When Marcus Stroman tore his ACL in a spring training fielding drill and was expected to miss the entire season, I bumped the Toronto Blue Jays from my preseason pick to win the AL East down to second place. Stroman had a terrific rookie season in 2014 -- 11-6, 3.65 ERA, just 28 walks in 130â…” innings with command of five pitches -- and looked like the ace of a Toronto rotation that didn't have a lot of depth. The Jays were going to miss him.
Of course, we couldn't have anticipated them acquiring Troy Tulowitzki and David Price, but that's another story. The amazing story developing: Stroman is going to make it back to pitch for Toronto in 2015.
Stroman made his first minor league rehab start on Wednesday and pitched 4â…” hitless innings for Class-A Lansing. And while rehabbing over the summer, he developed a new changeup, giving him six pitches. He'll hang with his Blue Jays teammates at home this weekend and then travel with them to New England, where the big league club will play in Boston and Stroman will make an 80-pitch rehab start in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on Monday, in the final game of the season for Triple-A Buffalo. "I can't say how excited I am to be coming back to be with my brothers," he said.
The Blue Jays haven't said what the course of action for Stroman will be, but speculation is he would replace Drew Hutchison in the rotation. If that does happen, he'll only have two or three starts at the major league level to prove he's ready for the postseason, but if he is, a playoff rotation of Price, Stroman, Mark Buehrle and Marco Estrada or R.A. Dickey would look pretty good. And I hear the Toronto offense is strong as well.
Ben Lindbergh of Grantland wrote about the science behind Stroman's remarkable recovery:
"There weren’t many previous pitcher cases to study. According to Corey Dawkins, an athletic trainer who maintains a comprehensive DL database at Baseball Injury Consultants, only 11 major league pitchers since 1990 have had surgery for ACL tears. The most encouraging precedent is Yovani Gallardo, who had his surgery in mid-May 2008 and made it back to the big leagues that same September. But Gallardo, who was 22 at the time, tore his right knee, the one a right-handed pitcher uses to propel himself forward. Only two of the previous 10 -- Paul Maholm last year and John Parrish in 2002 -- tore the ACL in their landing leg, as Stroman did.
"'I looked at the Gallardo case, and that was in the back of my head: "Oh, he did it and he came back,"' Stroman says. 'But then they told me the difference between landing and pushing legs, and that kind of put it in perspective. Because you’re bearing the weight of your body on that landing leg rather than just pushing off and just having that leg in the air, so it's definitely a lot more intense.'"
Stroman returned to Duke to finish classes -- he was one semester shy of graduating -- and Dr. Robert J. Butler of Duke's Human Performance Laboratory worked with the Blue Jays to oversee Stroman's rehab, which included wearing a harness across his chest that allowed the doctor to monitor his workouts. Butler also had to "factor in the psychological strain of Stroman's schoolwork and separation from the Blue Jays with Polar heart-rate monitors and Omegawave sensors, which measure heart-rate variability and other indicators of overwork."
All that helped get Stroman back on the mound more quickly than anyone would have anticipated. As Lindbergh's story shows, modern baseball science is about a lot more than just analyzing the numbers produced on the field.
For more Blue Jays coverage, check out Blue Jays Plus.
