Seranthony Domínguez Switches Clubhouses

Some transactions are epic sagas that unfold over weeks or months, while others are compact little one-act plays that are over and done with in an afternoon.

On Tuesday, the Blue Jays lost Game 1 of a doubleheader to the Orioles by a score of 16-4. Chad Green, the team’s second-most expensive reliever, surrendered four of those runs in one inning, bringing his ERA to 5.56 and his home run total to 14 in just 43 2/3 innings. Before Game 2, the Blue Jays DFA’d Green and traded for Orioles right-hander Seranthony Domínguez, an unused substitute in Game 1.

Cutting ties with Green, who makes $10.5 million this year, will be expensive, but the Blue Jays did save a few hundred bucks on airfare by trading for a guy who was already in the building.

In this odd, likely sleepy deadline season, “We need bullpen help” has turned into an all-timer of a cliché. It’s true because every team on the planet could use at least one more good reliever, but also because bullpen help seems to make up the bulk of the trade menu this season. I think I’m going to start using that as an excuse to blow off plans. “Sorry, I can’t come to your open mic night, I’m looking for bullpen help.”

Toronto’s bullpen help was supposed to be Green, who signed a three-year, $23.25 million contract with the Blue Jays before the 2023 season. In seven seasons with the Yankees, Green had been a useful innings-eater at worst, and at times he was a multi-inning high-leverage weapon. In 2021, for instance, Green struck out 99 batters in 83 2/3 innings, winning 10 games and saving six more.

He signed with the Jays while still recovering from Tommy John surgery, which limited him to 12 appearances in 2023, and hasn’t quite found his schwerve since. The end result has been this regrettable, absurdly homer-prone 2025 campaign.

On the whole, Toronto’s bullpen is third in the league in WPA this year, but just 10th in ERA-. Closer Jeff Hoffman has been terrific, though he has a couple nasty postseason blowups in his past. Yariel Rodríguez has cut down on his walks since moving to the bullpen, though his 2.25 ERA is buoyed by the fourth-lowest BABIP and fifth-highest strand rate among 170 qualified relievers across the majors.

Braydon Fisher has been good in medium leverage; Brendon Little hands out more free passes than a failing amusement park, but he’s left-handed and has a strikeout rate of 34.8%, and how many of those guys are there in baseball?

Anyway, this is an OK bullpen, and you don’t want to go into the postseason with an OK bullpen.

Domínguez helps insofar as he’s a hard thrower with experience in just about every high-leverage relief role there is. And a lot of that experience has come in the playoffs; he’s participated in the past three postseasons and put up truly gaudy numbers: 27 strikeouts in 17 2/3 innings, with just 13 hits (11 singles and two doubles), four walks, and two earned runs allowed.

There’s not a single active reliever with a better career postseason ERA than Domínguez in more innings. He’s one scoreless inning from passing Jonathan Papelbon on the career playoff ERA leaderboard, and two scoreless innings from overtaking Andrew Miller. (I could go on about how Domínguez’s only bad playoff outing ever came in a torrential downpour in which he couldn’t grip the ball, but I don’t want to pour it on too thick.)

With that said, Domínguez is not the silver bullet. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we know this because the Phillies dumped him at last year’s deadline to clear salary and bring in Austin Hays. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Now, this season, Domínguez has completely remade his pitch mix in 2025. He used to throw a hard horizontal slider with an even harder four-seamer and sinker, making him the most archetypal homegrown Phillies pitcher you could conjure up. (Due respect to Nick Foles, the true Philly Special is massive sinker velocity.)

This year, Domínguez has reverted to the four-seamer as his dominant fastball, though he still throws the sinker. He’s loosened up his slider into a sweeper that he throws exclusively to righties and ditched his seldom-used changeup in favor of a splitter that he’s now throwing 17.4% of the time overall and 29.6% of the time to lefties.

This is a truly hateful splitter with a triple-digit spin rate; lefties have seen 101 of them this season and they’ve hit it for extra bases once while whiffing more than half the time. Domínguez has also introduced a curveball for use against lefties; it’s the first pitch he’s thrown in his nearly decade-long major league career with an average velocity below 86.0 mph.

The drawback is a prolific expansion in walk rate. Domínguez is running his highest K% since his rookie year (30.9%), but he’s also walking 13.7% of opponents. That’s not only a career high, but it’s also the sixth-highest walk rate among qualified relievers. Combine that extreme TTO tendency with pedestrian contact suppression numbers and you’ve got a rental reliever with a 3.24 ERA.

For the privilege of summoning Domínguez from the opposite clubhouse, the Jays surrendered Juaron Watts-Brown, a 23-year-old right-handed pitcher out of Oklahoma State who’s split this season between High-A and Double-A, with pretty good results: 3.54 ERA, 3.11 FIP, 30.5% strikeout rate in 89 innings over 19 starts.

Our prospect impresario, Eric Longenhagen, dropped Watts-Brown into the no. 35 spot in Baltimore’s organizational prospect ranking. I wouldn’t get too discouraged by that big number; this was a good system anyway, and it’s now turgid with prospects after Baltimore dropped in the products of the most expensive draft class in baseball history. Eric’s 40 FV grade says more about Watts-Brown than his ordinal ranking.

Watts-Brown has started every game of his professional career, but he nonetheless has strong reliever markings. He pitches from the stretch at all times, and even though he sits 93-94 and can hit 98 as a starter, the fastball plays down and he struggles to command it; see his own double-digit walk rate. Nevertheless, Watts-Brown has used his plus slider to carve hitters up in the lower and middle rungs of the minors. The breaking ball is good enough that he can be a useful big leaguer, but he’ll probably end up in the bullpen (perhaps as a multi-inning guy) eventually.

Domínguez is the second hard-throwing reliever the Orioles have traded in the past five days, after Gregory Soto. That makes for a convenient point of reference; Domínguez and Soto are both free agents at the end of the year, they’re the same age and have similar top-line stats. Domínguez makes $8 million this season, compared to a little over $5.3 million for Soto, but I don’t think the Blue Jays are sweating a prorated third of that number. I know the Mets aren’t.

So with all that said, I think Toronto got a better pitcher than the Mets did, and gave up a lot less to get him. The premium on Soto being left-handed probably explains the bulk of the discrepancy in prospect cost (assuming the Orioles have a similar view of their prospects to what Eric has written up); even factoring that in, along with my concerns about Domínguez’s walk rate, the Blue Jays got a solid medium-leverage reliever whose stuff has a chance to play up in October in exchange for an unremarkable minor league pitcher.

Toronto will probably be eyeing another upgrade or two before Thursday, but this is a good piece of business.