Boston – It’s comforting that the acerbic wit is still intact. It tells you Alex Lange is still very much in the fight. He’s not cowering or shutting himself down emotionally.
He was asked on Saturday what he’s been working on through this rough stretch he’s found himself in.
“I mean, getting strikes would be the obvious thing, right?” he said.
Ha. Yes it would. As he has throughout his still young career, Lange, the Tigers’ right-hander, is working to harness the dynamic movement on both his curveball and sinker. Both have been avoiding the strike zone for a too-long period of time.
Since June 4, he’s walked 26 hitters with 25 strikeouts in 20.2 innings with a 53% strike rate. In those outings he’s allowed 19 runs (17 earned), posted seven saves, blown two saves and took three losses. He issued three walks in each of his last three games.
He’s lost, for now, his high-leverage role in the Tigers’ bullpen.
“It’s just a repeatability thing, honestly,” Lange said. “Just know that, regardless of this stretch, I’m still who I am. I’ve been through tough situations before. I haven’t been executing but I don’t think I’m far off. I still have the punch-outs. When I get ahead, I still put guys away.”
That is the befuddling part of this. The nastiness of the stuff is still there – the 52% whiff rate with his curveball is real, the 42% whiff rate overall is real, the .173 opponent batting average is real. But the 18.3 walk rate, which ranks in the bottom 1 percentile in baseball, is also real.
“I wish I had the answer,” he said. “It’s one of those things you just have to grind through and keep working. You go through times like this over 162 (games) when it doesn’t go your way. Unfortunately, it’s been a few times in a row and in big situations.
“It just the nature of the beast.”
Looking at it from the outside, it’s convenient to look back at what happened June 4 and say Lange is suffering from some baseball version of post traumatic stress disorder. He’d been virtually untouchable for the first two months of the season, 10 saves, three runs in 24.1 innings, 34 strikeouts, 11 walks.
On June 4 at Guaranteed Rate Field, he entered a 2-2 game in the bottom of the ninth against the White Sox and with one out walked Yoan Moncada and Tim Anderson to load the bases. Left-handed hitting Jake Burger followed with a walk-off grand slam.
Four days later Lange blew a save in Philadelphia and the grind was on.
But to call it PTSD, though a plausible, easy-to-understand narrative, is false. And it is an affront to Lange’s mental toughness. He insists that his mind is free every time he steps through those bullpen doors.
“You can’t bring the last outing into the next outing,” he said. “There is no room for that. Listen, this isn’t something that’s foreign. Everybody in this locker room either has or will deal with it. It’s part of the game.
“This game is more mental than it is physical. You just keep going, keep trusting the process, keep trusting the coaching staff, keep trusting the work and the preparation and the results are going to be what they’re going to be.”
The work he’s put in with pitching coaches Chris Fetter and Juan Nieves is reinforcing that his mechanics are mostly sound. The sessions he’s had with pitching coach Robin Lund is assuring him there are no red flags biomechanically.
This is just part of the package with Lange. Pitches that move as violently as his do are often has difficult to tame as they are to hit. But another part of Lange’s package, the one that’s driven him from Friday night starter at LSU through to his ascent to the unnamed closer role in Detroit, is his indomitable self-belief.
“You can’t waver from that,” he said. “Sure, it is hard. But we’ve worked too hard the whole year and in the offseason. The preparation has been good. Sometimes the wheels start spinning. You just have to get ahead of that as quick as you can.”
Twitter@cmccosky