TORONTO, Ont. – On June 1, Mark Buehrle threw eight innings of six-hit shutout at the Kansas City Royals in a game the Toronto Blue Jays won 4-0. Buehrle improved to 10-1 on the season, lowered his ERA to a minuscule 2.10 and, with the Jays having played 58 games to that point, was on pace for a 28-win season, unparalleled in the annals of recent history.
He hasn’t won a game since.
The veteran lefty got nickel-and-dimed to death in a three-run sixth inning in Sunday’s win over the Texas Rangers and wound up leaving in a tie game, so it’s been eight starts for Buehrle without notching a W. Five of those eight starts have been pretty terrific.
No one expected Buehrle to be able to keep up the great pace he’d set over those first 58 games, but there hasn’t really been so much a regression to the mean for him as there has been a return to normalcy.
Over his eight winless starts, Buehrle has posted a very respectable 4.06 ERA, only slightly higher than his 3.84 career mark coming into this season. He’s allowed two earned runs or fewer in half those starts, and pitched into the seventh inning in all but one.
Sure Buehrle hasn’t dominated as he did over his first dozen starts of the season, but his problem since June 1 hasn’t really had much to do with him as much as it’s had to do with the other eight guys on the field (and the one other guy who doesn’t get to field but gets to hit) wearing the same uniform as he does.
Twice the Blue Jays have been shut out in Buehrle’s last eight starts, twice more he left a game with only one run having been scored for him. He gave up a total of 10 runs in those four games, ordinarily more than good enough to win some, if not all of them.
There have been two blown saves behind Buehrle, each time Dustin McGowan giving it up, but in both those games the Blue Jays came back to win.
On Sunday afternoon Buehrle “blew the save” himself, giving up three runs in the sixth to turn a 5-2 lead into a 5-5 tie, but that was an inning that really illustrated just how much bad luck Buehrle has had lately in his quest for that 11th victory.
It started with Buehrle taking rookie John Smolinksi to school, striking him out looking. Geovany Soto then lofted a soft liner to centre that fell in front of Colby Rasmus for a single and Leonys Martin followed with a little dribbler that just snuck under Buehrle’s bare hand and out towards second. Munenori Kawasaki came charging in to throw Martin out, but the call was correctly overturned on replay review.
Adam Rosales was next, and had the hardest-hit ball of the inning – a line drive to left on which Melky Cabrera made a nice, sliding catch for the second out. Rougned Odor then hit a ground ball through the hole on the right side to load the bases, but Buehrle still had the three-run lead with two out and rookie Daniel Robertson, with all of 73 big-league at-bats under his belt, coming to the plate.
Buehrle, pitching from the stretch with the bases loaded, caught the toe of his landing foot on the mound as he attempted to deliver a pitch to Robertson, and fell down. He wisely held onto the ball but the balk pushed a run across and moved the tying run to second base, from whence it scored when Robertson delivered a two-run single up the middle. Buehrle picked Robertson off first base to end the inning but handed it over to the bullpen at that point, guaranteed another no-decision.
He’ll get his next chance at that elusive 11th win on Friday night, when the Blue Jays open up a three-game series at Yankee Stadium, and the odds are stacked against him there, as well. The Jays will go into that game having lost 16 straight in The Bronx, and Buehrle himself has just one career win against the Yankees in 18 starts. But hey, the Blue Jays beat the Yankees the last time Buehrle started against them, and sometimes when all the signs are pointing in one direction, it’s smarter to bet the other way.