Nine months later, Manoah ready to show off adjustments in Blue Jays return

WASHINGTON — Alek Manoah has had a lot of time to sit around and think about all the things that didn’t go his way in 2023.

The 19 starts he made that produced a 5.87 ERA only months after he was a finalist for the 2022 American League Cy Young award. The nagging physical issues he carried through the season that got worse with each outing. The diminished fastball velocity and slider movement; the out-of-sync delivery and release point he couldn’t find; the control and command that oftentimes eluded him.

It's why he’s so grateful for Sunday, when he’ll be activated from the injured list by the Toronto Blue Jays to make his first MLB appearance in nine months. Finally, an opportunity to start putting the pieces back together. Finally, he can let it all go.

“Sometimes, when you're rehabbing, you think so much about your body feeling good. And when you’re struggling, you spend so much time trying to control little things,” Manoah said Saturday following a throwing session at Nationals Park. “But I’ve finally got to a point where I feel really great and my mechanics are in a good spot. Now, it's just about going out there and competing and playing baseball.

“Not worrying about a stat sheet, not worrying about slider shape, not worrying about fastball velocity. Just going out there, letting everything flow, and getting outs.”

Manoah has taken a long road to get to this point, preparing once again to take a big-league mound. His last time on one did not go well, as Manoah was touched up by the Cleveland Guardians in August for four runs over four-plus innings. It took him 93 pitches to record a dozen outs. The day following, he was optioned to the minors for the second time in 2023.

That began a mysterious period in which Manoah visited a series of specialists for testing and imaging of various physical issues, while Blue Jays management offered only vague, sporadic updates when asked about his status. In early September, he was placed on the temporarily inactive list to open a spot on the Buffalo Bisons roster. And as the triple-A schedule whittled with no sign of Manoah on a mound, it became clear his season was over.

Amidst swirling trade rumours and speculation about his relationship with the Blue Jays organization, Manoah spent the winter training in Miami with his brother, Erik, while forming better dietary habits with the help of his wife, Marielena, who is a certified nutritionist. This spring, Manoah reported to Blue Jays camp carrying a noticeably leaner body composition, determined to sort out his mechanics and command.

He was positioned to open the season as Toronto’s fifth starter, but a shoulder issue derailed his progress in late February and forced him to restart his throwing progression two weeks later. To call the setback a test of his patience would be putting it mildly.

“I’m a bulldog, man. I like to be out there competing,” he said. “When I'm not competing, it sucks. It really, really sucks.”

Opening the season on the major-league injured list, Manoah began a rehab assignment with a rocky outing for single-A Dunedin, followed by inconsistent results over a trio of starts after moving up to triple-A Buffalo. But in his fifth and final rehab appearance on Tuesday, Manoah put it all together, demonstrating his best form since that Cy Young contending campaign in 2022.

While throwing 62 of his 92 pitches for strikes, Manoah allowed just two hits, two walks, and a run (on a solo shot) over six innings against a lineup featuring recent big-leaguers Ji Hwan Bae, Nick Gonzales, Yasmani Grandal, and Jake Lamb. Manoah struck out a dozen and got five of his six other outs on the ground; he allowed only two balls in play with an exit velocity over 92-mph (the homer and a routine ground-out to third); he pitched with palpable conviction and confidence.

“When we’re talking about what we wanted to see from Alek, it was that,” said Blue Jays manager John Schneider. “Being effective and efficient. His stuff is in a good spot. He pitched really well. And it was a pretty decent lineup he was going against, too.”

Manoah also showed off substantial adjustments he’s been quietly working on since we last saw him on a big-league mound. Start with the slider, which Manoah used to get 13 of his 19 swinging strikes on Tuesday. Last season, it was essentially a sweeper — cutting horizontally out of his hand while featuring around 41 inches of vertical drop. But the sliders he was throwing Tuesday averaged 44 inches of vertical break and reached as high as 49 at times. This was no longer a sweeper — it was a downward-biting slurve.

That change in shape is intentional. After spending 2023 coming up empty in his search for the inches of horizontal movement he’d lost off the pitch from a year prior, Manoah has opted to chase vertical action instead.

"I think it plays better to both righties and lefties. Probably less room for damage against that kind of pitch,” Schneider said. “I think last year he didn't have a feel for it — and it showed. But I like the action on it. When he's been really good, that's what it's been. More down than across."

Manoah has also renewed his intent of ripping the pitch with purpose, trying to make it look like a fastball for 55 feet before it falls out of the zone, rather than trying to guide it across the plate as he was in 2023. Tuesday, he was regularly doubling and tripling up on it, throwing it five times consecutively on two occasions. At one point, he struck out Grandal on three pitches — all sliders the former White Sox catcher whiffed over.

“It’s all in the way you throw it. Understanding that whether I'm throwing it for an 0-0 strike or an 0-2 strikeout, I need to attack with it,” Manoah said. “I think sometimes you can fall into a trap of making the game harder than what it is. ‘Oh, I've thrown one or two of them, maybe he's sitting on it now. Let me throw a fastball here.’ When, really, if that pitch is working for me, and it's where it is right now, it doesn't matter the count, it doesn't matter how many times I've thrown it. I have extreme confidence it’ll be tough to get to either way.”

And then there was the sinker. That was the pitch Manoah was using for his called strikes on Tuesday, earning 13 of them. Combine that with five whiffs and the pitch ran a 55 per cent called-strike-plus whiff rate. Anything above 35 per cent is considered elite. Manoah was locating the pitch both arm- and glove-side to righties and driving it in to the front-hip of lefties. Most importantly, he was keeping it to the edges and away from the heart of the plate:

That’s much better command than Manoah had shown in earlier rehab outings, and a slight mechanical adjustment to lower his hands from his jaw to his torso as he begins his delivery may have had something to do with it.

Lowering the hands in a pitcher’s delivery is something Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker has advised to many of his pitchers, from Yusei Kikuchi to Yimi Garcia and all the way back to JA Happ. For starters, it simplifies the delivery and quiets moving parts, creating a more direct path for a pitcher to consistently find his release point. It also helps shield the pitcher’s hand as they manipulate the ball in their glove, lessening the possibility of pitch-tipping, which was a concern with Manoah in 2023.

Manoah first adopted a slide step and started throwing with his hands up near his head in college because it helped him free up space for separation between his hip and shoulder. But, ironically, Manoah and the Blue Jays’ current theory is that the arm action was actually contributing to some of the shoulder issues he battled last season and this spring.

“And what was really crippling me was that it created trouble for me getting to the same release point. My arm was getting long, which can cause some of the shoulder stuff that I was dealing with,” Manoah said. “I feel like the hands being lower allows me to simplify things and get into that same arm pattern, same arm release point, a lot easier. It’s something that just clicked for me.”

Of course, it also helps that Manoah sat 94-m.p.h. with his fastball on Tuesday, touching 96. That’s a considerable improvement on the 92.6-mph Manoah averaged on his sinker last season and matches where his velocity sat during 2022. The physical strides Manoah made over the winter underlie all of these improvements — from the arm path, to the durability, to the revived nastiness of his pitches.

“It's pretty simple — stuff and delivery. That's kind of what his downfall was last year. Whether it was velo, slider, delivery not being in sync,” Schneider said. “When that’s all there, his stuff plays in the zone. And where his stuff is right now is better than where it was at the end of '22 when he was getting a lot of big outs in the zone. That’s what's been encouraging. As long as it's there in the zone consistently, he's going to have a pretty good chance.”

So, that’s what Manaoh will take with him into Sunday, when he finally returns to MLB competition. It’s been a long nine months of stops and starts, searches and setbacks. But lately, Manoah has found something that’s working; something that feels repeatable, natural, like he can be himself again. Something that’s allowing him to take the mound and let everything else go.

“There's a lot of stuff that I’ve learned through this whole process that I feel like has sharpened the toolbox for the future. There’s been a lot of growth,” Manoah said. “God has taken me through some really high mountains and some really deep valleys. And I feel like he talks to you even louder when you're down there. So, right now, I’m better able to understand my purpose and that, no matter what happens on the field, I need to just continue to follow this path. And stay strong through whatever comes.”