What Does Finding Another Gear Look Like for Dylan Cease?

[Matthew Creally]

Dylan Cease is ready to go. He made that fully clear in his introductory press conference with the Blue Jays during the Winter Meetings, but it doesn't seem like he has second-guessed himself at all over the past few weeks. A day before American Thanksgiving, he signed the largest free agent contract the team has ever given to a pitcher to break the dam of the open market. Despite some notable action around the league this week, it remains the most lucrative contract of the offseason at the time of writing.

Cease is somewhat of a contradiction of the pitcher archetypes that usually make it to free agency. He has top-tier strikeout stuff, yet he's very durable and only just about to turn 30. A repeated pattern of underperforming strong peripherals caused some chatter as to whether Cease, as true of a north-south, two-pitch pitcher there is, would live up to the expectations of a $210 million starter. As with every new addition, though, he was signed for the player the Blue Jays thought he would become, not who he has been. He won't be quite the same pitcher when he steps on the Rogers Centre mound for the first time. Manager John Schneider, speaking to the media for the first time since Game 7 of the World Series, echoed that sentiment in Orlando on Tuesday.

DiamondCentric's John Bonnes was on hand for the event.

Schneider called Cease an "inquisitive mind," someone hyper-aware of his past shortcomings and eager to innovate and find ways to get better. The right-hander was reported to have asked frequent questions of pitching coaches Pete Walker and Sam Greene when they pitched him on how they could help him become a consistent ace. He came away intrigued by their answers.

Cease may have come with a high price tag, but he is no finished product. This is someone who will work together with his club to build the best version of himself, a diligent process that will surely reflect Toronto's financial investment in him.

At the Winter Meetings, Schneider delved further into the specifics of what the plan is to allow Cease to reach the heights he's striving for. The manager acknowledged that there had been some "delivery stuff that has been a little bit inconsistent, like every pitcher, over the last couple years." He then commended Cease's openness to "start thinking more about a change-up" and asking how the team would help him develop it. Those are some pretty good nuggets worth diving into.

What might Schneider mean by 'inconsistent delivery stuff'? For years, Cease has had an over-the-top arm slot with a feel for spinning the ball, which allows him to get cutting action on that 97-mph rising fastball and the bullet slider. I wouldn't expect that to change a whole lot, but there was a discrepancy in the release patterns between the fastball and slider that might have played a background role in contributing to his inflated ERA.

Since coming into his current mechanics in 2021, he has had a 5-6° difference in arm angle between the two pitches, with the heater coming out at a slightly more vertical 55-56° and the slider hovering around 50° - this remained the case throughout his Cy Young runner-up 2022 season. In 2024, however, he closed that gap to about 3°, making the two pitches less distinct in their delivery on his way to more down-ballot Cy Young votes. This past season, the rift returned, with the slider averaging a 48.5° arm angle, a career-low for a full season.

Prior trends in his release height remained consistent, meaning this had more to do with horizontal release position. The chart below, from Baseball Savant, shows how Cease's two primary pitches were released at almost the exact same point from the center of the mound in 2024, before the slider came out farther towards third base this past year:

Now feels like a good time to remind everyone to look at the Y-axis of this chart. We are dealing with differences in mere inches here, details that would be invisible to the naked eyes of you, me, and everyone else who isn't an experienced player or coach in the big leagues. To the hitters, though, who spend countless hours on the lookout for pitch tipping and any other clue that might tell them what's coming their way, it just might be noticeable. I'd wager this topic was in the general realm of what was discussed between Cease and the Blue Jays a few weeks ago, but it's also important to remember that MLB teams have access to much more expansive release and delivery data than the public.

It felt like Cease was a prime candidate to once again attempt the integration of a changeup or splitter to his arsenal weeks before Schneider confirmed that was the case. Cease himself admitted a couple of years ago that he has long been working hard to add a pitch with arm-side movement, and added that the grip he used for the very slow lollipop changeup we have seen from him on occasion was modelled after Kevin Gausman's splitter. Isn't it funny how things work out sometimes?

Cease is now teammates with Gausman, as well as Trey Yesavage and Jeff Hoffman, three prominent splitter users. Shane Bieber returned from Tommy John with a new kick change. New signing Cody Ponce similarly revamped his changeup overseas. The Blue Jays are a hotbed for plus off-speed pitches, and there can't be many, if any at all, better places for Cease to learn one. The advantages of throwing more competitive pitches are intuitive: More weapons give hitters more to think about at the plate, giving the pitcher a higher chance of going deeper into games. Researchers have developed models to evaluate pitchers, especially starters, with this very concept.

The knock on Cease from a pitch design standpoint has always been that he's a two-pitch guy, but he started to move away from that in the second half of the 2025 season and got rewarded. Once he pushed his combined fastball and slider usage below 80%, opponents were less successful in the aggregate, despite some walk problems at the outset of this strategy (which is to be expected, as control isn't going to be great when tinkering with new pitch types). 

Dylan Cease Monthly Splits, 2025

Month	FF+SL Usage%	K-BB%	wOBA
March/April	81.0%	17.6%	.350
May	91.7%	24.8%	.282
June	92.6%	19.4%	.303
July	85.1%	21.2%	.340
August	71.7%	15.8%	.292
September	74.3%	20.0%	.309

Every changeup iteration he has attempted has achieved the lower spin rates we typically see from the pitch, but the vertical movements resemble that of a dead-zone fastball (15" IVB). The ones he has tried in recent years have been well under 80 mph, far too slow to be unpredictable. I wonder if his newest attempt at an off-speed pitch will be classified as a splitter or a kick change if and when the Blue Jays can bring it to life, seeing as his repeated problem to this point has been a lack of vertical separation from the heater. Getting the pitch to meaningfully fall off the table is something he has not been able to do yet, and it'll figure to be one of his first objectives as he gets to work this winter.

Dylan Cease Career Changeup Specs (2019-25)

Pitches	MPH	RPM	IVB	Arm-Side HB
710	79.0	1,666	15.2"	6.1"

The tidbits from Cease's introductory press conference, as well as John Schneider's insights into the conversations he has had with his new team, should be reassuring to the fanbase. An organization that prides itself to this degree on clubhouse culture and bringing the right personalities into the fold would not hand out $210 million on a whim, and Cease has shown every indication that he's ready to admit to and work through his previous shortfalls, diligently try to be the ace he's expected to be, and take pride in being a Blue Jay.

The fact that the team dug this far into the weeds as to how they'd help him get better before they even spoke with him is no doubt reflective of the current standard for free agency meetings. Yet, because it helped persuade him to sign here, it's also a testament to the lengths they are willing to go in order to bring the game's best talent to Toronto. If it was good enough for Dylan Cease, more are sure to follow. The prospect of his evolution for 2026 and beyond looms excitingly.

View full article