Blue Jays Render Unto Cease What Is Cease’s: $210 Million

The stove was already hot the week before Thanksgiving. But on Wednesday evening, the Toronto Blue Jays threw some logs on the fire and aimed a leaf blower at the damn thing, and now the proverbial stove is hot enough to melt soda cans into aluminum ingots.

Dylan Cease has signed with the reigning AL champions, and for what they offered him — $210 million over seven years — you’d be packing your bags for Canada, too. Looks like someone can shell out for the fancy cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving.

Last time the Blue Jays were in the news, they were suffering an excruciating World Series loss and facing down the impending departure of their second-best (depending on who you ask?) position player, Bo Bichette. The Jays aren’t exactly the Mets or Dodgers, but they’re a big-market club that’s shown a fairly strong organizational commitment to fielding a competitive team over the past decade.

Still, we’ve seen too many contenders suffer a near-miss and retreat back into mid-payroll obscurity. It was not a given that Toronto would rearm and head back into the thick end of the action.

So from that perspective, it’s good to see the Jays make such an aggressive move for a player at the top of the market. Cease, 29, was the no. 1 pitcher on our Top 50 Free Agents list, and our no. 3 free agent overall.

Pitching is like music, the complex interplay of distinct instruments in which nothing is meaningful without context. There are pitchers who construct exacting symphonies, and others who pitch with great rhythm and sour horn sections. Cease is like Nirvana, a three-piece rock band whose music is simple but memorable, loud, and fuzzy.

Cease threw six pitches at least once in 2025, but with only infrequent allowances for a sinker or a slow curve, his arsenal is mostly fastball-slider. The heater, which averaged 97.1 mph in 2025, has some cut action and rise, while the slider is a tight upper-80s offering. Either one is hard to handle in isolation, and in concert they’re among the best two-pitch swing-and-miss combos in the league.

Cease led all qualified starters in whiff rate in 2025. In fact, he led all pitchers of any role in whiff rate even if you lower the innings threshold to 80. He led all qualified starters in whiff rate in 2024, as well. He was fifth in 2023, and second in both 2022 and 2021.

Given the state of starting pitching in this day and age, it’s notable that Cease has qualified for the ERA title six seasons running. Since he made his major league debut in 2019, he’s missed a total of two starts due to injury, and he’s never visited the major league injured list.

Now, all starting pitchers are durable until they’re not — just ask Gerrit Cole, Zack Wheeler, and Corbin Burnes, to name a few off the top of my head — but Cease is the most durable front-end arm you’re going to find unless you have a time machine.

The Blue Jays had a strong rotation last season, but it’s easy to appreciate why they’d want to add another frontline starter. Their run to the World Series depended on some realistic best-case scenario contributions from pitchers on both ends of the aging curve: Max Scherzer and Trey Yesavage. Even with a full season of Yesavage and deadline acquisition Shane Bieber expected in 2026, Scherzer and Chris Bassitt are bound for free agency this winter.

There was a time when Bieber, José Berríos, and Kevin Gausman were all capital-A Aces, but I don’t know if you can count on that continuing as they all get into their 30s. And while I’ve been a big Trey Yesavage fan since before most of you knew who Trey Yesavage was (don’t worry, I have proof), I’m also old enough to remember how everyone got ahead of themselves with Michael Wacha based on one good postseason run back in 2013. Could Yesavage rip off 10 straight years of Cy Young-quality work? I guess. I just wouldn’t make that a load-bearing assumption while trying to build a team that could win the AL East.

Cease is one of two pitchers in this free agent class (Framber Valdez being the other) whom I’d describe as an upgrade on anyone the Blue Jays had under contract on Wednesday morning. In addition to liking this signing on the basis that it signifies the Blue Jays’ intent to pour resources into the major league roster, on general principle I think it’s more cost-effective in the long run to shop at the top of the free agent market than it is to try and outsmart the other 29 guys who think like you by attempting to find a bargain in the second tier.

With that said, the Blue Jays clearly think Cease is an elite starting pitcher. His $210 million sticker price is tied for the seventh-largest total value ever awarded to a pitcher. Sixth largest, if you don’t count Shohei Ohtani. According to Mitch Bannon, The Athletic’s Blue Jays beat reporter, Cease’s contract is heavy on the dreaded deferred money, which reduces the AAV to roughly $26 million.

That lessens the blow somewhat, but Toronto’s faith in Cease seems like an outlier opinion. Ben Clemens had Cease signing for $31 million a year, but over only five years, not seven. Our readers, on the aggregate, are even less bullish on Cease, predicting that he’d sign for five years at $26 million per, give or take a few hundred thousand depending on whether you want the mean or median crowdsource numbers.

Which is weird, because Cease is both the best bat-missing starter in the majors and the least injury-prone starter in the majors. Aren’t those the two most important attributes for a pitcher?

Indeed they are, but get ready for the mother of all backhanded compliments: Cease is the realistic worst-case scenario for a pitcher who’s the best in the world at the two most important things a pitcher needs to do.

Over the past six seasons, Cease leads all starting pitchers not only in strikeouts, but also in games started. (Berríos is second in starts, Gausman fourth, Bassitt seventh, and Yusei Kikuchi, who spent two and a half season in Toronto, is 13th. The Blue Jays have a type.)

But while Cease leads the league in starts by clear daylight, he’s only eighth in innings pitched as a starter and fourth in batters faced. Out of the 201 pitchers who have made 50 or more big league starts since 2020, Cease is 72nd in batters faced per start and 79th in innings pitched per start. His walk rate, which has been within four-tenths of 10% in four of the past five seasons, is also one of the worst you’ll find among high-volume pitchers. Third worst, to be exact, out of 52 qualified starters this past year.

And Cease’s cutter-action fastball and vertical slider present a less severe version of the elevator shaft problem I wrote about earlier this week in the context of Ryan Helsley. Hitters, for the most part, are guessing from between two pitches with Cease. While those pitches come in different velocity bands with different vertical movement profiles — which makes them tunnel better — they have the same lateral movement profile, which takes away an element of uncertainty.

Cease’s swing-and-miss numbers are — and I apologize for belaboring this point but it bears repeating — the best of any starter in baseball, but he’s mediocre at suppressing hard contact. Hitters might not guess correctly that often, but when they do, they can do quite a bit of damage.

Of the 10 qualified starters with the best swing-and-miss rates in baseball in 2025, Cease had the worst walk rate and second-worst xwOBACON. The list of best whiff rates among qualified starters in 2025 was almost congruent with the list of best ERA- numbers among qualified starters. Jesús Luzardo, who got Monstars’d for a couple starts around Memorial Day, which wrecked his ERA, is the only pitcher apart from Cease to land in the top 10 in whiff rate but outside the top 13 in ERA-.

In other words, and I’m sorry for burying the lede here, but Cease had a 4.55 ERA in 2025.

He does this sometimes, alternates dominant seasons with iffy ones. In 2022, Cease was the AL Cy Young runner-up, with an opponent BABIP of .260. The following year, he had a BABIP of .330, and his ERA was in the mid-4.00s. The same pattern repeated in the past two seasons: .263 BABIP and 3.47 ERA in 2024, .320 BABIP in 2025.

Given that both FIP and xERA think Cease’s ERA was a run too high, and his quality-of-contact numbers didn’t swell up like a marshmallow in a vacuum chamber like they did in 2023, I’m happy to extend Cease the benefit of the doubt over his ugly ERA in 2025.

The thing is, that benefit of the doubt was already priced into that five-year, $130 million(ish) estimate from the readers, or the five-year, $155 million estimate from Ben. The Blue Jays paid over the odds.

Which, as anyone who’s had Friedman’s Law cited at them can attest, is just how free agency works. Usually, the winner overpays by a little. Either the Blue Jays know something the rest of us don’t, or they overpaid by a lot.