ARLINGTON, TX — For nearly two weeks now, it’s felt like Dylan Cease has been white-knuckling his season, correcting and counter-steering every lurch and pull as it careens from his control.
He entered September a legitimate Cy Young candidate. But then, a sudden velocity dip. The hard-hit rate shooting the opposite direction. A five-steal night exposing a blind spot in his game. Velocity dropping again.
He adjusted his between-start routines, took an extra day’s rest, talked about maximizing what he has. Yet, in his second and third outings of September, Cease’s fastball averaged less than 95-m.p.h. — the first time that’s happened in his career. He earned only one whiff with the pitch across those two outings, the swings against him growing dangerously comfortable.
The Blue Jays no doubt would have preferred to give Cease that extra day’s rest again following five walks his last time out. But multiple bullpen days per week are already putting undue pressure on the rest of the team’s pitching staff, leaving it ill-prepared to carry even more weight.
Plus, with so little margin for error remaining as the Blue Jays cling to relevance in a congested American League wild-card race, the short-term value of a far-from-fresh Cease pitching a critical game against the Texas Rangers on Friday appeared to trump the long-term concern over how his workload is impacting his effectiveness.
Appeared being the operative word. Now, following a 7-1 Blue Jays loss to the Rangers, in which Cease didn’t make it out of the third inning, the proposition has reversed. The Blue Jays must decide how much value there is in running this vastly diminished version of Cease out to the mound when his rotation turn comes back up in five days’ time. And they must weigh how much concern to have over the impact additional workload will have on his performance going forward.
"We'll see," replied Blue Jays manager John Schneider, asked how his club would approach Cease's next start. "He's reporting nothing. Feeling all right, feeling good. It's where we are in the season. Everyone's kind of battling and grinding to make pitches, grinding to make plays.
“So, we'll just be in touch with him. But nothing physically alarming enough to say, 'hey, we're going to skip you’ or anything like that. So, just try to manage it, try to work through it in between, and get ready for his next one."
Friday, Cease didn’t throw a first-pitch strike to any of the first six batters he faced, walking four of them. Along the way, Corey Seager and Wyatt Langford exploited his difficulties holding runners, stealing bases easily. He earned one whiff and one chase outside the zone with the 36 pitches he threw his first time through the order.
And incredibly, he was close to containing the damage. Cease escaped a jam in the first using a changeup to get a weak groundball double play from Brandon Nimmo and nearly did the same in the second when Evan Carter bounced a one-out curveball back up the middle. But Ernie Clement misfired a force attempt at third off the back of a baserunner’s head, allowing two to score.
A sacrifice fly and a Seager double brought in two more before the second inning was through, and shortly after Cease loaded the bases again with two walks and a base hit in the third, his night was done.
“If you don't have velocity or sharp stuff but you can throw strikes and execute, you can still get outs," Cease said. “But the walks and not commanding the ball is not a good recipe.”
In all, Cease located just 35 per cent of his pitches in the zone, including only 11 of his 36 fastballs, which led to a season-high six walks. He threw first-pitch strikes to only four of the 17 batters he faced while generating a chase rate below 20 per cent, which led to a season-low three strikeouts.
His 74 pitches were his fewest thrown since he exited a May start due to a hamstring issue. His 2.2 innings were his lowest since an August 2024 outing cut short by a lengthy rain delay. His 93.6-m.p.h. average fastball velocity was a career-low by nearly a full mile per hour.
"I think it's just late in the year. Obviously, I'm still able to take the ball and throw and all that," Cease said, asked if anything physical was limiting his velocity. “I don't know if it changes that much. I'm just trying to get it in the zone and execute. Whether it's 92 or 98, the name of the game is executing pitches. So, that's all I'm really trying to do.”
Cease’s difficulties created a sizeable early deficit Toronto’s offence was unable to overcome. Myles Straw, who entered the night with a 129 wRC+ over the last 30 days, cashed a run with a double in the fifth after Kazuma Okamoto and Josh Smith led off with walks against Rangers starter Kumar Rocker.
But Blue Jays hitters were otherwise unable to keep Rocker’s sinker off the ground while frequently chasing his slider beneath the zone. From the sixth inning on, while mustering only two hits against Rangers reliever Trevor Williams, seven of Toronto’s 12 outs were made with plate appearances of three pitches or fewer.
Meanwhile, the fallout from Cease’s short start is significant for a pitching staff already threadbare and thinning by the day. Five relievers were asked to cover the final 5.1 innings, a suboptimal way to begin a six-games-in-six-days road trip in the middle of September. Never mind that, following Jose Soriano’s Saturday start, the Blue Jays are positioned to run consecutive bullpen games on Sunday and Monday.
"We're asking a lot. We're trying to monitor, when they're in there, pitch count and number of ups and things like that," Schneider said. "But we're going to need Jose to be good tomorrow and reset it a little bit, that's for sure."
If all goes according to plan, Spencer Arrighetti will carry most of Sunday’s workload while Trey Yesavage, who threw a side session at Globe Life Field on Friday, will be activated from the IL to throw around 50 pitches the following day. But we all understand baseball is antithetical to best-laid plans.
If things go haywire again on Saturday, and the Blue Jays are forced to burn through even more of their bullpen, Yesavage could return as soon as Sunday — less than six weeks following surgery to repair the meniscus in his left knee. And after Michael Lorenzen, who’d been providing low-leverage length, was designated for assignment, the Blue Jays may need to summon further pitching reinforcements from Buffalo before the weekend is through.
Such is life when your bullpen is covering two rotation spots. And with the Blue Jays motivated to give 42-year-old Max Scherzer an extra day of rest ahead of his next start — presently scheduled for Tuesday in Baltimore — those spots now fall on back-to-back days.
Due up on Wednesday following Scherzer? Cease. On regular rest. A proposition that runs somewhere from risky to ill-advised based on Friday’s performance. That could mean a third bullpen day on the road trip. Or four considering what Friday’s game turned into, as Cease’s September careened further from his control, and any remaining optimism in this Blue Jays season slid right off the road with him.
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