Braydon Fisher Is Ready for More Responsibility

The natural state of a major league bullpen features a lot of in-season personnel turnover thanks to injuries, matchup planning for a given series, and the relative expendability of pitchers who fill a short-inning role. Thanks to the Blue Jays' ample starting pitching depth, as well as the fact that they have multiple Rule 5 draft picks (Angel Bastardo and Spencer Miles) fighting to break camp in the bullpen, Braydon Fisher is on the bubble to start the regular season in Toronto. He has three minor league options remaining and pitched mostly in low-leverage spots by the time the postseason rolled around in 2025.

Yes, there were multiple proven closers on the free agent market after a year in which Rogers reaped the financial benefits of a World Series run. Yes, the Blue Jays signed none of them, but this will still be the strongest bullpen they've had to start a season in quite some time. Behind Jeff Hoffman, John Schneider will have Tyler Rogers, Louis Varland, and a new-and-improved Brendon Little at his disposal in the late innings. The dependability of Rogers and a full season of Varland are especially encouraging additions, considering the bullpen the Jays entered 2025 with.

Fisher's current status, then, is far more a testament to the group around him than his own shortcomings. I frankly don't know how many other teams would even have to question whether Fisher would make their Opening Day roster. In exactly 50 innings in 2025, he did more things really well than you might realize. He was part of a group of just 32 pitchers (of the 339 that threw at least 50 innings) that had a strikeout rate above 30% and an average exit velocity below 90 mph. It's how he got those results, though, that stands out.

You see, Fisher's arsenal features an almost exclusive slider-curveball dependence. Only Atlanta's Tyler Kinley threw a higher percentage of breaking balls in 2025. Fisher's fastball has decent velocity at 95-96 mph, but its movement patterns (high-carry, cutting action) are pretty much exactly in line with what you'd expect given his arm angle and propensity for spinning the ball. So, he just doesn't throw it very often. He's extremely curveball-heavy to lefties and slider-heavy to righties, and it has worked out for him so far.

MLB Breaking Ball Usage% Leaders, 2025

Together, his 12-6 curveball and bullet slider frequently vexed opposing hitters. A ~75th-percentile average exit velocity against doesn't do Fisher's quality contact suppression skills justice; pitchers have little influence over that anyway. His overall groundball rate was only 36.4% in 2025, well below-average, but at the pitch type level, we can see there was an element of strategy to that. His curveball was actually quite efficient at generating grounders, while his slider (along with his four-seamer, when he used it) was a popup machine. His overall popup rate for the season was 11%. That's elite territory. A fairly large proportion of total contact against Fisher's two primary pitches is essentially guaranteed to be harmless.

Fisher's GB% and PU% by Pitch Type, 2025

This feels like a good time to remind everyone that Fisher was the lone piece of the return package when the Blue Jays traded Cavan Biggio to the Dodgers in 2024. At the time of the trade, Fisher had all of 11.2 innings above Double A to his name, and some pretty severe walk issues plagued him throughout the minors. The results didn't immediately get better in Buffalo either, but he made one key change to his approach: getting a head start.

Fisher's Command Indicators, Triple-A, 2024

Sometimes, throwing strike one more often really does allow everything else to fall into place. When Fisher started 2025 in Buffalo, that first-pitch strike rate climbed to 55%. In the big leagues, it sat just a hair under 60%. This is a guy who walked between 13% and 18% of batters he faced at essentially every step of the minors, and out of nowhere in 2025, he learned to throw strikes with consistency. The pitch models back that up as well, as his location was given perfectly average grades by both Cameron Grove's PitchingBot and Eno Sarris's Stuff+ model. As a former fourth-round pick out of high school in 2018, the stuff was never a big question. Whatever the Jays did to fix his command has proved consequential, to say the least.

There were occasions in 2025 when Fisher was thrown into the fire out of necessity. In hindsight, his two-inning, four-strikeout masterclass at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa to seal a 2-1 win for the Blue Jays in 11 innings on September 15 stands out as one of the team's most pivotal moments on their way to an AL East title. In fact, his strikeout of Junior Caminero to end that game was the second-most important strikeout by a Jays pitcher all regular season, according to Statcast win probability, behind only Mason Fluharty's famous ambush of Shohei Ohtani in August. That night in Tampa accounts for a large percentage of Fisher's total high-leverage work as a big leaguer (only 8.1 innings, beware of small sample size), but he does have a 1.22 FIP and a 2.88 xFIP in those spots. He has been up to the task when he has been needed most.

And yet, with the Blue Jays exhausting every possible option as they look to bring that elusive championship home in 2026, it's far from a lock that he'll be in the building to face the Athletics on March 27.

It won't be Fisher's fault if he doesn't make the cut. Things have gone mostly according to plan so far this spring through the first 16 batters he's faced (as of March 10):

Fisher's Key Indicators, 2025 vs. 2026 Spring Training

It sounds crazy at first that a 25-year-old reliever who misses bats, generates weak contact of all kinds, and excelled in his first taste of high-leverage action for a pennant-winning team might not make the cut next spring, but in their treatment of Braydon Fisher so far, the Blue Jays have exemplified the ways in which they've improved their player management over the past couple of years: They took a flier on a high-ceiling relief prospect hoping to find a silver lining after one of their most tenured hitters didn't pan out, oversaw significant improvements to his command and projectability, gave him the big league run time he had earned, and still amassed contingency plan after contingency plan for the bullpen following his first season. 

Fisher's flexibility with respect to his minor league options makes him a wholly undeserving candidate to be the odd man out on Opening Day, but again, that's just how the modern bullpen works. He showed more than enough in 2025 to convince the organization that he could be a key part of their relief corps for the immediate future, and if breaking camp isn't in the cards, he will surely arrive at the first sign of injury or underperformance. A young pitcher with plus stuff and damage suppression skills can't be held down for long.