Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Aaron Sanchez will start the season in the team’s starting rotation, manager John Gibbons said Monday.Chris O'Meara/The Associated Press
The question was not really whether or not Aaron Sanchez deserved being added Monday to the Toronto Blue Jays starting rotation for the upcoming 2016 Major League Baseball season.
Based on the 23-year-old's commanding performances (a 1.35 earned run average over 20 innings pitched) during the seven weeks of Toronto's spring fling here in Florida, Sanchez was the logical choice ahead of Drew Hutchison and Gavin Floyd, his two closest rivals for the job.
Hutchison, last season's opening-day starter for the Blue Jays, has been sent to Triple-A Buffalo where he will be kept stretched out as a starter.
Floyd will start the year in the bullpen for the Blue Jays, working primarily middle relief innings.
Now the big dilemma facing the Blue Jays – the one the team is rolling the dice on when it comes to Sanchez's relative inexperience in his new role – is how long he can reasonably be expected to last as a starter.
So far, the Blue Jays haven't said how exactly they'll manage the workload for Sanchez, who accrued just over 100 innings pitched last year, including the playoffs.
But Toronto manager John Gibbons is certain on one thing: Sanchez will not be a starter for the entire season.
"I think it will be harmful to him," Gibbons said. "I think in the end it will catch you. We've got to be smart about … his future."
The club does have a plan to restrict Sanchez's workload as a starter. They're just not willing to share it publicly.
"It gives you guys too much red meat," was Gibbons's delicate way of telling reporters to mind their own business.
The manager added that when the time comes, Sanchez will be moved into the bullpen, where he has proven to be a valuable commodity over his first two seasons in Toronto.
The last thing the Blue Jays want to experience is a repeat of the fiasco that helped sandbag a promising 2012 season by the Washington Nationals when they shut down team ace Stephen Strasburg for the final month of the season.
Strasburg was coming back from elbow surgery late in 2010 and the club controversially stuck to its guns to limit the 24-year-old to fewer than 160 innings on the season.
Washington made the playoffs with the best record in baseball, but without their ace, they suffered a stinging first-round loss to the St. Louis Cardinals.
"In the end, if we need to put him [Sanchez] down in the bullpen, we're that much stronger down there too," Gibbons said.
In his final tune-up before his opening-day start against the Tampa Bay Rays in St. Petersburg on Sunday, Marcus Stroman cruised through four Grapefruit League innings on Monday against the Philadelphia Phillies here at Florida Auto Trade Stadium.
The Blue Jays won 2-1 on the strength of a two-run home run stroked by outfield backup hopeful Darrell Ceciliani in the bottom of the eighth inning.
Against the Phillies, Stroman lowered his spring ERA to 1.98, allowing zero runs off three hits while striking out three.
Stroman, too, is still considered inexperienced when it comes to innings workload.
Last year, coming back to play in September after missing the majority of the season recovering from a knee injury, Stroman was limited to 46.1 big-league innings, including the postseason.
In his rookie campaign in 2014, he threw 130.2 innings.
Ross Atkins, the new Blue Jays general manager, said that while the club will keep close tabs on both pitchers, Stroman is less of a concern.
"It's certainly realistic," Atkins said in an interview on Sunday when asked if he was thought Stroman could reach the 200-innings-pitched plateau this season.
Atkins said the club will rely on its newly created high-performance department – which will incorporate cutting-edge scientific approaches to help players achieve and maintain peak efficiencies – to keep pitchers such as Stroman and Sanchez on track.
"It's one thing for a general manager or a pitching coach to come up with a framework on how to monitor fatigue levels," Atkins said. "It's another thing for an expert in sports science to come up with a framework to measure that."
Sanchez, who has added about 20 pounds of muscle through a rigorous off-season training program he undertook with Stroman, is just glad the hard work is paying off.
A starter with the team at the beginning of last season before an injury derailed his progress in June, Sanchez came back in July and was moved into the bullpen.
Although he was solid in relief – posting a 2.39 ERA in 26.1 innings pitched while restricting the opposition to a .178 batting average – a starting role was his ambition. He said it would have been difficult if the team had slotted him into the bullpen once again.
"I think I'd be a little bit surprised if I came out of the 'pen, only because my mindset since we lost against Kansas City has been 'starter' the whole time," he said. "So I came in with a plan and it was all about executing, and I felt like I did a pretty good job of doing that."
As the Blue Jays draw nearer to opening day, they received some encouraging news from injured slugger Edwin Encarnacion, who has yet to play in a Grapefruit League game.
Playing against Triple-A competition for the first time at Toronto's minor-league complex, Encarnacion slugged a home run, and afterward said he feels he should be ready to play in Sunday's first regular-season game.