What Can We Learn About the Blue Jays From Statcast’s Newest Bat Tracking Metrics?

[Owen Hill]

Have you ever wondered which pitchers actually get the biggest whiffs? What it actually means when we say a hitter’s timing is off? If a batter is getting tied up or flailing?

Statcast and Baseball Savant have given baseball nerds like us the ability to quantify all that, and so much more, with the recent release of swing timing and miss distance. Mike Petriello provided an in-depth breakdown of the new metrics and did a great job contextualizing what they actually mean in his article for MLB.com. I’d encourage you to check out Petriello’s article and play around with the new leaderboards for yourself, but first, stick with me here as I put a Toronto Blue Jays lens on the brand new swing and miss distance and timing metrics. 

There’s a lot of fun to be had in looking at outlier individual events like the largest swing and miss distance induced.

Since the middle of 2023, as far back as we have access to this stuff, Clayton Kershaw holds the all-time record with one of his patented big breaking curveballs thrown to Ronny Mauricio in June of 2025, which Mauricio missed by an astounding 57.5 inches – almost five feet!

José Berríos holds the top spot among Blue Jays pitchers when it comes to the all-time biggest whiff with this June 2025 slurve that made Iván Herrera miss by 37.7 inches.

It makes a lot of sense that Berríos, who at his best is throwing frisbee-like breaking balls, has the ability to create such a big whiff when you consider that the average swing and miss on breakers is the largest among the three pitch groups (fastballs, offspeed, and breaking). The average whiff on a breaking ball misses by 4.7 inches compared to 3.7 inches on offspeed and just 1.3 inches on fastballs.

However, if I gave you a million guesses, I doubt you’d ever guess the Blue Jay pitcher who’s induced both the second and third biggest whiffs.

Unless, of course, the first name that came to your mind was journeyman reliever Trevor Richards, who spent parts of four seasons with the Jays from 2021-2024 and has finished with an ERA below four in just one of his nine big league seasons.

In 2023, Richards got Giancarlo Stanton waving at a filthy 82 mph changeup in the dirt for a whiff of 35.1 inches. It still stands as the second-largest whiff from any Jays pitcher.

And in 2024, he got Trey Cabbage to miss by 32.9 inches on a similar, 80 mph changeup, which holds the third spot.

The Blue Jay pitcher with the biggest swing and miss distance induced in 2026 is likely a little easier to guess, because it came on a Trey Yesavage splitter, which Riley Greene missed by 27.3 inches.

The Jays hitter with the biggest whiff is actually the fourth largest whiff of “all-time” (again, since mid-2023). At the beginning of June 2026, Kazuma Okamoto was befuddled by a classic Chris Sale slider, which he missed by 47.8 inches.

Aside from bringing focus to a one-pitch low-light, the new numbers can actually help explain a lot about Okamoto and why his approach is leading to some of the streakiness we’ve seen from him early in his big league career.

One of the new terms that came along with this update is the “flawed swing”. Flawed Swing percentage is the rate at which a batter swings and is neither “lined up”, “centred”, or “on time”. Essentially, any of the swings you saw above are extreme examples of flawed swings. It’s the opposite of what a hitter is trying to do. Petriello explains in his article that flawed swings lead literally to a 0% contact rate and a .000 average.

Seven percent of swings across MLB are flawed.

12% of Okamoto’s swings have been flawed so far in 2026. It’s the highest mark among Blue Jays hitters, which passes the eye test when evaluating his free-swinging approach.

It’s certainly not a good thing that 12% of Okamoto’s swings can be written off, and seeing him bring that down would almost guarantee a drop in his sixth percentile whiff rate (34.3%) and third percentile strikeout rate (32.7%).

Digging in a bit further, Okamoto is actually exactly league average when it comes to being both on time and getting the ball centred on his bat. It’s just when it comes to verticality (swinging over or under the ball) that we see him start to slip. This tells me that he’s probably swinging over a lot of breaking balls and under a lot of fastballs.

I also don’t want to give the impression that stacking a lineup full of hitters with low flawed swing rates is the new market inefficiency. Munetaka Murakami, Kyle Schwarber and Nick Kurtz all have top 10 wRC+’s so far this season, yet each has a worse flawed swing rate than Okamoto, with Murakami leading baseball at 17%. Of course, a flawed swing isn’t a good result, but if it happens with less than two strikes, it’s actually a better result than putting the ball in play weakly and making an out. For example, Ke’Bryan Hayes currently has an 11 wRC+ on the season, but has the lowest flawed swing rate among qualified hitters.

Flawed swings are fun to look at, but as far as I can tell early on, there are really good and really bad hitters on both sides on the margins. They still count for just one strike, the exact same as if you hit a fly ball that would have been a homer had it stayed fair.

On the pitching side of things, as you might guess, Dylan Cease leads the Jays in flawed swing rate at 14%, about double the league average, and the ninth highest mark among qualified pitchers.

Following Cease’s recent 11-strikeout start against the Phillies, Codify put out this stat:

One of the other main functions of the newly released metrics is the average miss distance. Petriello explains in his article that while in a vacuum a miss by five feet and a miss by 0.5 inches are no different on paper, pitchers that rack up the biggest whiff distance on average outperform pitchers that miss bats by smaller margins.

So you’ll be surprised to hear that Patrick Corbin’s whiffs are by an average of 4.6 inches, which is the highest among Jays pitchers.

It starts to add up a little more clearly when you consider that breaking balls already get the largest whiff distance, and Corbin’s fastball is running an absurdly low 9.4% whiff rate, and average miss distance needs a “miss” to be calculated.

If we sort by individual pitches, Trey Yesavage's splitter is the Blue Jays pitch that gets the largest whiff on average at 6.7 inches, which completely passes the eye test.

There’s a ton of other fun tidbits to dig up, and some new stats I didn’t even mention, like perfect contact – the opposite of a flawed swing – and competitive swing rate, but I’ll leave you with perhaps the funniest thing I learned when digging through all of this new information:

Tyler Rogers throws the slowest sinker in baseball. It averages 83.1 mph. Yet, hitters are late on it more than any other pitch in baseball.

58% of the time that Rogers gets a swing on his sinker, the opposing hitter is late on it. That’s 10% more than Jhoan Duran’s 100.2 mph four-seamer, and 16% more than Louis Varland’s 98.4 mph heater.

There’s so much more to learn about how we can use these new numbers to help inform our analysis of players going forward, but I hope this article was a good introduction and helped you better understand some of your Toronto Blue Jays.

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[Hill]

Really cool stuff!