I want you to think back to the heady days of 2018. There was a bunch of dumb bullshit going on in the world. There was a bunch of dumb bullshit going on online. People were mad about stuff all the time. You know that one guy who has sucked for a while? Boy, was he at it! It was terrible. I don’t know how we all got through it.
Now that I’ve painted you a shockingly vivid picture that has brought you back in time four years, I no longer need to remind you that in 2018, Ty Blach was the Giants’ Opening Day starter.
Sure, that decision was entirely based on the technicality of Madison Bumgarner getting injured five days before the season started and the team not wanting to alter their rotation behind him, but still! Opening Day! Dodger Stadium! Tyson Michael Blach!
And it went well. In that game, Blach pitched five scoreless innings and got the win over Clayton Kershaw, with a Joe Panik solo homer being the only offense in the game.
Over his first 10 starts in 2018, Blach went 3-4 with a 4.05 ERA. The team was 5-5 in those games, and while Blach only averaged a little over 5 innings per start, he was still good enough to give his team a chance to win a good percentage of the time. Then he hit a rough patch, and at the beginning of June, Bumgarner came back, so off Ty Blach went to the bullpen, where he acquitted himself perfectly well for the rest of the season, throwing 54 innings of 3.17 ERA ball.
Blach’s 2019 was pretty rough in both San Francisco and Sacramento, and the Giants DFA’d him in July. He was picked up by the pitching-starved Orioles, who gave him more rope than the Giants did, and it didn’t go any better for them, so he got DFA’d again in September.
In 2020, Blach had Tommy John surgery, and he made several minor league rehab appearances for the Orioles last year, but nothing above A-ball. He signed a minor league contract with the Rockies (his hometown team) this year, and yesterday the team announced that Ty Blach had made their Opening Day roster as a long reliever.
That was a lot of words about Ty Blach, whose Giants career was fine, if not particularly notable. Why? Why am I talking about Ty Blach and not, say, Johnny Cueto?
(I am also very happy for Johnny Cueto, by the way, because he is cool and good and RIP Popeye)
My answer is this: Ty Blach was just a swell guy. I talked with him a lot when he was in Sacramento, and I saw him talk to other people, and he always treated fans as well as you could hope from a player, especially in 2019 when he could have been pouting about how he was a major leaguer for the entire season the year before. You never saw that. You never saw any of that. Maybe it’s cliched to say “I liked him because he was a high character guy,” but on the other hand, I liked him because he was a high character guy.
For a time, Ty Blach also wore the Kirk Rueter Lefty Who Doesn’t Strike Guys Out Crown. We thought to never see another champion after Pat Misch failed to claim it, but no…there was another. It is extremely aesthetically pleasing to watch a left-handed pitcher get ground ball after ground ball when it seems like the other team should crush him, and then you look up and it’s 2 hours later and the game is over. It’s fantastic, unless that pitcher is on the other team, and then it sucks, except for the 2 hour long game part, which is a good thing, because the game moves.
All of this is just to say, I am happy for Ty Blach, a good person who I am happy to see get another chance in the majors. He’s not a star and he probably never will be. His role is to pitch mop up innings for a bad team. But it’s the majors, and he worked hard to get there the first time, and he’s worked hard to get back there this year. There’s something to celebrate there. So let’s celebrate it.