Shape of the Blue Jays: Gausman, Sánchez, Miles

Welcome to Shape of the Blue Jays, my column where I dig into Statcast numbers to analyze recent pitch shape and swing shape trends for Toronto Blue Jays players and discuss how they have impacted their performance. Click here to read the last edition.

Quick Hits: Roster Shuffle

• The periphery of the Jays' roster is going to look a little different this weekend in Baltimore. The team announced Wednesday afternoon they'd traded for old friend Connor Seabold, who was recently DFA'd by the Tigers. Seabold, a right-handed pitcher, was with Toronto in spring training and has spent the past two years as a single-inning reliever but is capable of starting as well.
• In 11 appearances spanning 15.2 innings for Detroit, he was working on a 3.45 ERA, 20.3% K rate, and 7.2% BB rate, allowing two homers before getting cut loose. With Dylan Cease hitting the IL, the Jays needed another arm who can eat multiple innings as a spot starter/bulk reliever. Seabold figures to factor into their pitching plans this weekend.
• Later Wednesday evening, Jeff Passan reported that the Blue Jays were going to call up Charles McAdoo from Triple-A Buffalo. The team made the move official on Thursday afternoon.
• McAdoo was ranked by Baseball America as Toronto's 24th-best prospect before the season but got bumped up to 19th in their first midseason revision after a strong start in Buffalo (.250/.356/.436). He had plus raw power coming into the year and stole a career-high 34 bases in 2025, but BA gave his hit tool an underwhelming 30 grade in their preseason report. While he knows how to lay off pitches out of the zone, his approach borders on being too passive. However, he struck out less than 20% of the time at Buffalo this year, and his zone contact rate was up to 89.3%. McAdoo is a natural third baseman who can play first and has started to get game reps at second base this year.

Kevin Gausman

Kevin Gausman threw a season-high 19.1% sliders two starts ago against the Pirates. He mentioned to Jays broadcasters in an in-game interview a couple of days later that he'd been fighting a lack of feel for his splitter, although Pittsburgh isn't a good slider-hitting team, so it was a defensible adjustment from a game-planning standpoint as well. It worked, as he pitched into the seventh and also recorded a season-high 39% swing-and-miss rate.

Wednesday's start against the Marlins was different as he dialed his fastball usage up to 62.1%, good for second-highest in a single game this year, but he was fighting himself the whole time. His first batter of the game, Xavier Edwards, worked a 10-pitch double, which would become a common theme throughout the afternoon. Just five days after setting that new season-high, Gausman had a single-game low on the swing-and-miss front. Miami put a ton of balls in play, spoiled pitches, and Gausman battled his command about as much as we've seen. Despite all that, he earned a hard-fought no-decision (5 IP, 1 ER, 6 H, 5 K, 2 BB, 95 P), inducing a couple of key double plays and getting out of multiple jams. For a pitching staff as shorthanded as Toronto's right now, Gausman powering through on Wednesday and completing that fifth inning was crucial.

Jesús Sánchez

Jesús Sánchez's 136 wRC+ in May (entering play on May 28) is second only to Brandon Valenzuela among Blue Jay hitters. His SLG on the season is up to .456 after his big weekend against the Pirates and the grand slam he hit off former teammate Sandy Alcantara on Tuesday. I gave Sánchez a spot in this column a few weeks ago, noting he was tied for the largest year-over-year decline in the majors in bat speed at the time. Good news: He's swinging harder this month. His average bat speed is up 1.5 mph in May compared to April, and he's doing a better job of catching up to fastballs in particular.

The glass-half-empty prognosis of Sánchez's performance is that his hard-hit rate is down nearly 10% from April, his chase rate is up over 40% for the month of May, and his zone contact rate is down below 80% this month too. His walk rate on the season is a minuscule 4%, and while he's hitting plenty of line drives, which appears to be intentional, his May BABIP is an inflated .408, and he's outperforming his xwOBA by about 40 points. It's nice to see the bat speed rebounding, and the extra-base hits he's been bringing lately have been much needed, but I can't foresee him sustaining a 136 wRC+ if he continues to swing this much.

Spencer Miles

Spencer Miles has easily been this team's feel-good story of the year so far. When the Jays took him in the Rule 5 draft, he had never pitched above A-ball or thrown more than 7.1 innings in a season since his senior year at Missouri, thanks to a checkered injury history. Considering all that, concerns about overworking him are always going to be warranted, but as a bulk reliever every fifth day, he has gone above and beyond everything that was expected of him coming in. This month, his ERA is a pristine 1.53 (1.70 FIP, 2.75 xFIP). He's slated to pitch in the Sunday finale of the four-game set against the Orioles opposite Kyle Bradish.

Last week at Yankee Stadium (4.1 IP, 0 R, 2 H, 6 K, 1 BB), Miles went sinker-slider-heavy to righties and suffocated lefties with his curveball. To both sides, the curve returned a 55% swing-and-miss rate on the evening. On Tuesday against the Marlins, he threw sinkers to righties 48.3% of the time, a mark he only reached twice prior, and used the sinker and curve in perfect tandem to lefties. Ever since he started getting stretched out, he's been laying off the four-seamer and turning to the sinker as his primary fastball while his curveball and slider play off it. All four of his pitch types grade out as above-average according to PitchingBot's stuff model. He doesn't get much swing and miss but owns a 63rd-percentile K rate because his arsenal lends itself to plenty of called strikes. The curveball is his only offering that isn't running a groundball rate above 55%, and his quality contact suppression is up there with the best in baseball right now. 

All stats entering May 28, 2026.