Archive for Blue Jays

It’s trade deadline season, which means that it’s time for an annual tradition: the Astros somehow scraping together enough interesting young talent to trade for some much-needed major league improvements. This time around, they’re acquiring Daulton Varsho from the Blue Jays in exchange for Spencer Arrighetti, as Mitch Bannon of The Athletic first reported.

Varsho has a delightful positional history. He came up as a catcher, was one of the more fun multi-positional players in the league for a stretch, and then became one of the best defensive outfielders on the planet. He’s now a plus defender in center or an elite one in a corner; he’ll play center most of the time in Houston, stabilizing a position that’s been one of the worst in the majors this year. Jake Meyers was the presumptive starter, but he missed more than a month with an oblique strain and flirted with the Mendoza Line when healthy. The ‘Stros finally optioned him to the minors at the start of July, and in his place, they’ve run out a sampler platter of backup plans: Brice Matthews, who’s posted a 61 wRC+ and is currently on the IL, Taylor Trammell, a fourth outfielder type and not really a center fielder defensively, and even Lucas Spence, a fringe prospect who definitely does not look ready for the big leagues.

In other words, acquiring Varsho is mostly about not having a sinkhole of a position in the middle of the outfield. From that perspective, just by showing up he’s going to fulfill his end of the bargain. He’s Houston’s best outfield defender right away, and unless Yordan Alvarez is getting a rare day in the field, he’s probably their best-hitting outfielder too. Cam Smith has scuffled offensively for his whole big league career at this point, and the LaMonte Wade Jr./Zach Dezenzo platoon in left field isn’t exactly fearsome. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, I thought the Blue Jays were selling! Apparently not, or at least only kind of. Barely 12 hours after sending Kevin Gausman to Chicago, Toronto GM Ross Atkins as replenished his team’s strategic splitter reserve by acquiring José Soriano from the Angels in exchange for three prospects: shortstop Arjun Nimmala, outfielder Eddie Micheletti Jr., and pitcher Angel Rivero.

The Blue Jays are eight games under .500, 13.5 games out of the division lead and 4.5 games out of the second AL Wild Card, with five teams to climb over before they reach the Guardians. They came into Deadline Day with a 5.2% chance of making the playoffs. I’m as gung ho about going for it as the next guy, but that’s not a position from which you want to be trading prospects for big league talent. Read the rest of this entry »

Given the slew of injuries they’ve sustained within their rotation while running up the National League’s fourth-best record (63-49) — not to mention their lack of an obvious Game 1 starter — the Cubs had as much reason to trade for Tarik Skubal as any contender. Reportedly, they at least considered the possibility of dealing for the two-time Cy Young winner, yet like every World Series hopeful besides the Dodgers, they yielded to the two-time defending champions. On Sunday, however, the Cubs did land a substantial reinforcement for their rotation, acquiring 35-year-old righty Kevin Gausman from the Blue Jays in exchange for a pair of prospects, infielder Ty Southisene and outfielder Brett Bateman.

The connection between Toronto and Chicago made particular sense when I highlighted the likelihood that the Blue Jays would approach Monday’s trade deadline as sellers. Gausman, who is making $23 million in the final season of a five-year, $110 million contract, has a limited no-trade clause that allows him to block deals to eight teams, a list that reportedly includes the Brewers, Mariners, Pirates, and White Sox, all of whom are in the hunt for a playoff spot — but notably not the Cubs. As I noted in late June, at the time they traded for then-struggling Mets lefty David Peterson, five of the six pitchers forecast to throw the most innings for Chicago in our preseason Positional Power Rankings were on the injured list, and seven of the 11 pitchers who had made at least one start for the team (including openers) had landed on the IL at least once. The Cubs’ climb to the top of the NL Wild Card scrum since then justified further investment, and to their credit, less than 24 hours after Skubal was dealt, they made their move.

The trade was actually the second between the Cubs and Blue Jays on Sunday. Earlier in the day, Chicago sent 34-year-old righty Jameson Taillon, whom it had designated for assignment last Monday, to Toronto in exchange for cash or a player to be named later. More on him below, but first Gausman, who has not pitched as badly as either his 5-10 record or 4.38 ERA indicate. Though the latter mark is his highest since 2019, his 3.51 FIP is just one-tenth of a point higher than last season’s mark. His peripherals are only a hair or two worse than they were last year; the big issue is a 51-point spike in BABIP: Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays came agonizingly close to winning the World Series last fall, but this season has been a much different story. They haven’t had a winning record since April 4, and haven’t played above .500 in any full month besides May (15-14). While they clawed their way back to .500 on May 29 (29-29) and June 22 (39-39), an 11-20 skid since then has buried them in the AL East cellar, 14 games behind the Rays. Ten American League teams either occupy a playoff spot or are within 2.5 games of one at this writing, but the Blue Jays aren’t one of them; they’re 5.5 games out of the third Wild Card spot, with playoff odds around 7%. As the August 3 trade deadline approaches, several of their players could be on the move to contenders and are worth a closer look.

So little has gone right for Toronto this year. Last season, the team had four regulars with a wRC+ of 116 or higher in George Springer, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, and Alejandro Kirk, each of whom topped 3.0 WAR, as did defensive whiz Ernie Clement. Four part-timers (Joey Loperfido, Davis Schneider, Daulton Varsho, and Tyler Heineman) also met that offensive threshold. But Bichette, Heineman, and Loperfido are now elsewhere, and the rest have been far less productive. No Blue Jay with more than 25 plate appearances has a wRC+ higher than newcomer Kazuma Okamoto’s 113, while Guerrero, Kirk, Schneider, and Varsho are all below 100. Vladito even landed on my Replacement-Level Killers list, which isn’t great news for a player whose contract runs through 2039. Okamoto is the only Blue Jays position player on pace for 3.0 WAR. Ouch.

In 2025, the Blue Jays’ offense ranked second in the AL in scoring and WAR, and third in wRC+, but this year, the team has fallen to second-to-last in scoring and WAR, and last in wRC+:

By comparison, Toronto’s run prevention has been nothing to write home about, whether we’re considering last year (4.45 runs per game, 10th in the league) or this year (4.50 runs per game, ninth). It’s easy to forget that the club’s near-miss happened despite a makeshift October rotation that included just one of the three pitchers who took at least 18 starts for the team (Kevin Gausman) and featured a rookie with three regular-season starts (Trey Yesavage), a deadline acquisition who had just returned from Tommy John surgery (Shane Bieber), and a 40-year-old veteran who missed the first three months of the season with right thumb inflammation (Max Scherzer). Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to “Wait, What?!,” a series in which I’ll take a look at some of the players whose performance has most surprised me this season. These will all be guys I covered as part of this season’s list cycle. It’s important to reflect on previous work, and in cases where the numbers don’t match the scouting report, there’s often a lesson to be learned, or at least something to keep in mind going forward.

While it can be useful to let a report marinate for a couple years before looking back, sometimes a player’s production prompts a quicker postmortem. Such is the case with Blue Jays catcher Brandon Valenzuela, who has accumulated 1.6 WAR in his first 59 career games mere months after I projected him as a glove-first backup on Toronto’s farm system overview. Let’s take a deeper look at how we got from A to B, evaluate whether I should have seen this kind of production coming, and reflect on whether Valenzuela’s breakout warrants a re-evaluation. Perhaps we’ll even learn something, something to think about when it comes time to evaluate the next upper-level catcher who looks like a defense-first reserve. We’ll begin with a look at Valenzuela’s tool grades and scouting report from January, which I’ve reproduced below:

A glove-first catcher, San Diego traded Valenzuela to Toronto last summer in a deadline deal for Will Wagner. The 25-year-old has kicked around the mid-to-upper levels for a couple years now and heads into the 2026 season as the club’s third catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contending clubs. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 10% when this series began), 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 it here because the team’s performance is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the fifth full season of the universal DH, 0.2 WAR represents the current median, with 11 teams below zero, 12 between zero and 1.0, and just seven with 1.0 or more, with only five reaching 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .244/.325/.422 for a 106 wRC+ this season, down four points from last year’s final mark, the highest since the adoption of the universal DH.

It does appear that an increasing number of teams are investing more playing time in a single DH. From 2022 (the first full-length season with the universal DH) to ’25, the number of players reaching 450 plate appearances in the DH role increased from three to four to seven to nine; this year, they’re on pace for nine, as well. That said, all but one of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »