SARASOTA, Fla. — Eric Lauer and his wife Emily expected their first child to arrive Valentine’s Day, right at the very beginning of spring training, so the left-hander figured he’d only miss a week of camp, at most, before joining the Toronto Blue Jays.
Baby Landon, however, had other plans, waiting 16 days past his Feb. 14 due date to arrive, throwing all of the family’s plans, personal and professional, out the window.
“I kept making the joke to Emily that as soon as he comes out, I’m giving him a spanking because he’s making me late for work already,” Lauer said with a laugh. “But once it got to the two-week mark, we were like, we’ve got to figure out how to get him out, because he just wasn’t progressing, so we ended up going from a home, natural birth all the way to almost an emergency C-section. Those four or five days were just very chaotic and all over the place.”
Chaos hasn’t exactly turned to calm just yet, but new mom and son, supported by family, are both healthy and happy back home in North Phoenix, while Lauer, after missing the first 2½ weeks of camp, is back at it with the Blue Jays. He made his third appearance and first start of the spring Tuesday, allowing three homers and five runs in an 8-2 loss to the Baltimore Orioles.
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The 29-year-old, signed to a minor-league deal in December that will pay him $2.2 million if he’s in the majors with incentives based on starts and innings, liked that he ran his pitch count up to 61 pitches and that his velocity hovered around 92 m.p.h., touching 93. But he also fought through his mechanics and struggled to remain in sync, feeling “a little jumpy” in his delivery while not “working down the mound well.”
“You’ve got to take (the results) with a grain of salt in spring training because you’re trying stuff,” said Lauer, who gave up a three-run homer to Ryan Mountcastle on a curveball he wouldn’t normally throw in that situation, testing how it played against a good breaking-ball hitter. “So it’s a balance of, I’m not happy with how I did, but at the same time, I learned stuff. I realized like, OK, if mechanically I don’t feel right, I have to figure out a way to not jump, figure out a way to stay tight and lateral instead of pulling off to try to get velocity. Those things, in-season, become very quick adjustments. Spring training is where you find those adjustments.”
The pace at which Lauer finds those adjustments is suddenly more urgent for the Blue Jays, who may be facing an early test of their starting depth due to Max Scherzer’s thumb issues. Scherzer threw 47 pitches in a simulated game against minor-leaguers Monday and Tuesday said that while his thumb felt better than it had after his previous outing, he didn’t want to get overly optimistic or pessimistic until he pitched in a more competitive setting.
That could come this weekend “in some capacity,” said manager John Schneider, but that will depend on what happens during a bullpen before then. For the time being, “we’re going to continue to manage it day-by-day,” he added, with the goal of finding some clarity about his status to open the season before the team heads north.
“If he throws on Saturday, you’ve got to see how he feels Sunday — it’s always kind of the next day to kind of gauge how he’s feeling,” said Schneider. “Hopefully we have a decision this weekend. And if we don’t, we’ll manage it that way the best we can.”
Yariel Rodriguez, stretched out this spring for precisely such a scenario, is positioned to be the first man up and his next start Thursday at home against the Tampa Bay Rays will be closely scrutinized as a result.
Beyond him, the Blue Jays have Ryan Yarbrough, who’s also in camp on a minor-league deal but appears well-positioned to make the team, with Jake Bloss, Easton Lucas and Lauer being other options Schneider named. Adam Macko and Adam Kloffenstein both would have been candidates, too, but have been set back by injuries and “those two hurt you a little bit because you want them to get off the ground running.”
Still, “I think we’re all right,” Schneider added, while acknowledging “you’re going to need more than five (starters), we know that. We’ll also need some guys to continue to develop, hopefully quickly, that are in our system already. But with how we are lined up with our projected rotation and then the three or four behind them, we feel pretty good.”
A late-season boost could come from Alek Manoah, who Tuesday threw off the mound for the second time since undergoing ligament-replacement surgery in his right elbow last summer. He once again felt the rush of getting back to action — “obviously it’s exciting every every time it’s a mound day,” he said — but he’s also managing to contain his enthusiasm as “Tommy John has taught me so much patience over this entire journey.”
To that end, he’s got a rough timeline in mind, but is cognizant that “there are so many variables that could change.”
“When I just look at me and my plan, I want to be ready as fast as possible, I want to hit all these bullpens and have no setbacks, get into live BPs and strike everybody out, all that stuff,” Manoah continued. “For me, I think the perfect plan would be, back in August. Wherever the team is at, obviously those things can change, and hopefully, if everything comes back great, maybe it’ll be a little bit sooner. But the biggest thing is I’m going to be able to help this team with me being 100 per cent, as good as I am when I’m healthy. So that’s the No. 1 priority and once we have that, then we can help the team in any capacity.”
Lauer, under different circumstances, is taking a similar approach.
After seasons of 2.1 and 1.8 WAR, as calculated by Baseball Reference, in 2021 and 2022 with the Milwaukee Brewers, Lauer hit some health problems in 2023, suffering a shoulder impingement and a forearm injury in which “my nerves were just clamping down.”
In turn, that caused him to lose his arm path, because “as soon as I would get to lay back, my arm would just shut off and I’d have no idea, my arm could be here, it could be here, it could be here,” he explained, rotating his arm through various slots. “I couldn’t feel it. Command became really hard, which has always been one of the better parts of my game. I can throw the ball to quadrants. When I couldn’t do that, I started searching for other things to do, and then I started getting mechanically messed up.”
The Brewers outrighted him after a difficult 2023 and he bounced between the Pittsburgh and Houston systems last year before finishing out the season with Kia in the Korean league, where he continued to hone his delivery and “felt good about where I was with my arm path.”
That led to off-season work “making sure my nerves were stretching, not tight, and that I wouldn’t get that sensation of, where’s my arm?” he added. “That’s what I feel really good about now, I feel my arm the whole time. I can tell when I get too short. I can tell when I get too long. I can tell when I drop. Those are the little checkpoints you go through when you throw a bad pitch … and that’s kind of where I’ve gotten to this off-season.”
The next steps will come somewhere in the Blue Jays system, but the attrition has only just started and at some point this year, their depth will get tested further. Lauer, in part, signed with the team that drafted him in the 17th round of the 2013 draft — he opted for college and went in the first round, 25th overall, to San Diego three years later — because he wanted a place “where I could trust the staff and trust the people to help me.”
Since he got to camp, they’ve been doing that as Lauer adjusts to a new team, as well as a new son.
“It was hard to leave him two days after his birth,” said Lauer. “But I knew Emily had help. He’s already getting bigger, I get to FaceTime him a lot and see pictures. Hopefully, once I figure out where I’m going, she’ll be able to get out here and I’ll be able to be with them.”
