Yeah, this is the way this season is going.
Tommy Nance has been put on the IL with forearm discomfort. Well, they said ‘right forearm discomfort’….but I figured you guys knew which arm it would be. Nance has pitched in 19 games, 20 innings, 16 hits, 1 home run, 8 walks, 24 strikeouts with a 4.05 ERA. He pitched three of four games from May 9 for May 12, but hasn’t pitched since then.
Adam Macko has been called up from Buffalo. He relieved in 13 games, 18 innings, allowing 13 hits, 3 home run, 8 walks
and 19 strikeouts with a 4.50 ERA. He also pitched for Team Canada in the WBC.
Macko was #7 on our prospect list this year. Tom M wrote:
Every year there’s a guy I don’t think I’m going to have all that high in my rankings who, once I sit down and put together the probabilities that we use to underpin the expected value scores, just has to be up there. This year it’s Macko. He didn’t perform great in Buffalo’s rotation last season, but he held batters to a 73% contact rate overall and just under 82% inside the zone, both of which are solidly above average and represent steps forward over his superficially more impressive 2024.
Macko grew up in Slovakia, a noted baseball hotbed, and learned to pitch from watching YouTube. He moved to Canada and was drafted by the Mariners in the 7th round of the 2019 draft out of the noted baseball hotbed (but mostly not sarcastic this time) of Vauxhall High School in Alberta. He worked his way up to A+ in the Seattle organization before coming to Toronto in the Teoscar Hernandez deal. From there he’s gone one level at a time, establishing himself in Buffalo in 2025. He’s been maddeningly inconsistent, dealing with both actual injuries and fluctuations in his stuff and command. On the right day, he’ll spot 94-96 with a crisp slider and promising change, while on the wrong day he’ll be missing the zone entirely and sitting 91 with shaky secondaries. Things seemed to click a bit in the second half last year after a demotion to a long relief role. He sat closer to the top of his velocity range in three inning appearances and allowed just a 64% contact rate, generating 29 Ks and 61 swinging strikes in 26.0 innings while keeping his walks (6) under control.
I think that’s Macko’s most likely role going forward: a high quality multi-inning reliever who can make the occasional 5 and dive spot start. If that brings out the good version of him, the one with three 55 grade pitches that he can locate, more often, he could be an actual weapon on a good team. There’s still some hope that he finds a way to harness that quality in the rotation, in which case there could be a #3 starter in there, but that would take achieving a consistency that we haven’t yet seen from him.
When he makes it into a game, it will be his first major league appearance.
Congratulations Adam. Heal up quick Tommy (I have a friend that calls me Tommy, and I’m never sure how to react really, cause I don’t think that’s my name. But, we named my middle boy Thomas (my father, and his father, and his father were all Toms) and he decided, very young, that he was Tommy and he’s continued that way into adulthood and it suits him).
Today’s lineup. There are some changes. Pinango leads off, with Vlad second (DHing) and no Springer.
