BRADENTON, Fla. -- We interrupt your nonstop A-Rod coverage for this important bulletin:
If you’d just meandered 45 miles down the highway from Camp Alex on Wednesday, you could have watched a guy who might really make a difference in the AL East.
Marcus Stroman is the name. And if he has a big year, if he does for six months what he did in his 20 starts in 2014, there’s a good chance we won’t be talking all summer about how the Toronto Blue Jays were let down by their rotation again.
“I expect him to have a big year,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons was saying Wednesday, on the day the 23-year-old right-hander made his spring debut. “He’s that good. And he’s that confident.”
Stroman may not be the first name people talk about this spring when they start weighing whether the Blue Jays can reach October for the first time since Joe Carter’s home run landed 22 years ago. In fact, it’s safe to say he isn’t even the first name people talk about when they start ruminating about the Blue Jays’ young pitchers -- because Aaron Sanchez and hot prospect Daniel Norris seem to have passed him on the spring hype meter.
But unlike Sanchez and Norris, who have pitched 39 2/3 big league innings combined, Stroman has already been there and done it in a major league rotation.
After an early (and rocky) stint in the bullpen, he joined the Blue Jays’ rotation on May 31 – and went 10-6, with a 3.29 ERA, 1.15 WHIP and 103-to-27 strikeout-to-walk ratio the rest of the way. He took a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Red Sox in July. He spun a three-hit, no-walk shutout of the Cubs in September. He ripped off seven shutout innings against the A’s. He went 5-1, with a 1.83 ERA, in six starts against the Yankees and Red Sox.
“What sticks out in my mind,” Gibbons said, “is he was a dominant pitcher the majority of times he went out there. And against some good lineups. And that tells you everything you need to know. I don’t think the fact that he was successful was because nobody knew anything about him. … He’s pretty damn good at a young age.”
What the Blue Jays have also learned is that Stroman is remarkably fearless for a guy who’s starting every fifth day in the AL East, just two and a half years after he was drafted out of Duke in the first round in 2012.
The idea of having a team ready to depend on him as it tries to win “excites me,” Stroman said Wednesday, after allowing two hits and an unearned run in 1 2/3 innings against the Pirates.
“It doesn’t make me scared,” he said. “It makes me more motivated. And it makes me hungry.”
Stroman’s biggest claim to trivia fame is that, at 5-foot-9, he was the shortest pitcher to make a start in the big leagues last season. And he and Tom Gordon are the only pitchers that short to win 11 games or more in any of the last 35 big league seasons.
But what Stroman lacks in size he makes up for in exuberance -- and inquisitiveness. If picking brains can make you great, there might be multiple Cy Youngs in his future, because he’s always pelting the veterans around him with questions, about pretty much everything. Must be the Duke education in him.
“The amount of knowledge you get, learning from guys like [Jose] Bautista, Melky Cabrera, [Jose] Reyes, [Mark] Buehrle, [R.A.] Dickey, it’s unbelievable,” Stroman said. “My ears are always open. They might say something one day, just in passing, that really hits home for you, that you use in the game. And that’s happened nonstop for me.”
And you’ll notice that list of players he grills doesn’t just consist of pitchers.
“Honestly, I pick hitters’ brains more than I do pitchers’ or catchers’ brains,” he said. “I’ve always been like that. I think it makes more sense. Like a guy like Bautista. He’s seen every [pitcher] in the league. He knows what every pitch is doing. And when I go to Bautista, I ask him all the time, `Hey man, what’s the hardest pitch for you to hit from a righty?’ Or, `What are you looking for in a 2-and-0 count from a righty, if a guy’s throwing this, this and this?’
“I’m always trying to pick people’s brains, because you can’t have enough knowledge in this game. You can’t have too much information.”
He also believes, apparently, that you can’t have too many pitches -- because on Wednesday, he threw six of them: four-seam fastball, two-seam fastball, cutter, curve ball, slider and changeup. So when people talk about the league adjusting to the lethal two-seamer he developed midway through last season, Stroman doesn’t think that’s going to be a problem -- because he now has pitches for all occasions.
“I don’t think [hitters] necessarily say, `I’m going to sit on this pitch,’” he said. “I feel like if I do that, I have enough pitches where I can mix it up. If they start to sit on my sinker, I feel very confident in my four-seam fastball, where I can locate that in. If they start looking for that sinker, I can ride [the four-seamer] through the zone.”
Meanwhile, the Blue Jays wouldn’t mind riding Stroman as far as he can carry them. If Buehrle and Dickey just do their thing, and Stroman, Drew Hutchison and Norris (if he’s in the rotation) live up to their potential, this might just turn out to be the most underrated rotation in the American League. No kidding.
“Everyone crushes our rotation,” said Stroman. “But to be honest with you, I think we’re going to surprise some people.”