Chase Lee is a Worthwhile Upside Play for the Blue Jays

[Matthew Creally]

The Toronto Blue Jays added $37M to their fast-growing payroll Friday night, but just a few hours before that, they completed their first trade of the offseason. Right-hander Chase Lee is on his way over from the Tigers, with lefty relief prospect Johan Simon going the other way. It's a 1-for-1 swap of bullpen arms.

Here's the skinny on Lee: He's 27 years old and made his MLB debut in 2025, so he has 6 years left of team control. He pitched in low leverage for Detroit and while his first taste of the majors wasn't a disaster by any stretch, he did get knocked around a bit (4.10 ERA, 5.16 xERA, 4.53 FIP). However, he was good enough at AAA to warrant a call-up, with a career strikeout rate just under 30% in parts of 4 seasons. He managed a 20.7% K-BB there in 2025 despite a 6.47 ERA, which ballooned thanks in large part to a wild 48% strand rate. The Tigers, choosing to trust the strong peripherals, gave him a look, and here we are.

The thing about Lee is he's a side-armer. His 80-MPH sweeper is his best weapon, averaging a whopping 19 inches of glove-side movement from a -4° arm angle. He has a sinker which sits 89 MPH with plenty of drop from that low arm slot, and he also uses a four-seamer to change hitters' eye levels, as well as a changeup against lefties. Pitch quality models are torn as to which fastball is better; he deployed the four-seam more to lefties while the sinker was his go-to against righties, but the sweeper plays. It got a 120 score from Fangraphs Stuff+ in 2025, while PitchingBot's Stuff model gave it a 60 on the 20-80 scale. 

Lee was able to crack Baseball America's list of top 30 Tigers prospects earlier this year, mostly because of how much upside the sweeper has. He also got 60-grade control from BA's panel of scouts, and since getting traded from Texas to Detroit in the Andrew Chafin deal in 2024, he has put up zone rates in the high-50s at every level he has pitched. He throws a lot of strikes, but unlike most side-armers, he got plenty of strikeouts coming up through the minors. He ran into one too many barrels once he got to the majors (13.9% Barrel/BBE, 2nd percentile), but with a plus breaking ball and multiple fastball shapes from an unfamiliar release point, the best is yet to come.

The Blue Jays entered Friday with the likes of Hoffman, Varland, Garcia, Little, Fluharty, Fisher, Nance, and Lauer crowding the bullpen depth chart. On top of that, they just selected Spencer Miles in the Rule 5 draft. Lee has minor league options to spare, and he wound up being the first of two relievers with a negative arm angle that Toronto acquired in short succession, and the other one is making 8 figures for the next 3 years. It's safe to assume he'll start 2026 in Buffalo, but the potential is there for him to become a big-league middle reliever in the near future. 

What's interesting about this deal is to acquire this low-slot reliever with a nasty breaking ball, it cost the Blue Jays . . . a low-slot reliever with a nasty breaking ball. Johan Simon is a 24-year-old lefty who saw AA action for the first time this year, and it went swimmingly (2.38 ERA, 32.7% K, 11.1 IP). He had to spend parts of 4 years in rookie ball to get a walk problem under control, not seeing class-A until 8 months ago, so he's far from a finished product. Of all pitching prospects who threw at least 250 sliders in 2025, Simon's slider was the very best according to Baseball America's Stuff+ model. It touches the mid-80s from a low 3/4 delivery, making it an absolute nightmare for lefty hitters. He hopped from Dunedin to Vancouver to New Hampshire this summer so he's certainly on a positive trajectory, but the injuries and inconsistency that kept him in rookie ball have prevented him from becoming a ranked prospect to this point.

This seems like a smart deal for both teams involving two high-upside pitchers who are fairly similar, albeit with different handedness and at different points of their careers. Detroit needed to clear a 40-man roster spot to make the re-signing of reliever Kyle Finnegan a possibility, and both teams still get the chance to develop an under-the-radar reliever with a great sweeper. Lee won't get a long MLB leash on a team urgently trying to win such as the Blue Jays, but he figures to be on the short list whenever injuries arise or the flexibility of having an optionable piece is needed.

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