Aaron Sanchez radiates frustration as lost season officially ends

The office of Toronto Blue Jays manager John Gibbons is normally a pretty laid-back place.

Before each game, crowds of reporters sit on comfortable leather coaches, MLB Network plays on three televisions, and Gibbons adopts his now-famous lean. Banter is exchanged as often as meaningful news, non sequiturs and lengthy tangents are common, and the manager even subjects the media to his favourite country music at times. It’s a lot of things, but tense isn’t one of them.

That changed on Monday afternoon, when Aaron Sanchez made a guest appearance to speak about the end to his season. Make no mistake, Sanchez wasn’t remotely unprofessional. He answered each question to the best of his abilities and he didn’t snap at anyone. He did, however, radiate a level of frustration that filled the room and would only have been imperceptible to a sociopath.

At times that feeling slipped out overtly, like when he was asked about how the pulley strain in his finger that ended his 2017 might affect his offseason.

“When I pick up a ball I’m slamming the door on all this sh*t that happened this year,” he said. “I don’t even want to look at my finger, that’s how irritated I’ve been with all this stuff.”

Other times, he seemed more resigned.

“It is what it is. I ain’t going to beat myself up over it. I can’t control that my finger is the way it is. I can’t control that I’ve been getting blisters,” he said of his frustration level. “Like I said, this game is hard enough. If I complain about this, I’ll drive myself crazy.”

Even if Sanchez’s season had driven him crazy, he hardly could be blamed for it. Four trips to the disabled list. A one-inning start ended by a bleeding finger. Just 36 innings pitched after managing 203.2 in 2016 (including postseason play). Hitting arbitration for the first time after a severely truncated season. That’s enough to knock a screw loose in most.

“He’s been frustrated all year, since it happened [for the first time],” Gibbons said of his starter’s nightmare year. “He tried to come back and we let him… but I think this will all be behind him and he’ll look back and laugh some day I would think.”

For Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins, Sanchez’s season felt like one bad turn of fortune after the other.

“The most surprising thing to us was the setbacks that we had. I don’t believe in luck or bad luck. We have control over what we can control and try to create the best possible outcomes for our players and this organization,” he said. “So, the most disappointing and surprising thing is that we had the setbacks and I think that’s what we have to avoid next year.”

That’s certainly what Sanchez will looking to do, although there isn’t exactly a blueprint for how to do that yet. Blisters are as finicky as they are infuriating. Although the Blue Jays can be confident their prized right-hander will heal, there’s absolutely no guarantee the blisters won’t make a reappearance.

“You never know, he might deal with blisters now and then,” Gibbons said. “He’s had them in the past. It’s never happened to the extent it happened this year.”

During his seven-minute meeting with the media, Sanchez kept his cool and managed a string of coherent answers around the theme of staying the course in the offseason, the difficulty of pinpointing the root of the problem, and the futility of complaining his lot – but inescapable was the feeling of a man who was beyond frustrated by the course of events.

He’d have to be crazy not to be.

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