Owen Hill

It’s not often that a team gets to add a former Cy Young winner to its rotation in the middle of June, but that’s exactly what the Blue Jays did on Tuesday afternoon when Shane Bieber made his season debut. Bieber’s return puts the Jays’ starting rotation as close to full strength as it's been since Cody Ponce blew out his ACL in the third inning of his own Blue Jays debut all the way back in March, but the best version of this rotation includes a much better version of Bieber than we saw in this start. Across 3.2 innings against the Astros, Bieber threw 75 pitches, allowing four runs on nine hits, including three consecutive solo homers in the fourth, and a total of 10 hard-hit balls. The important thing is that Bieber was actually able to get on a Major League mound and make a start. The Blue Jays will be more concerned with how he recovers from this than with the results, but the expectations for his performance going forward have to be much higher than what he showed here. The Jays will also be concerned with the underlying numbers, because they matched the poor results. Bieber’s fastball averaged 91.7 MPH, down almost a full mile compared to the 92.6 he got out of it in 2025. Bieber also forced only six whiffs, none of which were on his fastball. A ratio of 10 hard hit balls to six swings and misses is not a very sustainable practice. There’s no positives to find in his velo being down, but in all fairness, Bieber’s never been a stuff guy – he hasn’t averaged 93 MPH on his fastball since 2020. Instead, his ability to mix and locate five different pitches has helped him put up many impressive statistical seasons with Cleveland over the years. From 2019 through two starts in 2024 before undergoing UCL surgery, Bieber threw 728.1 innings and allowed just a 3.02 ERA for the Guardians. It’s what the Jays hoped they were acquiring when they traded for him at the 2025 trade deadline, and for the most part, it’s what they got down the stretch and deep into the playoffs. Bieber followed up a 3.57 ERA across 40.1 regular-season innings after the trade deadline with 18.2 innings and a 3.86 ERA through game seven of the World Series. After Bieber opted into his player option for just $12M at the beginning of the offseason, concerns were raised about some persisting health issues from that 2024 elbow surgery. Those concerns were vindicated when Bieber’s spring training build-up was delayed with forearm fatigue and elbow inflammation cited as he started the season on the injured list. His rehab process was extensive as well. Bieber made five starts between three minor league levels on his way back to the big leagues, and while the results don’t mean much of anything, he did get hit hard in those as well. Across 17 innings, he had a 6.88 ERA and struck out just 14. His velocity was also reported to be down in many of those. It’s not unusual to see established major leaguers struggle in minor league rehab outings and then turn it on once they get back to the big leagues, but that’s not what we saw in Bieber’s start against the Astros. Is it time to press the panic button on Bieber? Absolutely not. Regardless of the team’s need for dependable starting pitching, Bieber has shown he can be effective without elite-elite stuff as recently as October, and with some more effective pitch mixing and location, we’re sure to see him get back to being a reliable option every fifth day. The current shape of the rotation also gives Bieber essentially unlimited runway. Bieber came in to fill a slot that had been a bullpen day since Max Scherzer went back on the IL in early June, and if we’re honest, it was often a bullpen day even when Scherzer was making the starts. Even then, if you consider Dylan Cease, Kevin Gausman, and Trey Yesavage ahead of him on the depth chart, the Jays have been running out Scherzer and Patrick Corbin to various degrees of ineffectiveness for the better part of this season. Obviously, if Bieber can get back to anything close to his Cy Young form, he raises the Blue Jays’ ceiling drastically, but even if he ends up in some sort of five-and-dive routine, he’ll have raised the floor of the pitching staff. The Jays have thrown the fourth most innings out of the bullpen in 2026, and Bieber’s ability to provide some length should help the Jays find more days off for Louis Varland, Jeff Hoffman, Tyler Rogers, and Mason Fluharty, who are all top 12 in reliever appearances. Unfortunately, we didn’t see the ceiling or floor-raising version of Shane Bieber in that first outing on Tuesday afternoon, but if he can continue to shake off some rust going forward, he absolutely transforms the starting rotation.

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 numbers. 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 miss distance 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 actually has 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, even though he 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 getting to see a pitcher's average miss distance. Petriello explains in his article that while a miss by five feet and a miss by half an inch are no different on paper, pitchers that rack up the biggest miss distance on average outperform pitchers that miss bats by smaller margins. So you’ll be surprised to hear that Patrick Corbin’s whiffs have come at 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 have the largest average miss distance, and Corbin’s fastball is running an absurdly low 9.4% whiff rate. Average miss distance needs a “miss” to be calculated. If we sort by individual pitches, Trey Yesavage's splitter is the pitch with the largest average whiff on the team, 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.

The Blue Jays have placed an emphasis on defense when it comes to roster building for years now. They’ve gone out of their way to trade for notoriously good defenders like Matt Chapman, Daulton Varsho, Myles Straw, and Andrés Giménez. They’ve found value in defensive-minded free agents like Kevin Kiermaier and even turned fringe roster pickups like Ernie Clement, Tyler Heineman, and Nathan Lukes into important pieces on winning teams, each of them with high defensive floors as essential skills. The Jays have long understood that preventing the other team from scoring a run is just as good as scoring one of your own. This philosophy has paid off, because the Jays have been one of baseball’s best defensive organizations in recent seasons. Baseball Savant explains Fielding Run Value (FRV) as, “Statcast’s metric for capturing a player’s measurable defensive performance by converting all of Statcast’s individual defensive metrics from different scales onto the same run-based scale, which can then be read as a player being worth X runs above or Y runs below average.” That’s baseball nerd for “Fielding Run Value is a statistic that takes into account a bunch of different defensive stats and combines them into one number.” Similar to WAR, players accumulate FRV throughout a season, they can gain both positive and negative fielding runs, and the larger the sample we’re working with, the more we can read into it. Blue Jays players accumulated more FRV than any other team in both 2024 and ‘25. And if you’re more of a traditionalist, and analytics aren’t for you, just take the fact that the Jays also won back-to-back American League Team Gold Glove awards in 2023 and ‘24 and enjoy the rest of the article. Defense is obviously something the organization has taken a lot of pride in, which is why the errors piling up early in 2026 feels so uncharacteristic. Errors are back-breaking plays. Best case scenario, they allow a runner to advance a base, and at their worst, they allow a runner that should have been out to reach base, or score a run. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the Jays have been one of the worst defending teams in baseball this season when it comes to errors, yet they remain near the top of the leaderboard when it comes to total FRV. There could be a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, errors are as subjective as they’ve ever been. An official scorer watches the game and determines how to “score” each play. If you’re a long-time fan, you may have heard or noticed that fewer and fewer plays are being scored as errors, and you’d be right. In the 2000 season, players accumulated 3447 errors, compared to 2451 in 2025. That’s almost 1000 more errors over the same number of games, or a 29% decrease in the number of errors just 25 years later. Without having gone through all of the plays, there’s a chance that official scorers have been particularly tough on the Jays' fielders compared to those on other teams when it comes to determining what’s an error and what isn’t. Errors, as we understand them, also don’t tell the full story. For example, it’s more than possible that a good defender with great range gets to a ball and then makes an error that a slower defender wouldn’t have even had the chance to make a play on. The other, much more concrete explanation is that the Blue Jays have remained close to the top of the FRV leaderboard because their catchers are elite. It’s well known that Alejandro Kirk is one of the best defensive catchers in the sport. Since 2022, he’s accumulated the second most fielding run value of any player in baseball, behind only Patrick Bailey of the Giants. But he’s been hurt since early April! This year, the Jays’ backstops – Tyler Heineman, Brandon Valenzuela, and Kirk (before his injury) – have combined to lead catching groups in fielding run value. Catchers are unique when it comes to FRV because they have way more opportunities to collect it. Blocking, framing, and throwing are weighed heavily in the formula, which is why we often see catchers separated from the other positions when it comes to tracking their defensive value. If we sort FRV by infielders and outfielders, excluding catchers, we can see that the Jays are still good, with a top 10 ranking, but not nearly as elite on the whole. So, what can we take away from this when it comes to the Jays and their defense? Well, if you’re a Jays fan, feel comforted that during the years they were considered one of the best defensive teams in baseball, total errors and fielding percentage saw them more as an average team anyway. There’s a lot more to baseball defense than these traditional stats take into account. You can also feel comforted that defensive statistics are among those that take the longest to normalize. Small samples can throw them out of whack very quickly. Fielders have far fewer opportunities than hitters or pitchers, so one or two weird or unlucky plays can make a great defender look average when it comes to advanced defensive metrics, especially this early in the season. At the same time, what has happened on the field has had consequences for the Blue Jays’ actual record. Ernie Clement, who was elite as a defender in 2025, with +10 fielding runs as a utility infielder, has been worth -2 as a defender so far in 2026. Daulton Varsho and Andrés Giménez are regarded as two of the game’s best up-the-middle defenders, but they’ve also fallen behind the pace, having been worth just +1 and +2 defensive runs, respectively, after being worth +6 apiece in injury-shortened 2025 seasons. The Jays are off to a disappointing start to a season that they entered with very high expectations, so keep an eye on their defensive statistics going forward. Once they start to improve, expect their record to improve along with it.