Flexible: Stroman Battles, Wins vs Yankees
The problem with waiting a day to recap a game in a schedule as vigorous as MLB's is that each game has a mood and the mood is ephemeral. The beauty of the last game against the Yankees has now been replaced with the frustration of the game in Boston.
There has long been an argument made that ace pitchers are ace pitchers for the way they pitch when they don't have their best stuff. The measure is how the pitcher can adjust on the fly. How does he centre himself and battle?
The best part of Marcus Stroman's start on Thursday was the fourth inning. Stroman lost his command, threw 34 pitches and looked about ready for Gibby to come get him. Getting out of that spot of bother only giving up two runs was key. Stroman was battling himself and won.
“I battled a little adversity in the fourth, it was more frustration than anything. I felt like my pitches were doing exactly what they needed to do, and I felt like I left up some pitches that weren’t really well hit, but just landed in the right areas.”
An unleashed John Lott, continuing his stellar work covering the Blue Jays, wrote about Stroman's sinker for Vice Sports. The sinker has been a key pitch in this young season.
“Stroman likes to tell the story about how he discovered his sinker grip one day while chilling on a couch with a baseball in his hand. He’d always thrown a four-seam fastball, which tends to travel in a relatively straight line. He could get it up to 94 much of the time and, supplementing it with offspeed pitches, he got a lot of strikeouts. He’d always wanted a sinker but could never find a grip that worked.
’I was just playing with the ball one day and came across a grip that was across the seams,” he says. “It’s considered an untraditional sinker grip, but it felt really comfortable in my hand.”
One of the ways I got back into baseball was my dad explaining pitching to me. It's still how he explains baseball to people. For instance, my cousin's husband is a Palestinian and wanted to know more about the game, so he went to my dad full of questions. My dad got a baseball in hand and went to work.
I bring this up now because Lott's Stroman article is full of similar pitching talk.
“I throw it off my middle finger. I throw it different. I don’t throw it like anybody else. It’s pretty unique. I try not to show my finger grip. I just take the ball and I torque it. All my pitches are like this, though. It’s super unique.
I’m a big comfort guy. Basically, it comes down to whatever feels comfortable in my hand is how I throw it. You can’t take this grip and teach it to someone. It’s weird. If I show it to anybody, guys say, ‘How do you do that?’ But it’s just the way my hands are built or the way my hands kind of manoeuvre. I have pretty flexible fingers.”
More, please.