Matthew Creally

After the disappointing news that Anthony Santander would be sidelined for five to six months following surgery on his left shoulder, Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins quieted the masses by declaring the team was "not significantly involved" in the market for additions to the outfield. The surplus of corner outfielders on the big league roster would finally be free to sort itself out with spring training games getting underway soon. So much for that. On Friday morning, the Jays double-backed on their unsuspecting fanbase by trading for Jesús Sánchez. Joey Loperfido is going back to Houston in return, rejoining the team that drafted him five years ago. The Yusei Kikuchi trade tree has grown another branch. The Blue Jays swapped one outfielder for another in this one. For those unfamiliar, Sánchez is a big lefty-hitting right fielder by trade who is coming off a down year but has been a quality bat at this level before; he debuted in 2020 and is under team control for this year and next. He has a prodigiously thunderous bat – here's a home run of his from a couple years ago that threatened to leave the cavernous Marlins Park, and who could forget this demolition in 2022 – yet he has never hit more than 18 homers or 25 doubles in a season, and is decidedly a power-over-plate-skills type of hitter. Sánchez's best years to this point were 2023 and 2024 with Miami. He finished with a wRC+ of 108 and 101, and fWAR totals of 1.4 and 1.6, respectively. He doesn't possess remarkable sprint speed but is more of a factor on the bases than he might seem at first glance, with 29 steals over the past two seasons. The defensive analytics can't seem to agree on how good he is in the field: In 2025, he saved 7 runs in right field according to DRS, but was a net neutral according to Statcast's fielding run value. He has posted 99th-percentile maximum exit velocities before and hit some of the most physically impressive home runs you can find. He also just recorded the first single-season strikeout rate under 25% of his career. There's clearly a lot to build on here, and the Blue Jays are going to take their shot at getting the most out of him. The Astros traded for him at the 2025 deadline in hopes of doing the same thing, but did not succeed, as Sánchez hit under .200 and posted a .611 OPS in 48 games for them. Still, Atkins acknowledged he has "always liked" Sánchez and has been interested in acquiring him for a while. It's not hard to see why. Sánchez has a strong reputation among analytically-inclined fans, thanks in large part to his 93rd-percentile bat speed. His barrel rate has been 11% or better in each of the past three seasons, and he has always crushed the baseball. What's impressive about his bat speed is that he achieves it despite having a short swing: No hitter in baseball with a below-average swing length and at least 200 PA in 2025 had a higher average bat speed than Sánchez's 75.9 mph. Displaying this much strength while remaining short to the ball is an extremely rare trait, even in an age in which teams are actively seeking hitters with that fast-short swing archetype. Jesús Sánchez Swing Mechanics Comps, 2025 Hitter Bat Speed Swing Length Swing Tilt Jesús Sánchez 75.9 6.9' 28° Bobby Witt Jr. 74.4 7.0' 29° Drake Baldwin 75.4 7.2' 31° Gunnar Henderson 75.5 7.3' 29° Atkins also made it sound like Sánchez will get more than his fair share of playing time against right-handed pitching, which is welcome news for a team that was looking to add power from the left side all offseason. Even in 2025, a year that saw Sánchez record a 93 wRC+ after that post-trade backslide in Houston, he had a 104 wRC+ versus righties. For his career, he has a 111 wRC+ and a SLG of .450 in those matchups. Those career marks are both better than what Nathan Lukes, Toronto's other remaining lefty-hitting corner outfielder with Santander sidelined, managed in 2025. Despite that, Atkins was quick to heap praise on Lukes during his media availability on Friday, saying the team wouldn't be afraid to slot both him and Sánchez in the outfield while moving Addison Barger to the infield on certain days when the opposing starting pitcher is right-handed. Lukes's plate coverage and his ability to put the ball in play are sure to come in handy, and the Jays do not appear to be shying away from Tetris-ing their lineup vs. RHP for the time being. All indications point to Sánchez, Lukes, Barger, and Kazuma Okamoto having fluid roles in these situations to start the year. Even though Sánchez has hardly ever been above-average at anything that doesn't have to do with power from an offensive standpoint, he progressed in other areas of his game in 2025. Not to a shocking extent or anything, but enough to make one wonder why his results sagged: Jesús Sánchez Contact & Discipline, 2023-25 Year K% BB% Zone Contact% Chase% 2023 26.6% 9.5% 78.9% 31.4% 2024 26.1% 7.6% 78.1% 36.1% 2025 22.9% 8.5% 82.2% 30.6% One of the reasons his talent hasn't fully translated to results is the fact that he hasn't pulled the ball enough, even during his most productive seasons. Too many loud outs to the biggest part of the ballpark isn't the most conducive use of the raw power Sánchez has. He also reversed this trend in 2025, going from a decidedly below-average 12.2% pull-air rate the year before to a 16.9% mark, a hair above league average. Above everything else, there are two main things holding Sánchez back. Most importantly, he simply cannot hit lefties. I wish I were exaggerating, but he's probably a non-option to face them. In fairness, the Jays have the likes of Okamoto, Davis Schneider, and Ernie Clement to pick up the slack there, but the lineup will be less powerful against southpaws thanks to Sánchez's absence. He ran a 33 wRC+ vs LHP in 2025, slightly reducing his career mark...to 41. He has more than quadruple the amount of plate appearances against righties as a big leaguer. Again, this roster has enough lefty mashers to offset that concern, but his effectiveness being strictly limited to one handedness is a crucial caveat to remember before dreaming too big on his bat speed. The other consistent knock on Sánchez, albeit the one that should theoretically be easier to fix, is that he hits too many groundballs. His groundball rate has sat in the high-40s for most of his career, too high for someone of his skill set. Outlier bat speed and exit velocities become compromised when the hitter cannot lift or pull, which is the dilemma Sánchez was dealing with until 2025, when he started to get a handle on how to pull again. His average contact point moved more than four inches towards the pitcher compared to 2024, and he started turning on the ball without sacrificing contact quantity. Maybe David Popkins and company continue to lean into that? It's also important to note that most of the other outlier fast-short swing guys have steep swing tilts better geared toward hitting the ball in the air (Pete Alonso, Riley Greene, Kyle Stowers). Changing tilt is hard to do year over year, but it might be worthwhile to try for Sánchez. With respect to balls in play, the goal for both him and the Blue Jays should be to make the most of those 100+ mph bullets we know he has in him. It's an exciting opportunity for Toronto's hitting coaches, and an exciting opportunity for the fanbase to watch someone who can do things on the field that no others can. Things didn't work out for Sánchez in Houston, but every underlying hint that suggests 25-homer power and a fearsome righty masher remains. With this move, the Jays have swiftly, intelligently, and calmly responded to the unfortunate timing and circumstance of the Santander injury. Loperfido has an intriguing skill set in his own right and has certainly earned a fair shot in the big leagues by now, but this is a logical chance to take for a team with high aspirations that just took a blow on the injury front, especially when the newcomer's old team happens to be cutting costs. The stars aligned for a hitter with untapped potential to join the Blue Jays at an opportune time. Perhaps Toronto is the place where Jesús Sánchez will truly come into his own.

The roster construction of the past few iterations of the Toronto Blue Jays has introduced fans to the reality that the standard of offensive production for position players varies widely based on how useful they are in the field. Beginning in 2023, the front office and coaching staff placed a strong emphasis on team defense, a priority that's still evident throughout today's roster. Daulton Varsho, and Ernie Clement are examples of guys who have been slam-dunk elite defenders every year, so for them to be considered positive contributors, their hitting doesn't have to be as effective as everyone else in the lineup. The state of affairs was problematic a couple of years ago because players like Varsho and Matt Chapman had very little offensive support around them, leading to the failing of an elite pitching staff and a playoff run that was (and long felt) over before it started. Nowadays, it's more practical to have someone like Clement assuming an everyday role because of the offensive firepower up and down the lineup. Any delightful revelations from those who have less pressure on them to deliver at the plate, such as Clement breaking the all-time single-postseason hits record and Varsho clubbing 20 homers in 71 games in 2025, are merely added bonuses. Few players in baseball illustrate this concept better than Andrés Giménez. With virtually no indication that it was coming, the Blue Jays traded for him last offseason, knowing he was a glove-first guy. From 2022-24, only Dansby Swanson was a more valuable defensive infielder than Giménez, according to Statcast. Someone that integral to run prevention at a premium position doesn't need to be an above-average hitter to be considered a good player. Case in point: In 2023, Giménez posted a 96 wRC+ with the Guardians, just a smidge below league-average offensive production. According to Fangraphs, he was still worth 3.8 WAR, enough to make him a top-eight second baseman in the game. Baseball Reference had him at 5.0 WAR. A below-average hitter who was still worth five wins! All else equal, Giménez probably only needs to maintain a wRC+ of 80 or greater to retain the status of a solid contributor at shortstop. There are usually only three to five position players every year who are that unproductive yet take enough at-bats to qualify for all major awards. Here's the bad news: He couldn't even manage to clear that line in his first season with Toronto. Amidst a handful of injury troubles, Giménez registered a 70 wRC+ in 2025. He was more than fine on defense, finishing with 1.0 fWAR in 101 games, but it was still a career-worst offensive season by almost every metric. I don't think Giménez should aim for a wRC+ of 80. That would be selling him a little short. Sure, he's probably the 10th-best hitter on the team as it is, but he also makes a lot of money: $15.6 million this year, and $23.6 million every year from 2027-29 before the Blue Jays get to decide whether they want to exercise a $23 million club option for 2030. His career wRC+ is 98, and he'll likely be here a while. He's not supposed to be a good hitter every year, but can he be just good enough that, inclusive of his defense, he rejoins the conversation of MLB's elite middle infielders? For those who need a refresher on Giménez's career path, it's been a rather peculiar journey for the focal point of the package Cleveland got from the Mets for Francisco Lindor. His first full season at age 23 was a 141 wRC+, 6.0-fWAR masterclass. Again, his defense has remained every bit as good as it was then, but the ensuing years saw him go from an elite hitter to about average to decidedly below-average to the guy we saw last year. His batting average on balls in play (BABIP) trend over that timespan is a whiplash-inducing roller coaster: Andrés Giménez Hitting, 2022-25 Year wRC+ BABIP lg BABIP 2022 141 .353 .290 2023 96 .289 .297 2024 83 .286 .291 2025 70 .239 .291 Giménez got paid after a 2022 season that, especially in hindsight, was a mirage in some ways. Right off the bat, a .353 BABIP for a guy with a low-80s zone contact rate and a barely-above-average line drive rate is a pretty serious red flag. His wOBA exceeded his xwOBA by 32 points that year, while his batting average cleared his xBA by 38. That's enough top-level evidence to suggest regression lies ahead, and it did: His BABIP returned to league norms for the next two seasons, taking his production to about the same level. In 2025, though, the baseball gods decided to curse him with a polar reversal of the BABIP luck he accrued three years before. Giménez doesn't swing fast or hit the ball hard or lay off bad pitches, and his contact ability is mediocre. He'll likely never be someone who can finagle his way to consistent overperformance on balls in play based on his skill set, but a .239 BABIP is far enough in the other direction that we can assume misfortune is at play at first glance. Let's look at some of the underlying numbers to verify that: Andrés Giménez Advanced Hitting, 2022-25 Year Zone Swing% Chase% Zone Contact% Out-of-Zone Contact% LD% PU% Barrel% EV90 Bat Speed 90 2022 70.9% 38.4% 81.2% 61.0% 24.4% 8.0% 6.2% 102.8 2023 71.0% 40.0% 81.6% 63.5% 21.9% 9.3% 5.5% 102.3 73.8 2024 74.6% 37.4% 84.3% 62.4% 24.0% 6.5% 2.8% 101.0 73.7 2025 67.2% 34.6% 81.6% 64.6% 26.2% 5.6% 3.0% 100.8 74.2 The most immediately concerning patterns here are a slow decline in top-end exit velocity and a barrel rate that has yet to match 2022, but as a whole, I don't see anything warranting a ~50-point drop in BABIP from 2024 to 2025. Sure, he made a little less contact on hittable pitches, but he slightly dialed back his free-swinging ways, hit more line drives, and hit fewer popups. Although his profile remains that of a below-average hitter, he didn't deserve the fate that befell him last year. Another quirk about Giménez that my editor, Leo Morgenstern, astutely pointed out in the early stages of preparing this piece: During his first two years in the league, he was basically a platoon-neutral lefty hitter, if not slightly reverse-platoon. Since then, he has suddenly forgotten how to hit lefty pitching: Year wRC+ vs LHP wRC+ vs RHP xwOBA vs LHP xwOBA vs RHP 2022 159 136 .320 .335 2023 100 95 .301 .296 2024 64 90 .268 .313 2025 39 80 .274 .318 His quality of contact (in tandem with his K/BB rate) has notably declined against same-handed pitching throughout the sample, which mostly boils down to increasingly poor swing decisions and suboptimal launch angles of hard-hit balls. Once again, though, the BABIP monster is the driving force. Observe Giménez's BABIP vs LHP from 2022-25: .386, .300, .277, .213. Such a violent shift across both ends of the spectrum figures to even out in some way. One thing that falls under the radar about Giménez's offensive value: He's a machine on the bases. He stole 20 bases during that magical 2022 campaign before stealing 30 each in 2023 and 2024 once the pitch clock came into the picture. I'm not sure we'll see 30 in 2026 because the quad and ankle injuries he suffered brought him down to 65th-percentile sprint speed (as opposed to 94th-percentile in 2022), but I'm sure the Blue Jays would gladly take 20. For all the things their offense did well in 2025, baserunning was not one of them. They were 12th in the AL in baserunning run value per Statcast, and 14th in stolen bases, ahead of only the Tigers. Giménez has what it takes to move them away from the bottom of the pile. The level of offense the Toronto Blue Jays received from Bo Bichette for most of the past half-decade was nothing short of a luxury at the shortstop position. Andrés Giménez won't hit like that, but he's probably going to be better than 2025 would indicate. Some upward regression to the mean appears to be in order based on the trajectory of his career to this point, and that might be all he needs. Between his baserunning and his world-class defense, a below-average offensive output is just fine. A wRC+ around 80 is likely enough to make him a positive contributor overall, and if he gets into the 90s, he'll approach four-win territory if healthy. That would make him a top-10 shortstop in the game, one with a very similar overall impact to Bichette, albeit with a drastically different style of play. FanGraphs' projection systems seem to agree with this outlook: Giménez's average wRC+ forecast for 2026 between their six distinct models is 90. So, then, let us root for a 10%-below-average performance from Giménez at the plate this year. It'll make his wizardry with the glove that much sweeter.

As consequential as 2025 was for the Blue Jays at the big league level, things were just as promising for their minor league pitching. It's been a long time since they've developed a homegrown starter that has lasted more than a handful of years in MLB before switching teams or roles, and that will have to change if they hope to be competitive long-term. After floating in the proverbial abyss for most of our short-term memory, the system has surged over the past year and a half, with Trey Yesavage, Johnny King, and Gage Stanifer breaking out to project as future starters. Khal Stephen was also part of that group before he was dealt to Cleveland for Shane Bieber at the deadline. Ricky Tiedemann is essentially fully recovered from Tommy John surgery. The Blue Jays' recent player development hires, including amateur scouting director Marc Tramuta and minor league pitching director Justin Lehr, shortly preceded this wave of positive momentum. While the recent lack of quality pitching to come from within has drawn the ire of many fans who care for sustainability (and has been offset by ownership's willingness to invest in winning), early returns suggest the Blue Jays have the right minds in place to end that drought. Absent from the list of pitchers who saw their stock rise in 2025 is righty Jake Bloss, who made six starts before tearing his UCL. He won't be fully recovered for spring training but should be back at some point later in the year. Bloss, who will be 25 in June, was the headliner in the prospect package Toronto managed to secure for Yusei Kikuchi, joining the franchise alongside Joey Loperfido and Will Wagner. He hasn't yet gotten outstanding results in Triple A, with an ERA over 6.50 in 14 starts since the trade. Command is the main culprit; his walk rate in Buffalo is a few ticks over 11%, and his zone rate is around 45% – considerably below-average. On a positive note, he has the stuff to succeed, with an in-zone swing-and-miss rate exceeding 15% post-trade. Heads were turned last week when FanGraphs listed Bloss as the Blue Jays' third-best prospect in their annual top prospect ranking, giving him a future value (FV) grade of 50 on the traditional 20-80 scouting scale. Their evaluators are optimistic about his chances to become a regular mid-rotation starter at the MLB level. Of course, some other outlets remain a little more skeptical after the injury; Baseball America has Bloss at #9 in the system, and MLB Pipeline's most recent update has him at #8. That FanGraphs ranked him so highly even after major elbow surgery, though, is nothing short of a ringing endorsement. That the Blue Jays got him and two others for what ended up being a pure rental was nothing short of a decisive victory. What's unfortunate about Bloss's injury is that the Jays had already begun to tinker with his pitch mix in an intriguing way over the 2024-25 offseason. He entered last year relying noticeably more on his changeup while dialing back his sinker. He also cast his sweeper aside after reworking his gyro slider, which was already a good out pitch, into a version that had more drop and more cut, effectively becoming a hybrid of the two slider shapes he was previously working with. How this all changes post-surgery is something to watch, but in general, pitchers seem less affected by UCL surgery now than they ever have. That's a good thing, because Bloss's stuff comps are rather encouraging. He leads with a mid-90s four-seamer with tons of carry and notable cut action. When accounting for his nearly seven feet of extension, the heater is reminiscent of Padres reliever Jeremiah Estrada's notorious fastball shape circa roughly 2023 when he was still with the Cubs, before he added a few ticks of velocity. A more recent comp for the pitch would be Red Sox reliever Justin Slaten's four-seamer. Estrada's 2023 fastball was an above-average pitch per Stuff+. Slaten's is one of the best in the game. Against righties, that new slider became Bloss's primary pitch in the starts leading up to his injury. It has somewhat of an unusual movement profile, with roughly seven inches of sweep (just a few short of being considered a sweeper) and positive induced vertical break, as well as mid-to-high-80s velocity. It compares closely to the ride-sweep shape coined by White Sox reliever Jordan Leasure, who isn't a household name but still notched a near 40% swing-and-miss rate with the pitch in 2025. It was one of the more effective sliders in MLB by run value (+7). Bloss's knack for cutting the ball makes him a good bet to handle same-handed hitters once he gets to MLB. Meanwhile, it was the changeup that was his preferred secondary against lefties. It doesn't have a special amount of separation from his fastball in terms of vertical movement or velocity, but it averaged nearly 13 inches of arm-side run, which contrasts nicely with the fastball's tendency to cut. Metrically, it likely won't be a plus pitch; it averaged 87 mph with less drop and run than most of the premier changeups around the league. Its closest shape comps are from 2023, a mostly uninspiring group led by Mike Clevinger, who got a 90 Stuff+ on the offering. If I had to guess, Bloss's newfound emphasis on it since coming to the Blue Jays has more to do with arsenal effects than anything else. In his TL;DR blurb on FanGraphs, former Pirates scout Brendan Gawlowski mentioned that a slower arm path might make Bloss's changeup easier to detect, but it runs enough that lefties don't usually square it up. His arsenal is rounded out by a sharp 12-6 curveball he deploys to both sides. It falls off the table with high-70s velocity and considerable glove-side action, often throwing off hitters expecting something else. It's biomechanically similar to the curve thrown by Giants starter Adrian Houser, which didn't receive glowing reports from pitch models by any means but was still useful last year thanks to Houser's elite command and deep pitch mix. The slider is Bloss's best breaking ball; he'll use this one more for effect. From time to time, he'll also mix in a sinker to righties, which runs like the changeup with a few more ticks of velocity and carry. The sinker's speed and movement profile has a top comp of new A's reliever Mark Leiter Jr. It's not a special pitch by any means, but it does the job to keep hitters guessing. He may have missed out on the shared success that Toronto's upper tier of pitching prospects enjoyed in 2025, but Jake Bloss is integral to the short-term future of the staff. Kevin Gausman and Shane Bieber are set to come off the books following this season, and Bloss is closer to being MLB-ready than most of the internal options the Blue Jays have to fill those spots. He has a deep arsenal led by a potentially plus-plus fastball and a bat-missing slider, and once he returns from injury and gets his accuracy under control, he'll be on the doorstep of a spot on the big league roster. After all, the state Toronto's incumbent starting pitching unit finds itself in is exactly why the Jays traded for him. As of now, there figures to be plenty of competition for rotation spots in 2027 and beyond. Bloss's first steps to proving he's an arm that can take on such a responsibility will begin in a few short months.

There shouldn't be many Blue Jays fans out there who need to be reminded of how good Addison Barger is. He's a physical specimen with positional versatility and a knack for bludgeoning the baseball. He has 97th-percentile max exit velocity, 93rd-percentile bat speed, 99th-percentile arm strength, and is simply a fun watch at the plate and in the field. He first broke into the league in 2024 and mostly struggled out of the gate, but just a year later, he became the poster child for betting on tool-rich prospects, delivering a 188 wRC+ in the postseason despite not truly finding his groove until Game 6 of the ALCS. Only, his high-upside skill set has yet to pay dividends over a full 162-game schedule. His offensive results in 2025 were merely good, not great. He had his first extended hot stretch in May and came into the All-Star break with a 125 wRC+, but finished the regular season at 107 after a choppy second half. He had a wRC+ over 140 in two separate months, but straddled the Mendoza Line post-trade deadline. Especially for someone with Barger's raw power, consistency is often synonymous with discipline: He chased pitches at a rate in excess of 40% in July to set the stage for a cold August, but was at his most patient in September before catching fire in October. Concurrently, he was prone to extended periods of striking out at a 30% clip, but that rate will sit in the low-20s when he's at his best. Of course, it was his first full season in the league. He's only 26 years old and has just 727 regular season plate appearances to his name. He was an elite hitter for a greater portion of 2025 than he was hovering around replacement level, and saying the best is yet to come for him is an opinion that would fall into the category of freezing cold takes. Still, he hasn't proved himself worthy of an All-Star nod or anything of the sort. There are holes in Barger's game that prevented him from taking a truly meteoric rise last year. What are they? The low-hanging fruit here is his plate skills. His chase, swing-and-miss, strikeout, and walk rates all placed between the 30th and 36th percentiles, and for that higher-than-average chase tendency, the rate at which he swung at strikes was actually below-average, indicating poor swing decisions overall (and as we now know, the discipline in particular can come and go at a moment's notice). He also recorded his fair share of mishits, evidenced by a 25th-percentile squared-up percentage, which is Statcast's measure for collision efficiency on contact. I don't want to spend too much time harping on him for this. It's a simple fact that hitters of this archetype, ones that swing hard with a high capacity to do damage and subpar bat-to-ball abilities, are likelier to experience a much wider range of outcomes over the course of a season compared to those with a lower ceiling but better plate skills (our beloved Ernie Clement, for example). Besides, it's not like his contact or his selectivity is bad enough that he's a below-average hitter. I'd be able to make a significant dent in the supply of the nearest vending machine if I had a dollar for every time John Schneider has told the media that he preaches "being yourself" to his players. He says it a lot because doing what you're good at is a sound philosophy. If Addison Barger tries too hard to hit .290, he risks losing his calling card: damage ability. This version of him, the one that doesn't have a .370 OBP or a low-90s zone contact rate, can be great. No need to reinvent the wheel. It may seem counterintuitive given his high bat speed, flat swing tilt, and general strength, but his pitch type splits from 2025 indicate some struggles with fastballs. Observe: Pitch Group Run Value Zone Swing% Chase% Zone Contact% wOBACON EV90 Bat Speed 90 Barrel% HH LA° Fastballs -5 65.3% 30.8% 81.8% .380 105.3 mph 80.3 mph 11.5% 8.5° Non-Fastballs 6 67.9% 31.2% 82.3% .434 107.1 mph 80.0 mph 11.4% 9.1° Fastballs include four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters. It's worth noting the average chase rate on secondary pitches is about seven points higher than on fastballs, so it appears Barger simply doesn't have a good eye for the latter. Despite similar top-end bat speeds, contact rates, and batted ball angles on hard hits between these two groupings, he makes better swing decisions, hits the ball harder, and gets better results on contact against the slow stuff. In theory, if he saw fastballs better, everything else would play up too. He'd be likelier to make more contact, and more quality contact at that, if he swung at better pitches. This is particularly true at the top of, and just above, the strike zone, where most of his swings and misses against velocity were. However, a deeper look at the bat tracking splits tells a much more revealing story: Pitch Group Attack Angle ° Attack Direction ° (pull = lower) Pulled Flyball% Fastballs 5° 6° 5.8% Non-Fastballs 13° -14° 8.7% It's timing. I included pulled flyball rate at the end to emphasize what attack angle and direction tell us. Attack angle is in many ways a counterpart to launch angle, measuring the angle at which the sweet spot is traveling at contact point. Attack direction shows the position of the swing from a horizontal standpoint. Barger had a ~70th-percentile pull air rate in 2025, and most of that was happening against secondaries. He couldn't position his swing to hit home runs off fastballs with regularity. He has power to all fields, so this could be by design to an extent, but regardless, it came at an apparent cost to his propensity for turning on velocity. He hit secondaries for grounders at a higher frequency than fastballs, but his popup rate on heaters was nearly double in comparison. Barger made some significant overhauls to his swing in 2025, adjusting his stance and catching the ball an average of 4.3 inches further in front of home plate than he did the year before, one of the largest increases in the league. Naturally, secondaries have a shallower average contact point than fastballs (they aren't as fast!), but he could stand to lean into that trend a little further to try to rework how he times the hard stuff. Resetting timing on fastballs is a rather acute adjustment. From a thousand-foot view, if Barger wants to take another sizeable leap in 2026, he could also work on his swing against lefty pitching. He only saw 89 plate appearances against them last year, which resulted in a run value of -3. He still tore the cover off the ball when he managed to put it in play, but those poor results were mostly driven by suboptimal batted ball angles, disproportionate swing decisions, and low contact rates. His contact point was also much deeper than it was against righties, another telltale sign he didn't pick the ball up out of their hands. A platoon weakness is not uncommon among young lefty sluggers, and Barger is surely working on that through the offseason, but taking more competitive at-bats in same-handed matchups would go a long way toward earning him the unbridled trust of his coaching staff. It's hard not to be excited about what Barger could accomplish in 2026. He has tantalizing bat speed and exit velocities and has shown he can lift and pull the ball without being totally reliant on one type of swing. The 2018 sixth-rounder showed impressive flashes of the player he hopes to become with more stability moving forward, already having developed from an extremely raw power-inclined prospect to an above-average third baseman/right fielder. If October was any indication, most of his road to becoming a truly excellent staple in this lineup has already been travelled, with solving lefty pitching and timing up velocity being some of the only boxes he has left to check on the way. In any case, with the sweepstakes for both Kyle Tucker and Bo Bichette being won elsewhere, his place on this roster is that much more important.

It's forecasting season! An annual staple at the dawn of the new year is the gradual release of player projections for the upcoming campaign on websites such as FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus. FanGraphs alone hosts an entire army of projection models, each with its own estimates and methodology. Steamer uses basic underlying numbers and regresses players toward league average. The Bat is based on a similar approach, while its newer variant, The Bat X, incorporates Statcast data to a heightened degree. ATC aggregates all existing projection systems based on what specific stats they're good at forecasting – averaging the results of multiple models is thought by many to be the most reliable method of projecting players. More recently, OOPSY was introduced, the first of its kind to use pitch modelling and bat tracking data in its forecasts. Today, though, we'll be looking at the Szymborski Projection System, or ZiPS, created by Dan Szymborski of FanGraphs. It has been around for longer than all the other ones mentioned above, and it's rather unique in that it identifies a series of close historical comparables for each player and prognosticates performance based on how the careers of their comps unfolded. Szymborski has been rolling out ZiPS projections by team over at FanGraphs since November, and on Tuesday morning, he released the system's first batch of estimates for the Toronto Blue Jays. How does ZiPS feel about the Jays going into 2026? Position Players: Few Weaknesses Suffice to say, the forecast is strong for Toronto's infield. Andrés Giménez and Ernie Clement form a potent defensive duo up the middle, and Kazuma Okamoto has enough offensive upside to be an above-average third baseman if his fielding doesn't fall off a cliff; his closest comp according to ZiPS is longtime Mariner Kyle Seager. It's easy to forget, given how well his October went, but Vladimir Guerrero Jr. could easily have a better regular season than he did in 2025, and advanced offensive stats have long stood by him. Of note: Two of Guerrero's top three closest comps are Albert Pujols and Rafael Palmeiro. That'll work, as will the 4.9 combined fWAR that Alejandro Kirk and Tyler Heineman are predicted to accrue. ZiPS is clearly sold on the offensive strides Kirk made last year, and with Addison Barger and Davis Schneider available to fill in gaps in the infield from time to time, there isn't a single hole in this section of the roster. ZiPS is also optimistic about what Daulton Varsho could do in a full season after what he flashed a season ago, banking on the rare and impressive power + defense combo he boasts at a premium position. The corner outfield and DH positions are a bit of a mess in terms of playing time estimates, with more capable players than spots on the roster, but regardless of who gets the lion's share of the reps, it's unlikely that one specific bat will hold the Jays back anywhere. This is a high-floor offense that still features a diverse set of skills from top to bottom after scoring the second-most runs in the AL in 2025. If they can add another elite bat, their ceiling will be pushed as well. A Deep Bullpen Many of you may be surprised at how highly ZiPS thinks of this bullpen. At the time of writing, these projections have been released for 25 teams (the Orioles, Mets, Cubs, Cardinals, and Dodgers are still to come). Toronto's combined reliever fWAR projection of 3.9 is the fourth-highest of the teams that Szymborski has sized up so far, behind only the Brewers, Phillies and Red Sox, and tied with the Guardians. While the Jays lack an A-list closer, ZiPS has the sixth-to-eighth-inning collection as one of the best in the league. It's delightfully high on Tommy Nance and gave a resounding thumbs-up to the Tyler Rogers signing. He may not be Jhoan Duran or Mason Miller, but readers would surely be delighted to see the 3.38 ERA, 74 strikeouts, 23 walks, and *eight* home runs allowed that Jeff Hoffman is pegged for across 61.1 projected innings pitched. Further down the list, ZiPS is also sold on Braydon Fisher's breakout 2025, estimating a 27.1% K rate for him this year – third-highest on the staff behind Hoffman and Dylan Cease. In fact, the model is content enough with this group to the point that Szymborski opined the team could even trade a reliever if another contender happens to need one early in the season. I wouldn't bet on that, as injuries and underperformance are always possible, but it speaks to the progress we've seen since the 2024 bullpen clocked in as one of the worst in baseball. The overarching theme is availability: There are a ton of bulldogs back there, with Eric Lauer capable of going multiple innings (as well as José Berríos if he decides he's okay with relief work), Louis Varland and Rogers as durable as they come, and enough strikeout guys to balance it out in Hoffman, Yimi García, Brendon Little, Nance, Fisher, and Mason Fluharty. Wide Range of Outcomes in Rotation This is where ZiPS isn't as confident. It likes the additions that have been made so far, with Cease good enough to be the de facto ace of the staff and Cody Ponce receiving a relatively optimistic projection as far as fifth starters go. However, between Shane Bieber's health, Trey Yesavage's lack of experience, and Ponce coming off unremarkable seasons in Japan before suddenly exploding onto the scene in Korea (he hasn't pitched in the big leagues since 2021), there is a moderate amount of risk. Interestingly, Szymborski argues that because of what could go wrong here (Bieber battles injury all year, Yesavage regresses as the league adjusts to him, Ponce doesn't translate as smoothly as hoped), the Blue Jays would improve their 2026 outlook more by signing one of the remaining starting pitchers on the free agent market instead of Kyle Tucker. Because Cease and Ponce were both acquired before the Winter Meetings, this train of thought likely hasn't occurred to many fans, but it's intriguing to consider. Of course, chasing a Framber Valdez or a Ranger Suárez would come with its own set of risks and affect the team far beyond 2026. Questions exist about Valdez's makeup, and Suárez's stuff is declining amidst a questionable bill of health. At this point, I'm not at all saying they should pursue either one, but ZiPS's diagnosis of the rotation as is helps to illustrate that, while its upside is undeniable, things could unfold in many different ways, and its floor is lower than that of the dynamic position player group. On the other hand, if things go well, a potential bounce-back from Berríos would merely be an added bonus, no matter what capacity he pitches in. The Verdict So, where does this leave us? With all that happened in 2025, there's only one thing left for this team to accomplish. ZiPS likes the position they're in. Not mentioned above are the Rays, which ZiPS currently sees as likely to hover around .500 again. If we add up Toronto's projected fWAR totals by position, the sum is 45.6. Add that to the common shorthand that a 0-WAR team would win 48 games, and the Blue Jays' projected ZiPS win total rounds up to 94 – exactly the same as last year. The AL East will be strong, but one more marquee addition ought to push the Blue Jays over the edge as the clear favourites.

Additions to the roster just keep on coming for the Blue Jays this offseason. Kazuma Okamoto is the first position player the team has signed in free agency, joining from NPB's Yomiuri Giants on a four-year, $60 million contract (no opt-outs). Okamoto absolutely raked in Japan. He makes a lot of contact with some power upside, which makes it seem like he was born to play for a team like the Blue Jays became in 2025. He also hasn't automatically taken Toronto out of the running in the sweepstakes for Kyle Tucker or Bo Bichette. The real intrigue with this acquisition is the impact it will have on the way this team sets up defensively for the upcoming season. The Blue Jays' socials introduced Okamoto as an infielder when confirming the signing. He spent about three-quarters of his time on the field manning the hot corner in 2025, with the remainder coming at first base. He has played left field on a sporadic basis in recent years as well. Obviously, he won't have to worry about playing first base every day with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. holding a seemingly infinite claim to that spot. He has a clearer pathway to consistent reps both at third and in left, but those are confusing situations in their own right. Ernie Clement finished top-five in Statcast's fielding run value at third base, his primary position, last year, though he also excelled at second base in both the regular season and the postseason. Addison Barger can play third as well and has a cannon for an arm, which can't be said for Clement, though Barger has inferior range and is also sometimes used in right field. Meanwhile, Nathan Lukes frequently patrolled left field, and Davis Schneider often took over when he didn't. Myles Straw saw some time there when John Schneider opted for a defense-first arrangement, and Anthony Santander even saw 58 innings in left, but that isn't as much time as he spent in right field or at DH. Don't even get me started on how this general logjam would intensify if Tucker or (and?) Bichette were added. Okamoto's Defensive Ability Since the Blue Jays got outstanding middle infield defense from Clement and Andrés Giménez in October, Okamoto's most logical fit seems to be at third for now. How that might go has been a mild source of disagreement amongst talent evaluators around the league. Baseball America's scouting report deemed him an above-average defender at third base, where he won two of NPB's equivalent to the Gold Glove. FanGraphs' Eric Longenhagen is a tad more skeptical, arguing he lacks range but still commending his lower body strength and arm accuracy. Sportsnet's Ben Nicholson-Smith says the consensus among MLB scouts he has talked to is that Okamoto profiles as average at third but would be a plus defender at first base. BA went so far as to call him 'plus-plus' at first, clearly the most optimistic of the bunch. Yakyu Cosmopolitan on X recently noted that Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) graded him as an average third baseman in Japan, with his unimpressive range holding him back a bit despite solid fundamentals. Potential Scenario #1 It wouldn't be surprising, then, if Okamoto's overall proficiency at third ended up somewhere in between Clement's and Barger's. He's bigger than Clement, listed as 6-foot-1 and 220 lbs on FanGraphs, but not as stocky as Barger. Either way, it'll be a priority to get his bat in the lineup. The what-if scenarios, depending on how the rest of the winter shakes out, are interesting to ponder. If Tucker comes north and Bichette walks, Giménez will likely take over at shortstop, clearing the way for Clement at second base and, therefore, Okamoto at third. Such a sequence of events would complicate things for Barger because Tucker primarily plays right field, and George Springer is still set to DH for the final year of his contract. In turn, the urgency to get Barger's bat in the lineup would theoretically hurt Santander's stock. Potential Scenario #2 Alternatively, if the Jays retain Bichette but fail to land Tucker, Okamoto figures to see more time in left and not as much at third as in scenario #1, because Clement won't be needed in the middle infield as much. Barger and Santander would have less competition for outfield reps. In both scenarios, Okamoto could shift between third and left depending on factors such as scheduled rest days, the opposing pitcher, and how John Schneider wants to position his lineup on the spectrum between the best possible run-scoring unit and the best possible run-saving unit. Okamoto will also take some pressure off Guerrero to play the field 145 games a year, though the latter has certainly shown the ability to do so. Versatility Is the Ultimate Benefit Amidst this daunting game of Blue Jays Lineup Tetris, it's hard to see the rest of the offseason playing out without a corresponding subtraction to the existing position player group. Later on in his report about Okamoto, Nicholson-Smith acknowledged that any further additions to the 40-man roster would necessitate a trade of someone whose playing time would be negatively impacted. Regardless, the coaching staff has a ton of options to work with. USA Today's Bob Nightengale reported that the Jays are interested in using Okamoto in a super-utility role, which makes a ton of sense – teaching him another position, or, at the very least, not assigning him a primary spot out of the gate would help accommodate the many different kinds of talent on this roster. In the postseason and especially the World Series, John Schneider and co. showed zero hesitancy to move players around in-game to adapt to the circumstances at hand, a sight that fans should probably get used to. When there are a lot of good players with overlapping strengths on the same team, everyone has to contribute in more ways than one. More clarity surrounding Okamoto's role will surface in the coming weeks, but the fact that he can assume more than one responsibility in the field makes it self-explanatory, to an extent, why the Blue Jays were pushing for him, even with Tucker and Bichette still out there. His propensity for contact and offensive well-roundedness are reminiscent of his new team's strengths, but so, too, is his defensive versatility.

In an offseason in which multiple high-profile additions to the Blue Jays pitching staff came early, and the markets of Bo Bichette and Kyle Tucker loom large, the returning pieces of Toronto's core have taken a step back into relative obscurity. Since Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has already been handsomely paid, and if the assumption is that any marquee hitter the team signs over the rest of the winter would come in on a multi-year deal, their top extension candidate is someone we have barely heard about at all in recent weeks: Daulton Varsho. Varsho's 2025 was complicated. On one hand, he posted his highest single-season batting average, slugging percentage, and OPS since getting dealt to Toronto. He also matched his highest home run total since the trade with 20, in less than half the plate appearances he had the last time he reached that mark in 2023. His barrel rate shot up to 15.9%, among the very best in the league. He hit the ball harder than ever, solved the popup issue that plagued him in 2024, and maintained elite range in center field. It was his best season with the club. On the other hand, Varsho was quite injury-prone. He missed the first month of the season recovering from a shoulder surgery that happened at the end of 2024, and when he came back, his arm strength, which was 40th percentile in each of the previous two years, plummeted to the 5th percentile, making him an easy target for runners looking to take an extra base on a ball in the gap. He was then sidelined for all of June and July with a hamstring issue he sustained when trying to stretch a double into a triple, which might explain why he became a non-factor on the basepaths despite maintaining above-average sprint speed. Even with all of Varsho's positive leaps on the field, especially with the bat, the Blue Jays have yet to see him reach his full potential for a full season. 2026 is his last year under team control, and even though he flashed a lot of promise in recent months, he still has plenty left to back up. It would be a delight for the entire organization if Varsho could maintain his newfound power production over a larger sample and give the lineup the consistent lefty threat it has needed for years. One thing is for certain: His offensive ceiling is higher than it has ever been before. Recovering shoulder and all, he set career-highs in barrel rate, 90th-percentile exit velocity, maximum exit velocity, and 90th-percentile bat speed, showcasing all the tools necessary to be one of the best power hitters in the game. Daulton Varsho 2025 Percentiles (>= 100 BBE) Metric Percentile Barrel% / BBE 95 EV90 95 Max EV 80 Bat Speed 90 91 The question is whether his plate skills will keep up. He has never been a contact-first hitter, and a decrease in contact and discipline is to be somewhat expected when optimizing one's swing for power. Yet, in 2025, Varsho swung more and came up empty more often than he ever has. His zone contact rate plunged into the mid-70s, his 29.8% swing-and-miss rate was a career-high for a full season, and his chase rate exceeded 30% for the first time since 2022. This led to the highest K% he has posted in a full season, and his lowest BB%, period. Hitting is a game of trade-offs, and some schools of thought suggest Varsho was successful in walking the line last year. DRC+ is Baseball Prospectus' catch-all hitting metric that inputs process more than results, making it a useful counterpart to the more explanatory and similarly-scaled wRC+. Varsho's DRC+ in 2025 was 120, which smashed his previous high of 97 (100 indicates a league-average hitter). His improvements follow some worthwhile changes he made to his swing. In 2024, Varsho was held back by an inflated 18.2% popup rate; he had high bat speed, but got under the ball far too often. He responded by flattening his swing by 3° and shifting his stance angle from 6° open to 5° closed, a couple of smaller changes that work in tandem to keep his front half from dropping and flying open before contact. In any case, this seems like one of those instances where it's a smart move to bet on the tools. Once again, Varsho displayed all the fundamental traits of an elite power hitter in 2025: He hit the ball hard, he hit it in the air (but not too far in the air), he pulled the ball, he swung hard, and he was aggressive on pitches he could damage. He also managed to work around his bat-to-ball deficiencies by adjusting his stance to maximize his potential. Fans may recall that Varsho would frequently give the same answer when asked how he was suddenly hitting so many home runs: by always trying to hit a groundball up the middle. For a player who has one of the most pull-air oriented swings in the game and historical troubles with popping it up too often, approaching each at-bat with the goal of harnessing his bat speed by staying on plane and keeping the ball down naturally leads to more hard line drives and fly balls. The sample was small enough last year that banking on a 46-homer pace might not be reasonable, but Varsho has now given us every reason to expect at least 30 bombs in 2026, health-permitting. Varsho also has some work to do in the field if the Blue Jays are going to consider giving him a long-term extension. His arm strength post-shoulder surgery simply did not meet the standards for a big league center fielder. A torn rotator cuff requires a long recovery, and his excellent range easily kept him a net positive on defense, but you'd be forgiven for wondering whether his throwing arm will fully bounce back, given the magnitude of the drop. Daulton Varsho Throwing Percentiles (>= 50 throws) Season Arm Strength (MPH) Percentile 2023 83.9 40 2024 83.7 40 2025 73.7 5 Among players with at least 50 throws from center field, Varsho's 74-mph 90th-percentile throw was a full 4.5 mph less than Jake Meyers, the next closest guy . . . and Meyers was 4.7 mph slower than the guy ahead of him (Myles Straw, coincidentally). It's tough to assess just how much Varsho will improve because there is very little short-term precedent for outfielders receiving surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff, which is an injury much more common in pitchers. per Baseball Savant Meyers himself had shoulder surgery after tearing his labrum in the 2021 postseason, causing him to miss the first half of 2022. He had 58th-percentile arm strength before, but it only dropped to 42nd when he first returned to action, and it returned to its original levels by 2023. According to Baseball Prospectus, Meyers has not been on the injured list for an arm injury since then, and I am no doctor, so any reasons for his sudden throwing weakness are beyond me. With the lack of outfield comps for the injury that led to this problem for Varsho, I'm going to tentatively hope that his arm strength will at least recover to 2025 Meyers levels next year. This would still be in the basement of all center fielders, but luckily, the impact of a weak arm on a center fielder's defensive value is far less than subpar range, an issue that Varsho does not have. Even in his truncated season, he was still worth six runs of value in the field, according to Baseball Savant, good for the 84th percentile. If his arm remains this weak, it may dissuade teams from offering him a longer-term deal because it makes a move to the corners virtually impossible, should the rest of his defense regress. Still, he has plus-plus range at a premium position - the most important thing a fielder can lay claim to. The Blue Jays have sky-high aspirations next year. They've made the moves in free agency to back that up, and more are likely to follow. Many players are expected to be focal points in guiding them to a successful season: Dylan Cease and Tyler Rogers with their new paydays, Trey Yesavage embarking on his first full season, Cody Ponce attempting to stick the landing back on this side of the Pacific, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hoping to reach the standards set by his legendary postseason in the first chapter of his 14-year megadeal. Do not lose Daulton Varsho in this shuffle. If he can prove himself, he just might slot himself into the team's plans beyond 2026. He has more riding on this season than almost anyone on the roster, but there is reason enough to be optimistic that he'll deliver.

The Toronto Blue Jays added $37 million to their fast-growing payroll last Friday night, but just a few hours before they signed Tyler Rogers, they completed their first trade of the offseason. Right-hander Chase Lee is on his way over from the Tigers, with lefty relief prospect Johan Simon going the other way. It's a one-for-one swap of bullpen arms. Here's the skinny on Lee: He's 27 years old and made his MLB debut in 2025, so he has six years left of team control. He pitched in low leverage for Detroit, and while his first taste of the majors wasn't a disaster by any stretch, he did get knocked around a bit (4.10 ERA, 5.16 xERA, 4.53 FIP). However, he was good enough at Triple A to warrant a call-up, with a career strikeout rate just under 30% in parts of four seasons. He managed a 20.7% K-BB there in 2025 despite a 6.47 ERA, which ballooned thanks in large part to a shockingly low 48% strand rate. The Tigers, choosing to trust the strong peripherals, gave him a look, and here we are. Lee is a side-armer. His 80-mph sweeper is his best weapon, averaging a whopping 19 inches of glove-side movement from a -4° arm angle. He has a sinker that sits 89 mph with plenty of drop from that low arm slot, and he also uses a four-seamer to change hitters' eye levels, as well as a changeup against lefties. Pitch quality models are torn as to which fastball is better; he deployed the four-seam more to lefties while the sinker was his go-to against righties, but the sweeper plays. It got a 120 Stuff+ score at FanGraphs in 2025, while PitchingBot's stuff model gave it a 60 on the 20-80 scale. Lee was able to crack Baseball America's list of the top 30 Tigers prospects earlier this year, mostly because of how much upside the sweeper has. He also earned a 60 grade for his control from BA's panel of evaluators, and since being traded from Texas to Detroit in the Andrew Chafin deal in 2024, he has put up zone rates in the high-50s at every level he has pitched. He throws a lot of strikes, but unlike most side-armers, he also got plenty of strikeouts coming up through the minors. He ran into one too many barrels once he reached the majors (13.9% Barrel/BBE, second percentile), but with a plus breaking ball and multiple fastball shapes from an unfamiliar release point, the best is yet to come. The Blue Jays entered Friday with the likes of Jeff Hoffman, Louis Varland, Yimi García, Brendon Little, Mason Fluharty, Braydon Fisher, Tommy Nance, and Eric Lauer crowding the bullpen depth chart. On top of that, they just selected Spencer Miles in the Rule 5 draft. Lee has minor league options to spare, and he wound up being the first of two relievers with a negative arm angle that Toronto acquired in short succession, and the other one is making eight figures for the next three years. It's safe to assume Lee will start 2026 in Buffalo, but the potential is there for him to become a big league middle reliever in the near future. What's interesting about this deal is that to acquire this low-slot reliever with a nasty breaking ball, it cost the Blue Jays... a low-slot reliever with a nasty breaking ball. Simon is a 24-year-old lefty who saw Double-A action for the first time this past year, and it went swimmingly (2.38 ERA, 32.7% K, 11.1 IP). He had to spend parts of four years in Rookie ball to get a walk problem under control, not seeing Class A until eight months ago, so he's far from a finished product. Of all pitching prospects who threw at least 250 sliders in 2025, Simon's slider was the very best according to Baseball America's Stuff+ model. It touches the mid-80s from a low 3/4 delivery, making it an absolute nightmare for lefty hitters. He hopped from Dunedin to Vancouver to New Hampshire this summer, so he's certainly on a positive trajectory, but the injuries and inconsistency that kept him in rookie ball have prevented him from becoming a ranked prospect to this point. This seems like a smart deal for both teams, involving two high-upside pitchers who are fairly similar, albeit with different handedness and at different points in their careers. Detroit needed to clear a 40-man roster spot to make the re-signing of reliever Kyle Finnegan a possibility, and both teams still get the chance to develop an under-the-radar reliever with a great sweeper. Lee won't get a long MLB leash on a Blue Jays team urgently trying to win, but he figures to be on the short list whenever injuries arise or the flexibility of having an optionable piece is needed.

As the days following the Winter Meetings unfolded, all indications pointed toward the Toronto Blue Jays following through on their desire to pick up a big-time free agent reliever. One by one, the chips had begun to fall, with Ryan Helsley and Devin Williams coming off the market before the epicenter of the baseball world shifted to Orlando. Edwin Díaz and Robert Suarez followed earlier this week. The anticipation finally subsided north of the border on Friday with the news of submariner Tyler Rogers inking a three-year, $37 million deal. On Saturday afternoon, The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal revealed the terms of a vesting option for 2029 that would pay Rogers an additional $12 million if he pitches either 110 combined games between 2027 and 2028 or 60 games in 2028. Since his debut in August 2019, Rogers has not pitched fewer than 68 games in a full season. He will be 38 by the time the 2029 season rolls around, so that vesting option is essentially the Blue Jays telling him he'll be rewarded with another year if he keeps doing what he's been doing by the time he's within striking distance of 40 years old. Buckle up: The jokes and fan activation opportunities that come from Rogers sharing a last name with his new team's ownership conglomerate are soon to rain down on all of us. They might be easy to stomach, though, because (Tyler) Rogers is a very good pitcher who immediately makes this bullpen stronger. He has a 2.76 ERA and 3.31 FIP for his career, easily better than Jeff Hoffman, Yimi García, Louis Varland, and any notable external addition the Shapiro/Atkins regime has made to the bullpen since the pandemic (with all due respect to those guys, who should form one of the better units in the league next year). At no point during this recent stretch of Blue Jays baseball has there been a relief pitcher with a track record as consistently good as Rogers'. He was working on his second consecutive season with a sub-3.00 ERA when he was traded from the Giants to the Mets this past deadline, and ended up finishing with a sub-2.00 ERA while leading the NL in appearances for the fourth time in six years. Now that we've established some of what Rogers is, I'm going to mention one key thing that he isn't, because it provides some crucial context that is necessary to make sense of this deal: He was not the Blue Jays' first choice in the free agent relief market. According to Sportsnet's Shi Davidi, the team was actively courting Robert Suarez before he signed with Atlanta, and Rogers was their pivot in the event Suarez signed elsewhere. This news comes about a month after they reportedly met with Edwin Díaz's agents at the GM meetings in Las Vegas. With a strong crop of free agent bullpen arms this year, there are certainly more traditional "stuff-ists" that could prove to be more of a bargain than Rogers. For how disappointing the results were for Devin Williams in 2025, he still struck out 35% of batters and maintained elite peripherals, he is still just a year removed from being widely considered a top-two closer in the game, and he signed for a considerably cheaper commitment than Díaz. The Detroit Tigers transformed Kyle Finnegan post-deadline and retained him on a two-year deal worth less than $20 million total. Brad Keller, who only just turned 30, is still available after a dominant season in Chicago. Still, league-wide demand for high-leverage relievers is enough that every established name on the market has been getting multi-year deals, even the ones coming off down years. Rogers, like Suarez, will be 35 on opening day, and giving a three-year deal to a 35-year-old reliever isn't the best idea in a vacuum. However, I would much rather give him three years than Suarez, mostly because of something alluded to earlier: His durability. Rogers has not been on the injured list since 2015, and he leads relievers in both innings pitched and appearances over the past five years. Suarez also relies on elite velocity, sitting 98-99 mph on both his fastball and his sinker. This could become problematic if he continues to rely on both pitches a combined three-quarters of the time and loses some firepower on the wrong side of age 35. Rogers, a submarine pitcher who has maxed out in the mid-80s his whole career without any issues, does not have this concern. If there's any reliever from this free agent class I'd bet on at least staying in their current general neighbourhood of effectiveness by the end of their new contract, it's probably him. Much has been made of Rogers' -61° arm angle, which changes everything about how he should be valued because his pitches do not move at all like they are supposed to. He's a two-pitch, sinker-slider guy, using the former way more than the latter. The sinker averaged 84 mph last year; the slider 74 mph. Of course, this does not matter, because the sinker moves like a mid-80s 12-6 curveball while the slider rises with extreme cut, with both practically being released from the ground. He is truly one of a kind in this way. It's that bizarre delivery that has allowed him to become about as consistent as a reliever can be over the past few years. He absolutely pounds the zone, with a career walk rate of 4.4% that cratered even further recently, sitting at 2.2% since the start of 2024. Of all bullpen pitchers with at least 200 IP since the start of 2021, Rogers' average exit velocity against ranks second-lowest. His launch angle against is eighth-lowest. His barrel rate? Also second-lowest. Hard-hit rate? Sixth-lowest. Yet, he has surrendered 1,191 balls in play in that timespan, 199 more than Brent Suter, the next-closest guy on the list. That's the same as the difference between the pitchers ranked second and 15th. One of the reasons command and pitch-to-contact arms, especially if they're relievers, aren't valued as highly as they once were is that their approach leads to greater variability. More hittable pitches and more balls in play equals a greater risk of the opponent stringing hits together, doing damage, or both. For a half-decade, way longer than any other pitch-to-contact reliever in the game, Rogers has found a way to defy this law because of how hard his movement patterns are on hitters' eyes by virtue of his release point. It's entirely possible the standard of variance that non-strikeout arms sign up for simply doesn't apply to him to the same degree, and the infield defense he'll have behind him makes him an even more logical fit for the Blue Jays. Tyler Rogers Percentiles, 2023-25 Year BB% GB% AVG. EV Hard-Hit% Barrel% 2025 100 98 99 95 100 2024 100 93 99 95 93 2023 83 89 99 98 100 Data from Statcast This wholesale prevention of quality contact has allowed Rogers to maintain a lower-than-average rate of home runs per flyball for his entire career. The Blue Jays' relief corps hemorrhaged damage in 2024, and it still wasn't fully immune in that regard despite making it to the World Series this past year. The front office saw a chance to acquire someone who could fix a good chunk of that problem by himself and didn't pass it up. Blue Jays Bullpen & Tyler Rogers Home Run Rates, 2023-25 Year TOR Bullpen HR/9 TOR Bullpen HR/FB Rogers HR/9 Rogers HR/FB 2025 1.04 11.4% 0.47 9.1% 2024 1.46 14.8% 0.90 10.6% 2023 1.15 12.2% 0.85 9.7% Data from FanGraphs The effect his delivery has on batters seems counterintuitive because of how slow his pitches move, but he's arguably better at routinely inducing late swings than anyone in MLB. A common proxy to measure hitter timing is attack angle, one of Statcast's new bat path metrics that measures the vertical direction of the bat's sweet spot at contact (not to be confused with swing tilt). Hitters had a 0° attack angle against Rogers in 2025, the lowest among all pitchers to face at least 200 batters. They made contact deeper towards the plate against Rogers than they did anyone except Chris Martin and Tim Hill, and when adjusting contact point for velocity (slower pitches are naturally struck farther in front of the plate), opponents were later against Rogers than anyone who surrendered 100 balls in play. Aside from the immense degree to which it serves his own purposes, Rogers' alien release point also allows his coaches to mix and match the looks on their pitching staff. Arranging a bullpen with this in mind is a strategy popularized by the successful Rays and Brewers teams of the early 2020s – clubs that never spent on high-leverage relievers in free agency, but found a way to make it work by plugging holes with a diverse set of arm angles. Sportsnet's Shi Davidi reported earlier this month that the Jays are trying to follow this blueprint, which makes the recent acquisitions of Rogers and Chase Lee, as well as the use of a first-round pick on Trey Yesavage, quite intuitive. Blue Jays Pitchers by Arm Angle LHP Arm Angle RHP Arm Angle Eric Lauer 39° Trey Yesavage 63° Brendon Little 33° Dylan Cease 51° Mason Fluharty 33° Braydon Fisher 49° Cody Ponce 45°* Tommy Nance 42° Louis Varland 41° Shane Bieber 39° Jose Berrios 39° Jeff Hoffman 37° Kevin Gausman 37° Yimi García 27° Tyler Rogers -61° Data from Statcast No, Rogers does not provide the velocity and strikeout stuff the Blue Jays' bullpen was lacking to an extent, but the chances of a positive return on that $12.3 million average annual value seem likely. Toronto continues to pay pitchers for showing consistent availability, which makes it seem silly in hindsight that both the Cease and Rogers contracts weren't plainly visible from a mile away. Aggressively paying relievers left and right generally isn't good practice, considering how often and how long they suit up for, but big-picture, the Jays are doing a good job of straddling the line between the various bullpen-building strategies. Make no mistake, they have chosen to pounce on some free agents (Hoffman, García, Rogers), but some are reclamation projects (Nance, Lauer), while others are young, home-grown talent (Little, Fluharty, Fisher). It's good that the team still has money for its needs on the position player side now that the most pressing requirements on the pitching side are taken care of. Rogers may not have been the best option available, but he undeniably makes this team better and flashes considerable potential to make this a wise investment for the duration of his term, especially considering some of the other avenues the Jays could have pursued.

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.

There is still so much to be determined about the Toronto Blue Jays' offseason. With the annual Winter Meetings having just wrapped up, plenty of time remains to see what paths the club will take to prepare for its defense of the AL pennant. However, it's very likely they have already made their biggest value move of the winter. Right-handed pitcher Cody Ponce is coming back across the Pacific for his second stint in the big leagues on a three-year, $30M deal, following a standout season in the KBO that won him their MVP award. DiamondCentric's own Brock Beauchamp and Owen Hill have already done some preliminary analysis on Ponce; you should read their articles if you aren't caught up on his profile (here and here). Ponce is coming off one of the best seasons a pitcher has ever had in the KBO. Across 29 starts that spanned 180 innings, he recorded a 1.89 ERA, striking out 36.2% of batters, walking just 5.9%, and allowing only 10 home runs. FanGraphs' batted ball pages show that he induced groundballs at a 45.7% clip, a notable increase from his 40.4% career mark in MLB. His rate of flyballs on the infield also increased. His hard contact rate fell off the table. Thanks to pitching analyst Lance Brozdowski, we have some information on how Ponce went from being a castaway with a career MLB ERA of 5.86 to a KBO MVP. His average fastball velocity rose up a couple ticks, sitting at 95.5 mph and maxing out at 98. He added a new high-80s kick changeup. He makes use of five pitches in total, and could tinker with his arsenal to reacclimate to the big league level next year. The fact that he possesses plus velocity, intriguing off-speed shape, and arsenal diversity makes him projectable in both starting and relief roles. The changeup could prove to be Ponce's most consequential adjustment. When he was pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, lefty hitters slashed .297/.336/.703 against him, striking out only 14.4% of the time. A better weapon to neutralize the handedness disadvantage would go a long way toward making him a serviceable pitcher in MLB, so the news of his revamped changeup is a big deal because his struggles against lefties were a primary reason why it didn't work out for him the first time. Brozdowski mentions in his newsletter that his data shows Ponce's changeup averaged around 1300 rpm, but multiple big league teams that have access to other proprietary KBO pitch-tracking information have it closer to 800. Eno Sarris, analytics guru for The Athletic, has a separate data source that had the spin on Ponce's changeup even lower, down into 600 rpm territory. As such, I'm going to assume with reasonable confidence that the spin rate on this pitch is less than 1000 rpm. There are no public-facing pitch quality models for the KBO, but we have enough shape metrics here to draw comparisons. Using the past two seasons as my sample, I looked for off-speed pitches in MLB with profiles that closely align with Ponce's: velocity between 85 and 91 mph, induced vertical break between -1" and 5", arm-side break between 5" and 11", and less than 1000 rpm. I also focused my search on pitchers with similar deliveries to Ponce, only looking for arms that went 3" in either direction of Ponce's 6.3' release height and 6.5' extension. Only two pitchers met these criteria, and both throw splitters. Take a look: Name Season Pitch Type RV Stuff+ MPH RPM IVB Arm-Side HB Justin Martinez 2024 Splitter 6 136 89.8 845 2.2 8.3 Hurston Waldrep 2025 Splitter 3 125 86.8 762 2.0 6.3 Cody Ponce 2025 Changeup 87.6 <1000 2.0 8.5 Stuff+ via FanGraphs Blue Jays fans should be ecstatic about this. Martinez could release a feature film with the number of times he has been posted by Pitching Ninja, and Waldrep ran a 48.3 K% with his splitter in 2025. Both comps' off-speed pitches score as some of the sharpest in the game according to stuff models, which generates some intrigue about Ponce's ceiling. The jump in fastball velocity is another reason why he's coming back to the highest level. His four-seamer averaged 93.2 when he was last here, so it's encouraging to have seen it closer to the upper 90s in Korea. Seventeen inches of carry with 95-96 on the radar gun is a recipe for a good fastball, except, as Brozdowski notes, the KBO ball is slightly different from the one MLB uses. That means Ponce should expect to achieve less rise on the pitch in North America, all else equal. Brozdowski projects 16 inches of carry and 9.5 inches of arm-side movement. While that's still an upgrade over the heater Ponce was using with the Pirates, it's not exactly inspiring. In terms of stuff, it compares well with a couple of pitchers in the Giants organization: Name Season Pitch Type RV Stuff+ MPH RPM IVB Arm-Side HB Hayden Birdsong 2024 Fastball -3 95 95.8 2291 16.4 9.5 Tristan Beck 2025 Fastball 0 87 94.6 2361 15.7 9.6 Cody Ponce 2025 Fastball 95.5 approx. 16 approx. 9.5 Stuff+ via FanGraphs For reference, Ponce's old fastball received an 87 Stuff+ grade in 2021. Considering these comps, it does not seem likely that he'll be able to rely on this offering as much as he did in 2025, especially when taking the manufacturing differences between the KBO and MLB baseballs into account. This is where I believe most of the grunt work lies for the Blue Jays' pitching department: How will they compensate for decreased four-seam usage? Push the cutter? Introduce a new slider shape? If the fastball touches 98, then it will still be useful on certain occasions, but sequencing is something that Ponce will have to think about differently than he did in Korea, especially if he's going to be a starter. On the other hand, could the Jays opt to worry less about arsenal diversity and plug him into a leverage role in the bullpen? The flexibility he comes with is part of what makes Ponce such a low-risk, high-reward signing. The final aspect of his repertoire data I want to delve into further is the zone rate on his four-seam fastball. According to Brozdowski's data source, it was 47%. This looks low for someone who had an overall 5.9% walk rate, and Brozdowski has conceded that the KBO zone rates he has access to are likely inaccurate due to conflicting reports from other sources. Ponce's four-seamer had a zone rate between 54% and 55% in his time in the big leagues, making those inaccuracies seem feasible. In any case, it's worth evaluating how his ability to throw strikes will translate to the tougher competition of the big leagues. His career walk rate is a considerably-better-than-average 6.9% in 55.1 IP. In three seasons in Japan's NPB from 2022-2024, his walk rate sat firmly between 5% and 7%. Pretty solid and pretty consistent! These hold up well when evaluating Ponce against other Americans who left to reinvent themselves in Korea before coming back stateside. Veteran starter Merrill Kelly, known for his strike-throwing ability, has been solid through seven MLB seasons since his return from the KBO. Erick Fedde and Kyle Hart reached similar heights to Ponce in 2023 and 2024, respectively, before coming back to MLB. Each pitcher had solid walk rates in Korea, and each one of them maintained a similar level of control after making the jump: Name Y KBO BB% Y+1 MLB BB% Merrill Kelly 7.0% 7.3% Erick Fedde 4.9% 7.2% Kyle Hart 6.0% 7.3% Cody Ponce 5.9% If those who came before him are any indication, Ponce's walk rate is not likely to suddenly balloon in Toronto next year. With his imposing swing-and-miss pitch best used against opposite-handed hitters, increased fastball velocity, a solid pitch mix, and a consistent track record of avoiding walks, it's easy to see why the Blue Jays' brass was excited about the opportunity to bring Cody Ponce into the fold. Rogers has money to spend, especially in the wake of the team's run to the 2025 World Series, but their ability to compete with the biggest spenders in the free agent market did not stop them from pursuing a cheaper arm that comes with serious upside. The transition from Korea or Japan to MLB can be tough to size up, and it's not always linear, but there is enough information available about the physical profile of Ponce's weapons, as well as the pitchers whose careers have followed similar trajectories, to be confident in the heights he could reach with the Blue Jays. As this past year showed, supplementary additions can be the difference between being a competitive team and making a run towards a championship, and Ponce has the tools to play an instrumental role on a club with aspirations as high as Toronto's.

Baseball happens fast. One day, the Toronto Blue Jays were celebrating sweet victory over the game's Evil Empire in the ALDS, and not even a week later, they're embarking on a road trip to Seattle with no guarantee of returning to save their season. The odds and recent history of teams coming back after losing the first two games of a best-of-seven series at home have been an exhaustive part of the discourse surrounding this club lately, so let's look ahead to Game 3 – a contest that would change the dynamic of the ALCS with a Blue Jays win. The man leading this mission is Shane Bieber, who enjoyed a solid initial return from Tommy John surgery and made seven starts for Toronto down the stretch. His lone start in the ALDS, however, was not good; he allowed three runs (two earned) on five hits, recording two strikeouts and a walk in 2.2 innings, taking 54 pitches to get there. Unfortunately, the box score doesn't quite do it justice because nine of the 12 balls in play Bieber surrendered went down as hard-hit. That's 75%! Only four of those 12 batted balls stayed on the ground, and three of them came off the bat at 104 mph or harder. The Yankees timed him up and knocked him around, getting to the bullpen early and winning 9-6 as a result. Bieber's teammates picked him up, as he did for them a couple times late this past summer, and won the series, giving him his biggest chance yet to earn some goodwill among a fanbase that has crashed back down to earth. During his media availability before Game 2 against the Mariners, Bieber said he felt good about his outing in New York from an execution standpoint, essentially saying the ball went where he wanted it to out of his hand. His stuff was fine, with the velocity of all his pitches clocking in slightly above normal and the carry of his fastball remaining sufficient, all good signs for someone coming off a long-term injury. Still, whether he was properly executing is up for debate. Bieber knows himself better than any of us do, and when an accomplished big league pitcher prides himself on his execution in a start that didn't go his way less than 48 hours before the biggest outing of his life, I'm inclined to take his word for it. Regardless, the signs weren't all encouraging. One of Bieber's post-surgery adjustments was the introduction of a kick changeup. It registered six more inches of drop than his previous version of the pitch while maintaining high-80s velocity, and it scored as his best offering according to Stuff+ (103, per FanGraphs). He threw 11 such changeups in Game 3 of the ALDS, and none of them resulted in a called strike or swing and miss. Just three of them were in the strike zone at all; he kept missing up and away to lefties, and two of the ones he zoned left the bat at 104 mph. His fastball fared better, living in the zone far more consistently and leading to some called strikes, but it, too, was hit hard (93 mph AVG EV on 7 BIP). Against lefties, Bieber usually lives on the upper corners of the zone with his heater, while painting the whole outer half against righties. It missed over the plate, both up and down, quite a bit to New York's lefty hitters and sometimes ran in on their righties. The righties and lefties alike jumped on the changes in location. The most important thing Bieber needs to do at T-Mobile Park in Game 3 of this series is get his changeup back in order. It misses bats and generates groundballs more than any other pitch in his arsenal. The Mariners have three home runs from the left side so far in the ALCS, and when Bieber's changeup is on, it can neutralize any lefty. Look for him to throw this pitch down in the zone more often than he did in his last start, out of harm's way but close enough for Seattle to chase. The head-to-head matchup with the switch-hitting Jorge Polanco is particularly intriguing here. He has been hitting out of his mind for the past few days, and his swing from the left side is flatter than average and quicker than his righty swing, which gives him an ideal profile to square up fastballs in the zone but not pitches diving away from him. He also had a swing-and-miss rate just under 40% against changeups and splitters in 2025. This pitch will be key to taking the wind out of the sails of Polanco, as well as Cal Raleigh (who will hit left-handed vs Bieber) and Josh Naylor. Another strategy to watch out for is Bieber's deployment of his cutter. It was only a secondary pitch for him in the regular season, and not one of his main ones either, but he still used it between 10 and 15% of the time to both sides of the plate, especially early in counts. He located it on the outside half of the plate in both platoon matchups, and while opponents frequently sprayed it for line drives, it had the lowest average exit velocity of any pitch in his repertoire. However, it got lost in the shuffle during his last regular season start. He only threw four cutters in that game, and in his ALDS outing, he did away with it entirely, not using it at all at Yankee Stadium. Whether he has simply lost feel for it in recent weeks or this is part of a more deliberate plan of attack is tough to say, but if he's able, it might serve him to use it now. For all the excellence that Raleigh displayed at the plate this year, he hit just .190 when facing cutters, the only pitch type he had a negative run value against. Raleigh's heatmaps show a pronounced power outage on pitches up and in, which would be the natural path of Bieber's cutter if he elevates it on him. Relatively speaking, cutters gave Julio Rodríguez even more fits; he posted a light .115 batting average and .308 slugging percentage against them, striking out nearly 30% of the time on a pitch that isn't designed for swing-and-miss. Rodríguez can do damage and swings very hard, but he chases a lot and doesn't make much contact, making the cutter a logical option to disrupt his timing. There might not be a better time for the cutter to make a return to Bieber's game plan. It should not have taken this long for Seattle to start receiving recognition for how balanced their lineup is. They struck out at a virtually identical clip to the Yankees while hitting for fewer home runs during the regular season, but their 113 wRC+ placed third in MLB. They were top-five in bat speed this year as well, and looking at their lineup hitter by hitter clearly shows why they're dangerous. Their biggest contributors this series (Raleigh, Polanco, Naylor, and Rodríguez) are all guys who can make pitchers pay for a mistake fastball. Raleigh and Rodríguez often go big-game hunting, while Polanco and Naylor are more balanced with fewer holes in their approach. Meanwhile, the guys who have taken more of a backseat this series (Randy Arozarena, Eugenio Suárez, Dominic Canzone) crush secondaries in the zone. If Bieber hangs a slider to any of those hitters, it's likely ending up in the seats. In sum, this is a group that will require Bieber to stay on his toes and change his strategy with every hitter. Their combination of power guys, contact guys, steep swings, flat swings, fastball mashers, and off-speed/breaking-ball hunters is a tall task for any opponent. If Shane Bieber can rediscover his changeup, refine his fastball location compared to his last outing, and even mix in a few cutters to throw off the middle of the order, he should give the Jays a decent shot at getting themselves back in this series.

With Sunday's victory in Kansas City, the Blue Jays snapped a four-game losing streak and officially clinched a postseason spot. It has been an impressive year that fans shouldn't take for granted; just a season after winning 74 games and finishing last in the AL East, their 90-66 record is the best in the Junior Circuit. They'll have the division title and a first-round bye by the end of the week if they can simply tread water. While these are all huge developments for the franchise and should be celebrated, even the short-term future is difficult to size up. The Blue Jays have been greater than the sum of their parts, which is a necessary trait for a winning team, but there isn't a ton of proven, elite-level talent here. They may have 90 wins, but their run differential suggests that total should be lower. For most of the year, they've been a joy to watch, but they've done so despite showing many indicators of being a fortunate ball club. Of course, it's now 2025, a time when run differential is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our ability to quantify the impact of luck and determine how sustainable team performance is. Let's see what else we can find. Pythagorean win-loss record is, at this point, a fairly mainstream smell test that's used to determine the legitimacy of a team's actual win-loss record. It uses runs scored and runs allowed to determine what we'd expect a team's record to be. At the time of writing, the Blue Jays' record of 90-66 outpaces their Pythagorean record of 84-72 by six wins. The only team with a greater difference between the two is the Cleveland Guardians, who sit seven wins above their Pythagorean total. This is the kind of thing that can even out in no time flat. Remember 2016, when the Wild Card-winning Blue Jays swept the top-seed Rangers out of the ALDS? That wasn't as much of an upset as the bracket would show. Texas went 95-67 that year, but their Pyth. record was 82-80, the biggest difference (+13) in MLB history at the time (the 2021 Mariners finished 14 wins above). On the other hand, this could also be some sort of extremely long balancing act by the baseball gods. Remember 2021, when the Blue Jays went on a second-half heater to win 91 games but missed the playoffs because of how good their division was? Their Pyth. record was 99-63, suggesting they should've been playoff-bound. We can go deeper with this, though. FanGraphs has a modernized version of Pythagorean record called PythagenPat, which is more accurately sensitive to changes in run-scoring environment. That method expects the Blue Jays to be an 85-71 club at this point – one win better than the original formula says, but still short of the Yankees' and Red Sox's expected totals. Also available at FanGraphs is BaseRuns, a formula that uses expected runs for/against instead of actual by approximating those numbers using figures such as hits, walks, home runs, and sacrifices, and determining expected win totals from there. You could argue that actual run totals are noisy enough that BaseRuns is the most advanced theory in this realm of discussion, but it's also the tool that's least convinced by what the Blue Jays have done this season. Their BaseRuns record is 83-73, seven wins below reality. Of course, none of this is to discourage belief in this team. At worst, they're deserving of a win total between 83 and 85 at the moment. That's still worthy of far more respect than they got going into the season, and it's a marked improvement over last year regardless. What it does illuminate is how thin the margins are, especially going into this final week. If any of these three record estimators were perfectly reflected in reality, the Blue Jays would be either the fifth or sixth seed in the AL instead of being in pole position. Personally, what worries me the most about this team's chances in October is the lack of star power atop the rotation. Acquiring Shane Bieber at the deadline solved that to an extent, and Kevin Gausman has had a monster second half, but the fact that they're doing this without a clear ace feels fishy. A number one starter isn't necessarily an essential ingredient for winning a championship, but go back and look at all the World Series winners so far this decade. The only one with a below-average regular season rotation was last year's Dodgers, but they had a lockdown bullpen and more than enough offense to get the job done. Toronto's starters rank 20th in ERA and 24th in fWAR this year, and in a short series against tough competition, that could get exposed. If everything you've read to this point is an argument that the Blue Jays will struggle in the playoffs and that they aren't truly qualified to receive a Wild Card bye, then consider the rest an argument to the opposite. Toronto is once again leading MLB in Statcast's fielding run value, and despite some midseason lapses, they're a contender to win another Gold Glove Team Award this year. When there aren't All-Stars up and down the lineup or rotation, the standard for the defense is higher, and the Jays continue to show up in the field. That's part of why their position player fWAR total is second in the big leagues, behind only the Yankees. Conventional baseball wisdom suggests a team worth 0.0 WAR would finish with around 48 wins, and the Blue Jays' total fWAR, including the pitching staff, is 42.0. According to WAR, their 90 wins are no fluke at all. Another reason as to why their position players have accrued so much WAR is their offense, which isn't flashy, but has proven both effective and deep. Their 112 wRC+ is fifth in MLB. They hit the ball hard, and while they don't hit it in the air that much, aren't especially disciplined, and aren't actionable on the basepaths, they make a ton of contact. Not only have they struck out less than any other team in baseball this year, they're on track for the third-lowest era-and-park-adjusted K% of any team in the past 25 years. This is the approach that those 2014 and 2015 pennant-winning Royals teams swore by: Put the ball in play, hit line drives, and keep the pitcher on his toes at all times. We shouldn't disregard, however, the fact that the offense is also top-five by xwOBA. Further, their xwOBA is 10 points higher than their wOBA – it's not like they've been riding batted ball luck to victory the whole way. On top of all that...they beat good teams! Toronto's record of 47-40 against teams with a .500 record or better is tied with the Mariners for best in the AL. Their division is a gauntlet every year and has given them fits recently, but they've turned that around in 2025 as well. Only the Red Sox have a better head-to-head record against AL East competition. In order to maintain good standing in the division and the playoff picture, it's imperative to defeat both top rivals and good teams in general as much as possible, and this year's Blue Jays have done that and then some. They're a confounding team in so many ways. My expectations going into the year were shattered, which I'm sure is the case for many others. On paper, they aren't as menacing as the recent playoff teams in franchise history, but they win close games, they beat good teams, they frequently come back in the late innings, and they show the kind of fight that makes the fanbase proud. Can that all be taken at face value? Ultimately, I wholeheartedly believe the Toronto Blue Jays deserve the playoff spot they just clinched, but some form of luck is responsible for them being a first-place team hoping to secure a bye instead of a Wild Card team hoping to win the sprint to reach the playoffs. While the thought of a bye is certainly tempting, it will hardly matter when the ALDS gets underway in a week and a half. This is why they play the games. They got in, and they earned this opportunity. This year's team hasn't let many of those go to waste. All figures entering play on September 22, 2025.