitches and I think I’m slowly learning.”
That, more than anything else, is what Pearson’s spring should be about. The more he figures those things out, the more likely he lives up to the hype and winds up being a big piece of the Blue Jays rotation this year, and for many to come.