Article: Why Are the Blue Jays So Slow To Throw?

[Mike LeSage]

The Blue Jays pitching staff, as a whole, has been hesitant to give up the ball. Statcast measures "pitch tempo" as the median time between pitches in an individual at-bat. The 2025 Blue Jays have the slowest tempo of any team with the bases empty since the introduction of the pitch clock (2023). They were also the slowest in that situation in 2024 and second-slowest in 2023. Is this an organizational philosophy? A result of a veteran staff? Or is there something more sinister at play? Let’s dive into the numbers and see what we can shake loose. 

The pitch clock was implemented in 2023 as a way to speed up baseball games. Gone were the days of a leisurely afternoon at the ballpark, replaced with a high-speed, adrenaline-fueled flurry that Abner Doubleday would never recognize. Or, more accurately, the clock shaved about 24 minutes off the average game length. Broken down a little further, that’s roughly one minute and 20 seconds per half-inning. Not an insignificant amount of time, so we’ll have to account for that.

First, let's define a couple of terms I will be referencing throughout this article. Tempo, as I've noted, is the time from when a pitcher has released a ball to a batter until the next time that same pitcher releases a pitch to the same batter. It is only measured on takes (i.e., non-swings) within an individual plate appearance. Statcast further breaks down tempo to deem a pitch thrown within 15 seconds to be "fast" and any pitch thrown after more than 30 seconds to be "slow".

When the pitch timer was introduced in 2023, it was set at 15 seconds between pitches with the bases empty and 20 seconds with a runner on base. The on-base timer was dropped to 18 seconds in 2024 and has remained that way this season. (It is key to keep in mind that tempo measures the time between one pitch's release to the next, while the pitch clock only starts once the pitcher receives the ball and it stops when he begins his motion.) For the most part, pitchers throw the majority of their pitches with the bases empty, so unless I specify that I am referring to a stat with runners on, I will be leaning mainly on the "bases empty" stats of each pitcher.

This season, the MLB average tempo with the bases empty is 15.7 seconds. Chad Green is the only qualified Blue Jays pitcher below that mark. Every other pitcher on staff takes longer than average to throw their pitches. If we adjust that to include non-qualified pitchers, it allows Josh Walker, Dillon Tate and the ultimate fast pitcher, Michael Stefanic (four total pitches with an average tempo of 8.6 seconds), to join the quick pitcher list, but 20 other Jays pitchers are left in the above-average section. I decided to include the 11 qualified Jays pitchers currently on the roster and look back at their tempos before and after the introduction of the pitch clock, and before and after they came to Toronto.

Of those 11 qualified pitchers, Paxton Schultz and Mason Fluharty have only pitched for the Jays with a pitch clock in place, so we won’t go too deep on them. Similarly, Brendon Little has only thrown 13 pitches outside of the organization (in 2022 with the Cubs) and none of those came with runners on base, so he’s off the list. Likewise, Yariel Rodríguez, who debuted in 2024, should be eliminated from this discussion.

This leaves us with starters Kevin Gausman, Chris Bassitt, José Berríos and Bowden Francis; relievers Jeff Hoffman and Green; and the mixed-use Eric Lauer.

Let’s start with the tweener, Lauer. There isn’t any pitch tempo data for Lauer’s 2024; he spent last season with two separate Triple-A affiliates (PIT and HOU) and the Kia Tigers of the KBO. One look at his tempo from 2018-2023 (with SD and MIL), and it’s clear we’re dealing with a different guy. Perhaps he’s mellowed with age, or maybe it’s a Toronto philosophy, but Lauer’s 2023 saw a tempo of 13.7 and a fast rate of 64.3% – the fastest and highest of his career with the bases empty.

So far in 2025 with the Jays, Lauer has added over three seconds of tempo for a career-slowest 16.8, and his 16.6% fast pitch percentage is his lowest ever by more than 20%. Even looking at his pre-pitch clock numbers, he is slower to the plate now than he was with all of the (theoretical) time in the world. With runners on base, Lauer’s contrasts aren’t as stark (he’s also only thrown 60 pitches in such situations), but he’s still a second and a half slower to the plate than in ‘23, and his 0% fast pitch rate in this situation is (obviously) a career low.

Moving on to the starters, we can take a second to appreciate the stability that Toronto has had in its rotation over the last few seasons. The four qualified starters were all with the Jays when the pitch clock was introduced. Of the four, only Francis has increased his fast rate from last season in both scenarios. Prior to hitting the IL, Francis was averaging 15.9 seconds with the bases empty and 19.3 with runners on – both the fastest marks within the rotation. His bases empty fast percentage of 31.6% is more than double that of the next closest starter (Berríos at 14.2%). As he ramps up and rehabs from his right shoulder injury, it will be interesting to see if slowing his tempo is one of the changes that gets his season back on track.

At the other end of the spectrum is Gausman, who is the slowest on the staff between pitches with the bases empty at 18.1 seconds. He’s been adding time back since the introduction of the pitch clock. In 2023, he was a ‘speedy’ 16.7 seconds (league average was 15.3) and added a half-second more in 2024 to come to 17.2. Now, he is almost a full second slower again this season.

Gausman’s last season in San Francisco (2021) was when he took the most time between pitches. Unencumbered by the pitch clock, he averaged a leisurely 20.7 seconds between pitches and was only slightly faster (20.3) tempo-wise the next year in his first season with the Jays. That 2022 season in Toronto marked the lowest fast rate of Gausman’s career with a single team at just 1.6%. His relatively slow pitching with the Giants stands in stark contrast to where their staff has been the past few seasons. San Fran has had the fastest team tempo every season since the pitch clock was introduced, bottoming out at 14.1 seconds in 2023. They were also the second-fastest team in 2022, the last season without the pitch clock and Gausman’s first season away from the club. Performance-wise, Gausman’s best season in Toronto was the one where he had his fastest tempo (though he was still slower than league average), but I’m not sure I’d ask him to speed up at this point.

Berríos’ first full season with the Jays was the year before the pitch clock came into use. Despite that, he has still added time each season he’s been with Toronto, starting out at 15.4 seconds in 2022 and moving up to 16.8 this season. In his full seasons with Minnesota (2016-2020), Berríos was at his quickest in 2018 (coinciding with his first All-Star selection) with a bases-empty tempo of 14.9 seconds. He added a full second in each of the next two seasons before his trade to Toronto and is only one-tenth of a second off of his career slowest this season.

The last of the starters we’re looking at is Bassitt, who is as much of an enigma with his tempo as his eight-pitch repertoire might suggest. With the Jays this season, he’s averaging 17.8 seconds, down slightly from the 18.0 he posted last season but up from the 17.0 mark he had in the first pitch clock season. Bassitt has always mixed tempo like he does pitches. He has the highest career average tempo of the Jays starters we’ve looked at, but he’s done that while still posting fast pitch rates between 12.8% and 25.2% (in 2025 and 2023, respectively). With runners on base, he’s been incredibly consistent at just over 20 seconds with the Jays and right around 24 seconds pre-clock/pre-Toronto.

The qualifying pitchers from the bullpen are a tale of two different tempos. There are only two seconds between them, but they sit on either side of the league average (15.7 seconds) with Green’s 15.1 outpacing Hoffman’s 17.1. In the case of Hoffman, he’s been very consistent throughout his career (dating back to 2016), never straying more than one second from where he is this season – with one outlier. In 2022 with Cincinnati, Hoffman slowed way down to 21.1 seconds. It marked the only time in his career that he didn’t throw a single fast pitch in any situation. He was also appearing mainly as a middle-relief low-leverage guy at that point, but it’s an outlier nonetheless.

Green, meanwhile, has gone through a couple of speed cycles. Starting out in 2016 with a 16.3-second tempo and a fast rate of 36.4%, he gradually increased his time and lowered his fast rate into 2021, when he sat at 20.2 seconds and 0.3%. Green threw fewer than 100 pitches in each of 2022 and 2023 as his Tommy John surgery and subsequent recovery ate into most of those seasons. His next full season in ‘24 saw Green throwing with the fastest tempo of his career at 14.8 seconds and throwing fast more than half the time (54%). He’s mellowed ever so slightly this season, adding three-tenths of a second to his tempo and dropping that fast rate to 47.1% (both marks are the second fastest of his career).

That covers the qualified 2025 Blue Jays pitchers that I said we’d look at. If you’re still with me 1500-something words later, I’m hoping you’ll indulge me a look at a couple more pitchers that are interesting. The first is former Jay, Yusei Kikuchi, who started in 2019 with Seattle. He was with Toronto for the two full seasons on either side of the pitch clock introduction, which also represented his slowest and fastest tempo seasons, respectively (19.9 and 4.6% in 2022 vs. 16.0 and 30.4% in 2023). He added some time back in 2023, when he split his season between Toronto and Houston, but has been shaving more time off this season with the Angels and is approaching his 2022 numbers.

The other pitcher is Alek Manoah. His 2022 breakout season saw him with a 20.7-second tempo and a slow rate mark of 8.2% - that slow rate mark is the highest of any season of all of the other pitchers we’ve looked at (70+ individual seasons worth), with the exception of Bassitt’s 8.3% with Oakland in 2021 (Bassitt had a 19.2 tempo that year). Hoffman’s 2022 in Cincinnati (that we already covered) is the only pitcher season with a slower tempo than Manoah’s ‘22. All of that to say, Manoah was at his best when he took his time. The next season, the pitch clock came in and Manoah’s tempo sped up to 17.8 seconds, which, while more than two seconds faster, was still the slowest tempo of any pitcher’s 2023 that we’ve looked at. My pet theory was always that the increased tempo imposed by the pitch clock led to the struggles that Manoah faced and potentially led to the injuries that hampered his two seasons after the implementation of the clock.

I asked a few questions at the beginning of this piece, and as we wrap it up here, I’m afraid I haven’t come to any definitive conclusions. While the Jays are without a doubt on the slow end of the tempo scale, I’m not sure that it’s an organizational philosophy so much as it is a reflection of the pitchers they’ve assembled. At the very least, this gives us something to track as the season goes on and revisit when we have a few more pitchers and a few more data points to analyze. Until then, like Lizzo said: I need tempo.

Stats in article cover games through the end of June.

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