DUNEDIN, Fla. – Jose Berrios and the Toronto Blue Jays started their deep dive into his 2022 season at the most basic of places, his numbers. The pitching line wasn’t pretty – a 5.23 ERA, a league-leading 199 hits allowed and 100 earned runs against, a drop in strikeout-percentage of more than six per cent at 19.8 – and the why behind it had been a moving target all year.
They tried moving him from one side of the rubber to the other and back again. Altering the mix between his four- and two-seam fastballs. Adjusting the curveball. Eliminating what they felt might have been some pitch tipping. Attacking different parts of the strike zone.
Nothing fully eliminated the all-or-nothing results– 16 starts of two runs or less and nine outings of five-plus runs in his 32 times out.
“Took our lumps,” is how pitching coach Pete Walker put it.
Absent the pressure of another outing in five days, Berrios and the Blue Jays had a chance to think about things in a more holistic way. The numbers said he was still throwing strikes, still holding his velocity, still nasty with the curveball, still getting chase, but too often he was in the dangerous parts of the plate and getting crushed there.
“I was wild in the zone,” said Berrios. “I was able to throw strikes, but good strikes for the hitters, not quality strikes for the pitcher.”
To establish why, the Blue Jays juxtaposed his mechanics from his good outings against his bad ones, assessed his release points, from where on the rubber his stuff played best and came to a diagnosis.
“It was more physical. It was more mechanical,” said Walker. “He kind of lost the feel for certain pitches based on that and we wanted to restructure and make sure the mechanics were in order. Then there is the part where you want to get back to locating pitches in the right spots, in the right counts and really having an approach that we’re going to stick to. I feel like that’s where we are right now.”
To that end, Berrios believes he’s in a good spot.
Identifying issues that led to last year’s unsteadiness helped erase the doubts bred by the performance inconsistencies. A handful of small but significant changes felt strange at first but are comfortable now.
“My release point was inconsistent, changing pitch by pitch,” said Berrios. “We saw little things were affecting my release point so we started working on getting better on those movements.”
Those movements are:
• Maintaining a steady eye-level with the plate by ensuring his head doesn’t lean to one side or the other and is aligned with his spine, something a move to the middle of the rubber should help
• Being more consistently aggressive driving off his back leg
• Staying firm on his front side, keep his glove tight on the inside of his body, preventing him from opening up and dragging his release point
“He knows what he’s capable of, he’s just looking for more consistency,” said Walker. When it comes to release point, when it comes to arm stroke, being more consistent will benefit his breaking stuff, the location of his fastball, getting to the right spots.”
Berrios spent the winter committing the changes to muscle memory at the Player Development Complex, flushing the frustrations of a year ago in the process. He feels good about the way he showed up for his teammates by taking the ball every fifth day in 2022, about “being able to help, kind of.”
Still, he was driven knowing that “I want to bring more to the table,” and as the ball started going where he wanted, as the results began to show in his work, he started quashing the questions that had eroded his self-belief.
In hindsight, he’d started to give hitters too much credit and “that can’t happen in the game,” he said. “Between the lines you have to believe in yourself, you have to compete 100 per cent. That’s what I learned most from last season.”
Manager John Schneider praised the 28-year-old for being “as accountable as anyone I’ve ever seen” to his coaches and teammates through his struggles, acknowledging that he could be better. That shone through in the plethora of adjustments Berrios made throughout the season and into the winter, where the Blue Jays are hopeful they’ve finally hit the right spot.
“There were some other things that we felt might be going on that we felt like we took care of last year from a tipping standpoint. It seemed like certain teams had a pretty good approach against them, you scratch your head sometimes when you see those kind of swings against a guy like him,” said Walker, and it’s noteworthy both the Yankees and Guardians roughed him up twice. “The biggest thing is the adjustments will get him to his locations better. That’s the most important thing for him. It’s not his stuff. It’s not the spin. It’s not the four-seam/two-seam and the breaking stuff. It’s getting it to the right spots and making sure that’s coming out of the same release point.”
A leading indicator of how those changes play comes next month when he represents Puerto Rico once again at the World Baseball Classic. The Blue Jays won’t be looking for Berrios to be dramatically different, just simply the best version of his 2022 self.
