After toying with repping his mom's homeland, the Long Island-born Stroman turned up aces for the U.S. Robert Beck for ESPN

This past December Stroman was vacationing in Miami when he got a call from Joe Torre, the Hall of Fame manager-turned-MLB executive and Team USA's general manager. Torre asked whether Stroman wanted to pitch for his country in the WBC. "That was a surreal moment," Stroman says, laughing. "It was like, 'How did Joe Torre get my phone number?'" Stroman immediately accepted the offer -- and in the process set off a Twitter firestorm.

The seed had been planted three years earlier, with a tweet Stroman sent in September 2013. With barely a full season's worth of minor league work behind him, Stroman logged into his Twitter account and began typing: Hopefully have the chance to represent my mom @aya11763 and Puerto Rico in the next World Baseball Classic. That would be unreal.

"It was just a spur-of-the-moment tweet," Stroman says now, clearly annoyed by the attention those two sentences would earn. "I didn't even know if I'd get to the point in my career where I'd have the opportunity to be playing in the World Baseball Classic."

After accepting his spot on Team USA in December, Stroman sent out another tweet, which made it sound as if his mother wanted him to play for her native Puerto Rico. "Sorry momma...," he began. Stroman insists he was messing around, but the missive unleashed a torrent of harassment toward his mother. "Sometimes with my son, I want to kick his butt," Auffant says. "I told him he puts too much out there."

The flood of comments poured onto Auffant's social media pages and continued through to the championship game. "I cried a lot," she says. "The vile, nasty things that were said to me and about my son, I felt responsible. It was my part, specifically because it was the people from my country. I understand competition, the back and forth, that's fine and normal. But they went in on us. They crossed boundaries."

Stroman couldn't help but feel he'd put his family in the crosshairs. "I had unbelievable respect for Puerto Rican fans, their team, the culture," he says. "That's 50 percent of my blood, so that's part of me.

"It just got to a point where bad things started to get thrown at my mom. That's not something a mother should have to see or have to endure. Look, I don't care what's being said toward me. I have extremely thick skin. But when it gets to Mom?"

During the three-week-long tournament, Stroman made three starts, logging 15 innings with a 2.35 ERA. Outside of the first inning of his first start against Puerto Rico -- a 6-5 mid-March loss in which he gave up six consecutive hits and his only four runs of the tournament -- it was impossible to find a more dominant pitcher on the planet.

When Team USA advanced to the WBC final to play Team Puerto Rico, manager Jim Leyland turned to Stroman to face the only opponent that had beaten him in the tournament.

"We knew that if we got to that final game, Marcus would be the guy who was going to be out there for us," Leyland says. "Marcus wasn't going to be scared. He was going to compete his ass off."

Before the game, Auffant sent her son a text with an emoji of a flexed arm. "She knows that when I'm able to get a little more emotion, I'm able to play that up more," he says. "I'm able to lock it in and have a better start."

"I will always remember the look on Marcus' face before the game," Leyland says. "I would have bet everything I had that Marcus Stroman was going to be great."

During multiple points of the game, cameras caught Stroman mean-mugging the Puerto Rico bench as he walked toward his dugout. After an inning-ending strikeout in the third, he shimmied off the mound. "I was feeling it," he says. Team Puerto Rico got its first hit off Stroman in the seventh. At the end of the inning, with the U.S. up 7-0 and Stroman out of the game and on the bench, he put an index finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, looked at the Puerto Rico dugout and yelled "F--- you!"

The reaction was not a surprise to anyone who knew him well. "He's a young, enthusiastic, emotional kid who enjoys competing," says his former roommate and Blue Jays teammate Aaron Sanchez. "You mess with his mom, that's just more fuel to his fire."

Stroman's commitment to shaping slights into motivations is as ingrained as his obsession with improvement, a trait that has led to a habit of bugging Blue Jays hitters, asking his teammates about pitches, sequences, about how batters would adjust to his own adjustments.

"I'm always tweaking my game," he says. "I'm trying to take all the knowledge I can from Troy Tulowitzki, Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson, Russell Martin. I've had unbelievable hitters around me to learn from."

This season he's incorporated a Luis Tiant-esque hesitation to his pitching motion, his left leg momentarily frozen in the air before delivering the pitch. Other times, he's learned to pause midstretch before lifting his leg. Sometimes he simply kicks and fires.

The leg kick, the tweaks to his pitches (six in all), the pause -- they're just part of a lifelong attempt to perfect the art of pitching. The campaign came to an important crossroads last season. In the first half of 2016, he posted a 4.89 ERA and a 17 percent strikeout rate, prompting Blue Jays fans to talk about shipping him to Triple-A. He turned his inner frustration and the outside chatter into fuel once again, watching film of himself and making adjustments with his positioning on the rubber. In the second half, he had a 3.68 ERA and a 23 percent strikeout rate.

His surge carried over into this season. After two starts, Stroman was the best starter on a team many predicted would contend for the AL East title, allowing just three earned runs in 15 innings, including a complete game against the Brewers -- his first since 2014. But the team itself struggled out of the gate, falling to 2-10 by mid-April, the worst record in baseball.

And so it is that against Boston on April 18, Stroman takes the mound at Rogers Centre in Toronto, in the closest thing to a must-win game this early in the season. Gone is Donaldson, the offensive catalyst, with a strained calf that will keep him sidelined for at least another two weeks. Gone is Sanchez, with a blister. Starter J.A. Happ was just put on the disabled list with elbow soreness.

Four weeks ago, Stroman was the Blue Jays' fourth starter. Now this is his rotation. And as he delivers his first pitch, his team 6 1/2 games out of first place, sweat already glistens on his face.

The outing doesn't go well. By the fifth inning, with one out, the Blue Jays are down 4-3. A runner is on second and two relievers are warming up in the bullpen.

Stroman delivers a thigh-high sinking fastball to Mitch Moreland, and the first baseman drives a double off the left-field fence, scoring a run. It's Boston's 11th hit off Stroman tonight, the fifth run. Stroman walks up the mound, chomps on his gum and exhales.

One ground ball out later, his night is over.

"I'm not really going to worry about it," Stroman says later in the clubhouse, after being charged with six earned runs, his worst outing since last July. "I'll bounce back my next start. Just got to wash it. I'm not going to look too deep into this."

But everyone else will. And by morning, the man with the chip tatted on his shoulder will have read his Twitter mentions, dissected the think pieces, as he always does. He will find another way to feel underestimated, minimized, doubted. The shine from his WBC win is already fading; his MVP is in the past.

It's not even May, and Stroman will find that he must prove himself all over again. This is the moment he says he lives for, back to the wall. Once again, it will be up to him to find his motivation.