Two pitching standouts
José Soriano fanned 10 batters over eight innings (1 ER in 20 IP span noted in weekend coverage), and Miguel Rojas made a notable pitching appearance during his Toronto return — both stood out in recent MLB action. Social posts singled out Soriano’s strikeout surge and Rojas’ unusual role as a pitcher in that game (x.com). Those events are the kind of small‑sample surprises that buzz through baseball twitter and can affect rotation and bullpen planning. (x.com)
The two most memorable pitching moments from Monday night did not come from the same kind of pitcher. One came from a starter who is beginning to look like a real force. The other came from a veteran infielder lobbing the last outs of a blowout in Toronto. They belonged together anyway, because baseball is built to hold both kinds of surprise at once: the breakout that might matter for months, and the odd little scene people will replay all week. José Soriano’s part was the serious one. On April 6, he carried the Angels through eight innings against Atlanta, allowed one run, struck out 10, and did not walk anyone in a 6-2 win at Angel Stadium (mlb.com). It was his third start of the season, and through those three outings he had worked 20 innings with one earned run and 21 strikeouts, good for a 0.45 ERA (espn.com, espn.com). That line is small-sample loud, but it is still loud. What makes it more than a hot week is the shape of it. Soriano has always had the arm. FanGraphs lists him this season with a pitch mix built around hard stuff and a ground-ball rate above 60 percent, which is a hard combination to fake even in April (fangraphs.com). Baseball Savant has his average fastball velocity at 97.8 mph and his early run-value numbers deep in the red for hitters, with a whiff rate above 35 percent and a barrel rate that has stayed low (baseballsavant.mlb.com). The point is simple. This does not look like smoke and mirrors. It looks like a power starter finding the strike zone often enough to make the rest of his arsenal matter. That is why the 10 strikeouts stood out. Soriano had opened the year with two scoreless six-inning starts against Houston and the Cubs, but Monday was the first time the dominance stretched into a game’s late shape, where a manager starts thinking about saving the bullpen tomorrow instead of surviving tonight (espn.com, mlb.com). Eight innings from a starter in early April changes the arithmetic for everyone behind him. It also changes the conversation around a rotation. A pitcher stops being interesting and starts being useful. Then the scene shifted to Toronto, where useful gave way to absurd. The Dodgers crushed the Blue Jays 14-2 on April 6 in a World Series rematch at Rogers Centre, and Miguel Rojas took the mound in the ninth to finish it (espn.com, mlb.com). This was not a stunt in a close game. It was the familiar modern bargain of the position-player pitcher: accept a little weirdness now to avoid spending a real reliever in a game that is already over. Rojas is unusually good at making that weirdness memorable. MLB had already written about one of his earlier mop-up outings because he used the moment to imitate Dodgers pitchers on the mound, copying the mannerisms of Landon Knack, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Clayton Kershaw while eating two innings in a 2025 blowout loss (mlb.com). In Toronto, the joke was shorter and cleaner. He got the final outs of the 14-2 game, with MLB’s game story marking the last Blue Jays plate appearances against him and the final out as a pitching highlight of its own (mlb.com, mlb.com). The return to Toronto mattered because that building is now loaded with Dodgers history after last fall’s World Series. The man on the mound at the end was still a shortstop.
