The Blue Jays’ bullpen, like Bonnie Tyler, needs a hero.
Deep as it is, bullpens are baseball’s ultimate dice roll. The Blue Jays have gotten impressive innings early on from Jordan Romano, Erik Swanson, Adam Cimber and Tim Mayza, but that’s to be expected. It’s the pleasant surprises that can make good bullpens great.
Through the first 18 games, that looked like Zach Pop. The Canadian right-hander had a 1.08 ERA with 11 strikeouts in 8 1/3 innings, his reborn slider giving plenty of reason to believe that it was more than a blip. Wednesday came knocking, though, and Pop gave up four runs to the Astros and watched that ERA balloon to 5.00.
Still, there’s something intriguing about Pop. Despite spending most of Spring Training on the outside looking in at the Blue Jays’ bullpen, he'd earned as much praise as any reliever in camp by the time he won the eighth job. No longer a “one-trick pony,” as manager John Schneider put it, Pop was showing some legitimate upside in the middle innings prior to Wednesday.
Pop has always thrown a slider, but near the end of last season, he started to talk with former bullpen coach Matt Buschmann about making it the best possible pitch. It wasn’t a quick fix.
“I went on this journey in the offseason,” Pop said. “How are we going to get that vertical depth?”
It started with throwing bullpen sessions, which carried into Spring Training. He decided to work on very tangible goals. Instead of big, broad strokes and “trying to get better every day,” Pop would focus on a specific pitch or location at different points in camp. That is why some of his work took place on the back fields, not in live games.
Then, eventually, Pop finally “stumbled on to something."
“What I started to do was choke the baseball a little bit more. I put it deeper into my hand. I had more of a loose grip beforehand, and that led to a bit more cut. When I put it deeper in my hand and grip it, it allows me to get a bit more vertical.”
Keep an eye on Triple-A Buffalo, too.
Former No. 1 prospect Nate Pearson turned in another scoreless inning for the Bisons on Wednesday, striking out one on a 99.5 mph fastball that he couldn’t have placed better, low and away from a right-handed hitter.
Pearson has now struck out 15 in 7 1/3 innings in Triple-A, and if the Blue Jays didn’t have so many relievers who were out of options, Big Nate would likely be on this roster already.
The message the Blue Jays gave Pearson when he was optioned at the end of camp, though, was to force their hand. He’s doing just that.
The Blue Jays envision Pearson as someone who can push up to two innings, like most of their current relievers not named Jordan Romano, but he has stayed fairly close to the single-inning limit early in Buffalo. We’ll see how long that lasts, but coming off years of injuries and frustrations, Pearson is finally showing consistent flashes of his incredible abilities.
“I have to get back to what made baseball fun for me,” Pearson said back in Spring Training, and that refreshed mentality was written all over his face.
Down the road, the Blue Jays have Chad Green working his way back from Tommy John surgery with a return expected by the middle of the season. Hyun Jin Ryu’s pending return from that same surgery will impact the broader roster of pitchers and Ricky Tiedemann, the club’s new No. 1 prospect, who has struck out 15 in 6 2/3 innings already in Double-A, could kick the door down any day.
There are options here, so this is more a question of patience than anything. How long will the Blue Jays wait when a reliever struggles, or when one off their roster is making a push? That timeline can’t stretch on as long as it has in the past, with every win mattering in a stacked American League East.
Pop is having his shot right now while Pearson knocks, but with depth comes competition, and that competition didn’t end when the Blue Jays flew north from Dunedin.