MILWAUKEE, Wisc. — Unemployed and left to his own devices as pitchers and catchers reported to club facilities across MLB this spring, Patrick Corbin had to figure out his own training progression towards a regular season he was determined to pitch in. He wasn’t sure where or with. Only that he needed to be ready.
So, the 36-year-old began building up pitch count at Cressy Sports Performance, a private training facility about 10 minutes from his home in Palm Beach, Fla. He turned up every morning after dropping his kids off at school and tried to mimic the typical day starters across the league were working through.
On Tuesdays, he threw long bullpens, regaining feel and refining the shapes of his five pitches. On Fridays, he faced hitters, progressively getting up to five innings and 85 pitches, which he repeated several times.
He never knew who’d be catching him or who he’d be pitching against. Some days, he got big-leaguers such as Jordan Walker and Tommy Pham. Others, he faced college kids. During one session, he spotted Jacoby Brissett working out and asked the Arizona Cardinals quarterback if he’d be willing to step into the box against him.
“I actually tried to talk him into it a couple times,” Corbin said. “But he never agreed to it.”
Hey, any port in a storm. Corbin had been facing the same hitters over and over again — sometimes the same batter 10 times within an hour. He was desperate for new looks and even more eager for the adrenaline of live competition under lights with a defence behind him and spectators looking on.
That’s why it was no issue for Corbin to throw 74 pitches over five innings in a minor-league game a day after he signed with the Blue Jays earlier this month, and 85 over four in the majors only a week later. Playing ball is all he’s wanted to do for months. And he did everything he could to be ready the moment an opportunity materialized.
“I felt pretty good about my season last year and knew I wanted to play a couple more years,” said Corbin, who threw 5.2 innings of one-run ball in a 2-1 Blue Jays loss Thursday afternoon. “There’s always thoughts of, ‘Man, if nobody wants me, I don’t know what the heck I’m supposed to do.’ But I just tried to throw as much as I could and get as prepared as I could possibly be.”
Despite Corbin’s strong outing, which followed Dylan Cease’s best of the season, the Blue Jays struggled to generate offence for a second time in 30 hours and left Milwaukee with a fifth consecutive series loss after sweeping the Athletics on opening weekend. And the only thing preventing this series from being a sweep in the opposite direction was a pair of desperate comebacks in a wild, 9-7 Blue Jays victory Friday night.
After scoring only once in a 2-1 defeat on Wednesday, the Blue Jays offence responded with a punchless performance against Brewers swingman Brandon Sproat, who entered the day with as many walks as strikeouts — 10 — over his first three outings.
The Blue Jays generated a run in the third, as Andres Gimenez led off with a double, advanced on an Ernie Clement single, and dashed home when Tyler Heineman pushed a sacrifice bunt up the first base line. But little came about from there.
A promising opportunity developed in the sixth, as Davis Schneider and Daulton Varsho both reached to begin the frame. But Vladimir Guerrero Jr. bounced the first pitch he saw — a sweeper away — into a routine double play. Two pitches later, Jesus Snachez flew out to left, erasing the threat just as quickly as it materialized.
A day after John Schneider described his team’s offensive approach as “quick” and in need of an adjustment against pitchers trying to use Toronto’s aggressiveness against itself, Blue Jays hitters made over half of their outs against Sproat on three pitches or fewer, allowing him to get through 6.2 innings while throwing only 75 pitches.
One of Toronto’s most lively moments came between innings, when Trevor Megill struck out Daulton Varsho to cap the top of the eighth and glared towards the Blue Jays bench as he walked off the mound. That brought Schneider and Heineman out onto the field, chirping back and forth with Megill as he continued to his dugout. From the on-deck circle, Guerrero motioned for the Brewers reliever to keep walking.
Tempers will run high when a season begins as lamentably as Toronto’s has. Particularly as you’re getting beat on a walk followed by three consecutive bunts, which is how the Brewers scored the game-winning run against Tommy Nance and Joe Mantiply in the seventh.
Meanwhile, making his second start with the Blue Jays, Corbin looked far more comfortable than in his first, breezing through his opening three innings on 40 pitches. He allowed back-to-back hits to begin the fourth with runners on the corners and none out, but limited the damage to only a run on a sacrifice fly.
He erased a lead-off single in the fifth with a pickoff ahead of a couple of strikeouts. And he even came back out for the sixth to face Milwaukee’s top two hitters a third time, retiring both.
In all, Corbin struck out six while allowing four hits and a walk over a 79-pitch outing. He worked front-door sinkers, elevated four-seamers, and diving sliders to lefties. He threw sinkers away, cutters up, and the odd slider to righties. The only pitch that wasn’t reliably working was his changeup, so he threw it just often enough to show hitters he had it.
Corbin’s stuff is far from overwhelming, but on days like these, when he’s moving around the zone and sequencing effectively, it can get him into the middle innings. Which is all the Blue Jays are asking him to do from the back end of their rotation. At least five frames, a little more than two trips through the lineup, preferably with only two or three runs scoring. It won’t always go like that, but Corbin can be a stabilizing presence if it does more often than not.
Of course, Corbin’s season began similarly a year ago, as he went unsigned through most of spring training before the Texas Rangers offered him a contract on the eve of the regular season. The difference then was that Corbin and his wife, Jen, were imminently awaiting their third son, who was born only four days after he signed the deal.
That additional life stress added a degree of difficulty to his rushed preparation for major-league competition. Remember, the Rangers didn’t sign him as a long-term project. They signed him because they had a pressing rotation need, just as the Blue Jays did when they came calling this month. He at least got a minor-league tune-up this time around. Last season, he went straight from the delivery room to a big-league mound.
“I don’t know if doing it before was a little advantage or not,” Corbin said. “It almost helps to jump right into it and get going. Because it’ll never be perfect. You just try to make the best out of it.”
And you never know where opportunities will take you. Originally a rotation stopgap, Corbin went on to throw 155.1 innings over 30 starts and a relief appearance for the Rangers, working to a 4.40 ERA and 1.9 fWAR. That isn’t the dominant ceiling performance contending teams envision atop their rotations. But it is the serviceable floor production that those clubs need every five days to sustain competitiveness.
It remains to be seen if Corbin’s Blue Jays tenure lasts as long. But starts like Thursday’s aren’t going to hurt his chances now that he finally has one.