Chris Archer’s up-and-down season continues amid trade speculation
LOS ANGELES – Sometimes it’s no more than a few inches across 100 pitches or more, “This close,” Chris Archer was saying, holding his thumb and forefinger the breadth of one of those inches, not that that excuses anything that’s gone on for the Tampa Bay Rays or, for that matter, Chris Archer.
It’s late Tuesday night and he’s given up a couple unearned runs and one very long home run, those dovetailing with the Rays’ fourth consecutive loss, all by one run, and his 14th loss, not that those fairly represent where he’s been or, perhaps, where he’s going.
He’d ridden a fastball well into the mid and upper 90s, that slider that can finish with such attitude and precision and a clever changeup to have what he believed was his best start in going on a year. And still, “This close,” he said, ruefully, of himself, of the Rays, of rallies that died in the batter’s box or on the basepaths, of innings extended a pitch or two or three by his own hand.
These are the Rays, today. This is him, today. They are in last place, by a lot. He is 27, modestly compensated by the standards of the industry, and talented and charismatic and healthy. What that means at the non-waiver trade deadline, that being Monday, is for Rays management to decide, though it could be argued the Rays would be better off with more Chris Archers, not fewer. It’s never that easy, of course, so the trade winds ripple the uniform pants of Archer, Jake Odorizzi and Matt Moore while they pitch away from so many uneven starts and into a lost summer.
“Honestly,” Archer says, “I think baseball just sometimes balances itself out. The first two months of the season were pretty rough. Then you give up some hits, you shy away from contact, you have an ounce of doubt, and that adds to non-competitive pitches. A question mark. And for some reason I had a stretch of games where the first inning, I just couldn’t get outs. Then I’d pitch five or six innings, walk two or three in the first inning, and it inflated …”
He trails off. He’s managed the oddly contradictory season, that being the league-leading 14 losses, the league-leading 155 strikeouts, the ERA spike a year after finishing fifth in the Cy Young Award vote.
“I think people have been very critical of me, and I’m fine with it,” Archer says. “People talk about I should change my delivery, change my mechanics, but for me and everybody in this room, you watch and it’s this close. Every game it’s a different thing. You throw a hundred pitches and it’s three or four pitches. Whether that’s a walk, or whether that’s a bloop or a bomb.”
Put it all together — a few more hittable pitches, a few more walks, a few injuries that softened the defense behind the entire staff, an offense that has scored the second-fewest runs in the American League — and a determined franchise finds itself searching for ways back. Maybe it’s enough to have everyone on the field together again. Maybe it’s more than that, particularly at a time when there aren’t enough good arms to go around, not in the trade market, and not in the coming free-agent market.
For “this close” doesn’t just speak to the distance between a start that is celebrated or buried, but also to the reaction time to a broader opportunity. The Rays aren’t a team that can afford players forever — Evan Longoria, perhaps, notwithstanding — and they must see what two months of ninth-inning coverage in Chicago is worth alone. They must see a sport starving – and willing to pay gluttonously – for a pitcher in his prime who, certainly on Tuesday night, was at his best.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was asked — rather clumsily — before Tuesday’s game about Archer and whether the coming start amounted to a “tryout” at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers, for one, have held up reasonably well under an avalanche of injuries, and their farm system is thick with the kinds of players who could make somebody’s tomorrow a little brighter, and sometimes one and one is two, even if it’s hardly ever that simple.
Roberts laughed and said, “No, I wouldn’t say it’s a tryout for Chris Archer. He’s got a pretty good track record.”
Five hours later, Roberts added, “That’s the first time I got to see him up close and personal, and now it really makes sense.”
Archer threw hard. He threw strikes. He stirred a lot of terrible swings, mostly on the slider. The Dodgers saw that. Everybody saw that. For Archer, it felt good to pitch that well. It was lousy to lose. He knows what people are talking about, sees his place in those conversations, and lifts his head for whatever is next. The season’s not exactly what he’d planned. But there’s still season out there, lots of it.
“I’m beyond the numbers,” he says. “This situation reveals who you truly are. … Who are you? Are you still diligent? Are you still locked in on every pitch?”
That means taking care of today. Every day, today. Because tomorrow is only a rumor, even if it is this close.
