was a Cy Young candidate in 2022 but his difficult start to the 2023 season is almost unprecedented in MLB history.If you're a Toronto Blue Jays fan, there's a pretty good chance that you know Alek Manoah is struggling right now. And he's pretty much struggling for most of the reasons that you would imagine a pitcher would struggle. His strikeouts are down. His walks are up. His slider, which has been his signature pitch, is just not moving the way it generally does.
And yet, he's struggling in a pretty profound way. And the question becomes, have we seen guys in the past who had these amazing seasons and struggled out of the gate the way Manoah has? And the answer, sort of. A couple. Really, there's three guys you can put in the same bucket as Manoah right now, guys who had an ERA of 4.50 or more in their first nine starts after having one of those amazing seasons.
His strikeout rate was never high. It was a little bit lower than you'd think. But as you might imagine, Maddux, after his rough patch, he just rolled on and had maybe not his best year ever, but a Greg Maddux-caliber year. And kind of the learning there is that sometimes, even the best pitchers in MLB can have these types of stretches where they're not effective for a little bit and then they are. So that's the good news for Manoah fans.