It wasn’t easy to feel comfortable with Ty Blach a year ago. His 2017 was like one of those cloth oven pads that you make as a child, sloppily woven together with equal parts encouraging starts and terrifying bouts of hard contact.
One week he’d get shellacked and you’d remember that pitchers who cannot miss bats rarely do well, and then the next week he’d make the Dodgers look like minor leaguers. He kept you hanging around with results that you didn’t understand, then reminded you why you didn’t understand them.
He was better than he had any right to be, and yet, even with that, he wasn’t very good.