St. Paul – May was one of the longest months of Marco Raya’s playing career.
He started the season off strong, throwing scoreless outings in two of his first three games of the season. But from April 25 to June 5, never made a start longer than four innings, allowed 27 hits, 16 walks, an opponent’s OPS of .963, and 30 earned runs in 19 ⅓ innings over seven starts.
Physically, everything felt fine for Raya during his lousy starts. Things were slipping away from him mentally, and he tried to correct things on the mound by being perfect with every pitch after he made a mistake.
“I’ve been feeling good,” said Raya. “I was feeling when things weren’t going well. It was really just a thing within myself of how I was feeling on the mound and things like that. But just went to the drawing board and kind of fixed those issues and have been feeling a lot better lately.”
Raya began to change how he evaluated his performances after each start with Jonas Lovin and Carlos Hernandez, his pitching coaches. They reviewed video of his previous starts from Double-A last season to compare and contrast where things began to go wrong with him this season, focusing on the mechanics of his delivery.
“More so, just look at videos of myself with mechanical things, looking at that,” Raya said. “Seeing older videos and seeing kind of like when I was at my best, and compare it to whenever things weren’t going my way early this year. Kind of just like putting it together, going out there and just throwing the ball.”
It wasn’t just a matter of fixing his mechanics. He also worked on the mental side of the game. Raya became more collected with his thoughts and better articulated in analyzing what went well and where he can make improvements with his stuff. Lovin believes it became a moment of maturing with the game.
“He’s grown up a lot, man,” said Lovin. “I know a lot of it’s on him, he’s done a nice job just taking the serious steps it takes to be a professional baseball player and to be a major-league pitcher. The small processes we work on each day, whether that be on or off the field, whether that be more physical than mental, I think that’s where we’ve seen the biggest differences.”
The change in evaluating his work has allowed Raya to be freer of invasive thoughts over those seven bad starts. Over those seven starts, he felt a need to be perfect with every pitch, and the fixation to be perfect to correct those mistakes was part of what contributed to the poor results.
Now, the game has slowed down for him, taking things one pitch at a time. Over his last four starts, Raya has gone five full innings in three of them, pitching to a 2.41 ERA, keeping opponents to a .206 batting average, striking out 23.4% of hitters, and walking 10.4%.
There are still some areas for improvement. However, from where Raya was in May, he’s turned things around in a positive direction to stabilize an ever-changing Saints rotation.
“With a guy like Marco, he’s got great stuff,” said Saints manager Toby Gardenhire.
“We knew that all along, and it’s just a matter of him finding himself a little bit. In the beginning of the season, it was him trying to do too much for himself, and now he’s just pitching and he’s throwing and doing great. He’s using the stuff that he has to fix himself, and that’s what we’ve been looking for him to do.”
The pitch clock demands pitchers to be in motion within 15 to 18 seconds of the countdown. However, Raya’s secret is to make those seconds feel longer. It distracts him from what’s outside of his control on the mound and allows him to wipe the slate clean with each new batter.
“Everybody at one point tries to do a little too much, and I felt that sort of thing was happening earlier in the season,” he said. “Lately, like I said, everything has been happening in slow motion for me when I’m out there, so I’ve been able to control the controllables.”
Now that Raya’s finally back in his groove, he has a good chance of working himself back into Minnesota’s rotation plans for later this season. He’ll still need another month of pitching as strongly as he has to get the opportunity, but with him being on the 40-man roster and Andrew Morris out for the foreseeable future with a right forearm strain.
Raya may very well be the next man up in the rotation if the Twins need to call upon him.
