In years past, I’ve generally addressed the teams receiving less-than-acceptable production in one corner outfield spot or the other within the same post, but this year’s batch of right fielders is disproportionately large, mandating a separate entry that led me to combine the left and center field lists instead. There’s still some crossover between most teams’ pools of right fielders and the positions I covered in the previous post, with a couple teams from this group landing on both lists. As they look to upgrade, there’s some fluidity as well, with teams willing to test the defensive limitations of their outfielders in order to shoehorn better bats into the lineup.

While still focusing on clubs that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far (which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season), I’ve also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included the club here because its performance is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly within the context of the rest of a team’s roster. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the August 3 trade deadline, but these are ones to keep an eye on. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we have the first of several Killers two-fers, with a pair of lists covering the right side of the infield. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of a contender (Playoff Odds of at least 10%, a criterion that 22 of the 30 teams meet) and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far (which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. That may suggest that some of these teams will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because their performance at that spot is worth a look. All statistics are through July 12.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Cease came within three outs of making history on Wednesday. Only one Blue Jays pitcher has successfully thrown a no-hitter: Dave Stieb on September 2, 1990. Many others have come close since then, but none of them has finished the job. You can add Cease’s name to that list. He held the Giants hitless for eight innings before allowing a single to the first batter in the ninth. His final line: 8+ innings, one hit, three walks, and 11 strikeouts.

The game started off with a bang — Kazuma Okamoto’s grand slam in the top of the first inning gave the Blue Jays a 5-0 lead before Cease even took the mound. Once he did, it was evident he had his best stuff going. He retired the first 14 batters in order, at one point striking out five in a row. A walk to Willy Adames with two outs in the fifth broke up the perfect game, and then Cease issued another walk in each of the next two innings. This no-hit bid even had its signature defensive play, when Daulton Varsho tracked down a deep fly ball off the bat of Bryce Eldridge in the eighth inning, slamming into the wall in left-center field after making the catch. Ultimately, Cease’s effort fell short. Heliot Ramos saw two pitches from the right-hander in the ninth inning before lining the third up the middle for a single.

That Cease was in a position to complete the feat was a bit of a surprise in the first place. He had thrown a career-high 115 pitches through eight innings, and with teams doing everything they can to protect their pitchers these days, there were real questions about whether Cease would be allowed to pitch the ninth. After the game, Blue Jays manager John Schneider explained his thinking: “I’m a fan of baseball. If a guy has a chance to throw a no-hitter, you let him do it, and I think you make the adjustments after that. Dylan, he’s done it before, and he’s really durable. He’s in the category where you can be pretty aggressive with it. It’s not very often you get to see that, so if I can let a player have that opportunity, I’m going to do it every single time.”

Cease joins a long line of Blue Jays pitchers who have thrown near-no-hitters.

Roy Halladay, Dustin McGowan, Brandon Morrow, and Bowden Francis all had no-hit bids ended in the ninth inning since Stieb’s feat 36 years ago. By game score, Cease’s effort falls in the middle of the pack, less impressive because he didn’t complete nine innings, but better than Francis’ two outings two years ago. Of course, Cease already has a no-hitter to his name, throwing one in 2024 with the Padres. The Blue Jays still have the second-longest no-hitter drought in baseball, ahead of only the Guardians.

As a quick aside, a true no-hitter feels like it could become an increasingly rare feat in the near future. The last no-hitter thrown by a single pitcher was Blake Snell’s back on August 2, 2024, and there were none in 2025. Two combined no-hitters have been completed since Snell’s — one by the Cubs on September 4, 2024 and one most recently by the Astros on May 25, 2026 — but the solo effort now requires both dominance and efficiency. Ballclubs are much more wary of overworking their starting pitchers, so to complete nine innings, they need to keep their pitch counts under control to go the distance. Cease’s durability has been a hallmark throughout his career, and that made Schneider’s decision to let him keep going despite a career-high pitch count justifiable.

Cease’s dominant outing dropped his season ERA to 2.56 and FIP to 2.20, and pushed his WAR up to 3.7, a hair ahead of Cam Schlittler’s mark for the AL lead among qualified pitchers. For most of the first half of the season, the young Yankees starter has been the frontrunner to win the AL Cy Young award. With Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, and Max Fried all dealing with various injuries, the field has been sapped of most of the preseason favorites.

While Schlittler still holds the advantage in the more traditional categories like wins and ERA, Cease leads the AL in strikeouts, FIP (among starters), and WAR — and that’s despite pitching two fewer games than Schlittler. A minor hamstring injury in late May sent Cease to the IL for just the second time in his major league career. Joe Ryan and Parker Messick are also making solid cases, and the traditionalists are bound to love Sonny Gray’s win count and low ERA. Still, it feels like, barring any big surprises, the Cy Young race will come down to Schlittler or Cease.

Getting a Cy Young-caliber season out of Cease immediately after signing him to a massive seven-year, $210 million contract is a triumph for the Blue Jays. One of the preeminent strikeout artists over the last five years, he’s pushed his strikeout rate up to 36.9% this year, a career high. His walk rate is also up slightly — he’s never had great command at any point in his career — but it’s higher than it’s been since 2020. Still, all those additional strikeouts have helped him navigate whatever traffic those free passes put on the basepaths.

While Cease technically has a six-pitch repertoire, he’s mostly known for his riding fastball and hard slider. Those two pitches made up more than 80% of his pitch mix over the previous five seasons. This year, he’s throwing those two pitches about two-thirds of the time. To make up the difference, he’s committed to throwing his changeup a lot more often to keep left-handed batters at bay. He had thrown a form of his changeup back when he debuted with the White Sox in 2019, but it quickly fell out of favor. He had used it almost like a trick pitch over the last few seasons, never throwing it more than 100 times in any given season since 2021.

He found a new changeup grip this offseason and decided to re-incorporate it into his arsenal to give him a reliable third pitch to keep batters off his fastball-slider combo.

The revamped changeup has worked wonderfully so far. He’s thrown it almost exclusively to lefties, but they simply can’t hit it. The pitch has a 60% whiff rate, the highest of any pitch thrown at least 100 times this season. If batters do make contact, it’s usually weakly hit in the air; opposing batters have only managed a .185 batting average and a .215 wOBA against it.

When you think of effective changeups, you might picture Devin Williams’s airbender, dropping and fading away from opposite-handed batters. Or perhaps Edward Cabrera’s power changeup, modeled after Félix Hernández’s cambio. Based on Harry Pavlidis’ research into what makes a changeup effective, we know that a large velocity differential is beneficial for inducing swings and misses. But he also found that changeups that have a wide separation in movement profiles from the pitcher’s fastball can also be effective, particularly at generating groundball contact. Cease’s changeup is unlike any other in baseball.

The velocity differential between his fastball and his changeup is the second highest in the majors, but the pitch’s movement profile is what makes it stand out. It doesn’t fall off the table like you might expect, and it doesn’t fade away from lefty batters either. It’s a straight change. I calculated z-scores for those three characteristics — velocity differential, induced vertical break, and horizontal movement — and summed them as a rough approximation of how unique a pitcher’s changeup is compared to league average. Cease’s has the highest combined score by far.

By this crude method, Cease’s changeup is the most unique offspeed pitch in baseball. It moves a lot like a fastball, except it comes in 14 miles per hour slower. No wonder opposing batters can’t touch it.

This odd movement profile is tied to Cease’s release. He’s a natural supinator — when he releases the ball, his hand is behind it, imparting more backspin on the pitch. Supinators have a very difficult time throwing pitches with the arm-side movement that you would expect a traditional changeup to have. Cease’s change possesses a significant amount of backspin — that’s the reason why it doesn’t tumble as much as you’d think — and its spin profile closely mirrors that of his fastball. Because his offspeed looks a lot like his fastball out of the hand, the effectiveness of his heater has improved, as well. His four-seamer is running a 30.7% whiff rate, a career high for that pitch.

While he may not have made history on Wednesday, Cease is in the middle of what is shaping up to be a career year. He was just named to his first All-Star roster, and he’s pitched his way into the AL Cy Young race. In his first season in Toronto, he’s made the right adjustments to thrive.

Recent Sunday Notes columns have included soccer segments with Jake Burger (Tottenham Hotspur) and Tommy Kahnle (Bayern Munich) discussing their respective allegiances, as well as their thoughts on the World Cup. This week we’ll hear from Sean Doolittle. The Washington Nationals’ assistant pitching coach is a devoted fan of Leeds United.

“It really kind of took off in 2020,” explained Doolittle, who prior to joining the coaching ranks made 463 relief appearances while playing for four teams, primarily Oakland and Washington, from 2012-2022. “Harvey Sharman, our director of medical services — the head of our training staff group [with the Nationals] — was a “physio” at Leeds for 15 years before he came to the states. I learned a lot about the club from him. Before that I was more of a casual soccer fan, playing a lot of FIFA on Xbox.

“They were in the Championship,” continued Doolittle, referring to England’s second-tier league. “They started up before us after the shutdown, and I remember watching those games and kind of jumping on the bandwagon. They won and got promoted to the Premier League. I was hooked after that. It’s since been an up-and-down couple of years, but last season [a mid-table finish] was really fun.”

Doolittle told me that his Leeds allegiance “isn’t super-influencing” the way he has been watching the World Cup, although he is very much aware of how the team’s players — four in all — have been faring on the sport’s biggest stage. He cited how Gabriel Gudmundsson (Sweden), Ao Tanaka (Japan), and Crysencio Summerville (Netherlands) have all seen their countries eliminated, while Brenden Aaronson still has a chance to hoist a trophy with Team USA. Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Shulman was featured here in Sunday Notes on June 21, the topic being broadcast traits he shares with his son Ben, who calls Toronto Blue Jays games on radio. Today we’ll hear from the TV play-by-play voice of “Canada’s Team” on non-familial matters, primarily how a club’s fortunes influence tone in the booth. The elder Shulman has been behind the mic in both good times and bad, but does the number of wins and losses — be they over a multi-week stretch or a much longer span — actually matter in terms of a broadcaster’s style?

Shulman addressed that subject, and more, on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: How well a team is doing impacts the mood of a fanbase. To what extent does it — or should it — influence how the games are called?

Dan Shulman: “I think every broadcaster has their own internal balance. Some sway more positive. Some sway more neutral or objective. My job is to keep people interested in watching the team, whether they’re playing well or they’re not playing well, but you certainly can’t have entirely the same tone when the team is having a bad year, as opposed to when they’re having a good year. In 2024, the Blue Jays finished last. In 2025, they made it to the World Series. The tone is very different.

“You do always try to find some positives. In 2024, after the deadline, they traded off a bunch of guys and had some younger players coming up who did pretty well and were interesting. You focus on that a little bit. But again, the overall tone is different. You can’t sugarcoat everything. You have to be pretty honest with the viewers. At the same time, you can’t go on the air and say, ‘This is bad; none of these players belong here.’ That’s not how the job is done.”

Laurila: Basically, it is fair to be critical, but only to a point… Read the rest of this entry »

George Lombard Jr. is bound for The Bronx — or maybe Motown? According to the New York Post’s Jon Heyman, the Yankees’ top-rated prospect is being targeted by the Tigers in a potential trade for Tarik Skubal. Swap or not, the 21-year-old shortstop has a bright future. A first-round pick in 2023, Lombard Jr. has come to the plate 287 times this season between Double-A Somerset and Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre and is slashing .258/.387/.446 with eight home runs and a 124 wRC+. Moreover, he was scorching the ball prior to being placed on the IL with sprained fingers on his glove hand this past Thursday. Over his previous eight games he had gone 11-for-30 with seven doubles and a pair of round-trippers.

How has the son of former MLB outfielder, and current Detroit Tigers bench coach, George Lombard changed since I interviewed him late in the 2024 season?

“From a physical standpoint, the stance and setup are a little different,” Lombard Jr. told me last month. “But it’s more the mental side. Compared to then, I have a more complete understanding of my swing, how my body moves, my tendencies, and what I need to do to stay in a good place. Most of the change has been mental maturity.”

Asked to elaborate on the physical, he replied that he has changed his hand positioning in an effort to get to ”the firing spot” more efficiently. That adjustment came over the offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

In the summer of 1872, Martin Malone pitched three complete games in three days for the Brooklyn Eckfords of the National Association. In today’s game, a pitcher who threw three complete games in three days would be hailed as something of a miracle, but Malone’s accomplishment loses a bit of its luster when you consider the context of the era. According to the numbers in our database, starters went the distance 83% of the time that season. Another piece of context scrapes the rest of the shine off with a machete: Over his three games, Malone allowed 86 runs on 96 hits. You will not be shocked to learn that he went 0-3.

Nineteenth century record-keeping being what it is, those are Malone’s only three games in our database, and for several reasons, that’s not quite fair. First, those three games don’t represent anything like a complete picture of his total performance. Malone first suited up for the Eckfords five years earlier. “It is surprising that all of Malone’s vital statistics remain undiscovered,” wrote David Nemec in Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, “for he seems to have been an integral part of the Brooklyn baseball scene for more than a decade.”

Next, Malone’s pitching may not have turned out well, but he did go 5-for-16 with a walk, for a .313 batting average and 115 wRC+ at the plate. Last and most important, it’s hard to say how much credit Malone really deserves for all the runs he gave up. He only allowed one home run. He didn’t walk anybody and he didn’t strike anybody out. He did what so many pitchers have been implored to do over the course of baseball history: He let the offense put the ball in play and trusted the defense behind him. It was a catastrophic mistake. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a casual follower of great relief seasons, this year has probably been all about Mason Miller for you. That’s eminently reasonable. It’s June 4, and his strikeout rate is still above 50%. If there’s a second name in the running, it’s probably Cade Smith, whose 21 saves pace the big leagues. Maybe Cleveland just has a “dominant closer” machine in the clubhouse somewhere. Who needs Emmanuel Clase? But the reliever atop our leaderboards isn’t either of those guys. (They’re second and third, mere hundredths of a win behind, but let me have my bit.) It’s rubber-armed October stalwart Louis Varland, who is most famous for being available a lot.

Varland pitched in nearly every game of the Blue Jays’ playoff run last year, which made him something of a folk hero in Canada. Those appearances weren’t notable for their outrageous quality – he had a middle-of-the-road 3.94 ERA and a 5.01 FIP in 16 innings – but for how impressive it was to take the ball day after day, no matter the situation, and give his team valuable innings. No Toronto reliever entered in more important spots, and while Varland had zero win probability added in the aggregate, that availability was just cool, and particularly noticeable in today’s splintered world of playoff pitching.

This year, Varland is still throwing a ton of innings. He’s 11th in relief innings pitched, but the guys in front of him are pretty much all long relievers. He’s also tied for 11th in relief appearances. Consider this: No reliever who has appeared as often as Varland has thrown as many innings as him, and no reliever who has thrown more innings has appeared more often. You can rack up a lot of innings pitched if you throw multiple frames per appearance. You can rack up a lot of appearances by being a short-stint guy. It’s pretty difficult to be both, but Varland accomplishes it. Read the rest of this entry »

Daulton Varsho is a tinkerer. In each of his seasons with the Blue Jays, either SportsNet’s Arden Zwelling, SportsNet’s Shi Davidi, or both have written an article detailing a swing change – except in 2024, when Zwelling noted that for once, Varsho was going to finally try (gasp!) not tinkering with his swing.

Despite all the adjustments, Varsho remained the same kind of hitter. He had a super steep swing that was seemingly tailor made for today’s lift-and-pull focused game. He whiffed a lot and didn’t hit the ball particularly hard, but when he did square it up, he ripped it into the right field bleachers. That’s a recipe for a lot of variance – the lows involve scads of strikeouts and the highs involve heaps of homers – so it wasn’t surprising that his first three seasons with the Blue Jays saw one average season at the plate, one below-average season, and one above-average season. Although injuries limited him to just 71 games in 2025, Varsho put up a career-best 123 wRC+ and slugged 20 homers. Over a full season, that’s a 46-homer pace! If ever there was a time to stand pat, this was it, right? Right!? Read the rest of this entry »

Previously one of the most durable pitchers of the 2020s, José Berríos was absent last year when the Toronto Blue Jays missed out on a World Series championship by a single base. Berríos was first demoted to the bullpen in late September after a string of uninspiring starts, and then was left off the playoff roster due to elbow inflammation. Three mediocre spring starts and an ugly rehab stint in the minors later, Berríos underwent season-ending Tommy John surgery this week, cutting short his 2026 season before it ever really began, and almost certainly costing him a decent chunk of 2027 as well. If the Jays aren’t furrowing their brows at their fourth and fifth starters yet, it may be time to start.

The Jays had been at least cautiously optimistic about Berríos entering the season. He said he felt back to 100% this spring, and new inflammation was only discovered when he underwent an MRI for insurance purposes as he attempted to play for Puerto Rico in the World Baseball Classic. Neither Berríos nor manager John Schneider seemed the least bit worried, at least publicly:

“It’s weird. The MRI is seeing something, and what I feel is way different,” Berríos said. “The MRI says I have inflammation, so we need to take care of that.

“He feels great, and I can’t overstate that. He feels great,” Schneider said. “He’s going to continue to play catch until we get a bit more info, but he’s not going to start today. It’s a unique situation right now with an MRI and the WBC insurance.”

But since pitchers are cursed by the Fates to near-Odysseus levels, things naturally unraveled from there. Berríos consulted with Dr. Keith Meister in mid-March, and was diagnosed with a stress fracture that caused him to miss the start of the season. After four rehab starts in the minors, Berríos reported additional elbow soreness, which led to surgery to address the fracture and remove loose bodies. Apparently, those bodies were pretty darn loose, and Berríos had the full reconstructive Tommy John surgery, definitely erasing him from the team’s short-term plans.

Toronto’s rotation has actually been quite good overall in 2026 so far, thanks to the trio of Dylan Cease, Kevin Gausman, and Trey Yesavage all likely pitching as well as they ever will. In terms of their best three starters, the Jays have been absolutely elite so far:

The Jays rank third in the majors in WAR from their best three starting pitchers, and that’s with Yesavage missing the first month of the season with a shoulder impingement. Outside of their top three starters, however, the Jays have been among the bottom of the league:

The good news is that the performance of a team’s top three starters becomes extremely important when we’re talking postseason baseball, given that that trio tends to get a much larger proportion of the team’s innings than it does during the regular season. The projections reflect this, and despite a rest-of-season projected roster winning percentage of only .521, ZiPS has the Jays at a .543 roster strength for a possible playoff run.

Of course, to get to October, the Jays first have to survive May through September, and that’s a bit trickier. The AL East crown looks like a tough get, with Toronto 11 games back as of Friday morning. The team has a lot of pitchers theoretically available, but they’re now mostly injured, which is why Berríos coming back healthy was so important. A healthy Berríos is probably best classified as a no. 3 starter at this point, but eating innings has a lot of value on a team like this, and only three pitchers, Aaron Nola and teammates Gausman and Patrick Corbin, have thrown more innings over the last decade. Among the alternatives, Bowden Francis and Cody Ponce are both out for the 2026 season, and while Max Scherzer is nearing a return, he looks like he’s running on fumes at this point in his Hall of Fame career. Shane Bieber is nearing a return as well, but betting on him staying healthy is a pretty gutsy dice roll. Spencer Miles is fascinating, but he has all of three professional starts and an even scarier injury history than Bieber. When Corbin is likely in your rotation for the foreseeable future, you know there are depth issues to be concerned about.

That’s why when the Marlins inevitably start shopping Sandy Alcantara around again, the Blue Jays ought to be all-in on him. This is a roster designed to win now, and if you’re going to move on from Bo Bichette and go with an Andrés Giménez/Ernie Clement middle infield, you might as well take advantage of it with a sinkerballer who doesn’t whiff that many guys. ZiPS projects the Jays to get a bigger boost from acquiring Alcantara than any of the other 28 possible suitors. And Gausman is a free agent after the season, so acquiring a pitcher who can be written into the 2027 rotation wouldn’t be a bad idea even under happier circumstances.

The Blue Jays didn’t need Berríos to be what he was with the Twins — a boring, sturdy, and available version would do — but they did need him, and that is why losing him hurts. They’re a dangerous team if they make it to October, but to get there, some additional tinkering with the rotation looks increasingly necessary.