Ross Stripling's debut gave the Blue Jays a chance to win that they ultimately didn’t capitalize on Friday night against the Red Sox, but it was an encouraging first look at Toronto’s lone Trade Deadline addition expected to be with the club beyond the 2020 playoff push.

Stripling has been working to rediscover his “normal” early this season after taking “unprecedented damage,” as he put it, against his fastball. He managed to keep the ball in the yard over his 4 1/3 innings in the second game of Friday’s seven-inning doubleheader at Fenway Park, a 3-2 loss, while allowing three runs (two earned) on six hits and two walks.

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“Physically, I felt good, and I felt like I threw the ball well,” Stripling said after his start. “I mixed in everything. [There were] a couple of fastballs I want back, specifically a few 0-2 fastballs that ended up giving singles. I felt like I competed, though. I wish I could go a little deeper into the outing, for sure, but for a first one? I’ll take it and move on from there.”

This outing left a fine first impression on manager Charlie Montoyo, too, who asks for a couple of basic things from his starters. As long as they’re finding the plate and giving his team a chance to win on that given night, Montoyo’s happy, so Stripling should fit right in.

“He throws strikes with all of his pitches, and that’s pretty good,” Montoyo said. “That’s the sign of a good pitcher. He really was good.”

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That fastball is what the rest of Stripling’s repertoire is built off of, and 11 of the 12 home runs he’s allowed in 2020 have come against it, but his changeup is a critical piece of the equation, and it looked sharp on Friday. It’s a pitch that he focused on heavily this past offseason, even leaning on Cavan Biggio for advice as the two trained at the same facility in Texas before eventually becoming teammates.

Finding an effective changeup is the great mystery that eludes so many pitchers, but Stripling’s solution wasn’t all that complicated. The pitch was inconsistent over the winter as he tinkered with it, but had potential when he let go of a good one. Biggio encouraged him to stick with it, which he did.

When Stripling arrived at Spring Training, he and the Dodgers' coaches focused more on the pitch and found a better grip, with his fingers spread wider apart. The last piece of the puzzle? Letting it rip.

“The idea is to throw it as hard as you can,” Stripling said. “Since the second I’ve had that mindset, switch the grip up a little bit and throw it as hard as I can, that basically means to be more aggressive with it and don’t worry about pronating and all of that good stuff. Just throw it as hard as you can. Since then, it’s been a real weapon for me.”

Stripling wants to throw the pitch more to right-handed hitters going forward and still feels like there’s work to be done, but it looked good on Friday. Stripling used the changeup 17 times, 22% of his pitches, and it produced four swings and misses, five foul balls and just a pair of balls put in play, both of which resulted in outs. As he also works to sharpen his breaking pitches, having this changeup working will be crucial for Stripling if he’s asked to work deep into games.

“I threw it to a couple of righties today,” Stripling said. “I think I got swings-and-misses on those ones I threw to righties, a couple strikeouts to lefties. It was good today. A good step forward with it.”

Just how that role plays out is still to be determined, which is what you could say for many pitchers on this Blue Jays staff. That’s not a knock, either, just the reality of how the club has pieced together its innings in 2020. No starter has pitched into the seventh inning or touched the 100-pitch plateau yet, but an exciting group of young, multi-inning arms out of the bullpen have made that mostly an afterthought. Stripling is expected to have continued opportunities to start, but his ability to succeed in so many roles is even more attractive to the Blue Jays than your average club.

“I think that my arsenal fits better as a starter, but I also think that there’s a lot of value in a guy in a bullpen. We’ve seen guys do it here,” Stripling said, “being able to face the full lineup once through, maybe two-plus or three innings. I think there’s a lot of value in that, being able to bridge a shorter start to the back end of a bullpen. That’s a role I did well in L.A. and I’m proud to do, if that’s what’s asked of me.”