Chris Bassitt and his ‘like 40 pitches’ give Blue Jays righty a weapon for any occasion

DUNEDIN, Fla. – There’s a lot of time to think during the recovery from Tommy John surgery and Chris Bassitt did plenty of that after his procedure in May 2016. He’d experienced a touch of success in the big-leagues the two years previous, first with the Chicago White Sox in 2014 and then, after being part of a winter meetings deal for Jeff Samardzija, with the Oakland Athletics the year after. But he’d been hit around in the five outings before his elbow blew out and he recognized that if he kept pitching the way he had, constantly pushing for more and more velocity, he wasn’t going to last, even with his arm rebuilt.

“Everyone, even today, is like, you've got to throw hard, got to throw hard, got to throw hard and I understand the reasoning behind it, I get the numbers and the difference between batting averages versus 93 and versus 97,” says Bassitt. “But I quickly realized that throwing softer is a lot easier than throwing harder and I get to stay healthier a lot longer. I don't need to throw 95 to get guys out. I can sit 93. Give me two weeks, I can throw 95 but I don't know if I'm going to stay healthy doing it. So it was learning my body after T.J. and that you're good enough in the low 90's, you don’t need the mid 90’s.”

The 34-year-old from Toledo, Ohio has been proving that ever since, delivering 10 fWAR of value across 107 games, 100 starts, for the Athletics and, after a sell-off trade following the lockout, the New York Mets. The stability, consistency and intelligence he brings to a starting rotation were elements that landed him a $63-million, three-year deal with the Toronto Blue Jays in December, after a free-agency courtship he describes as, “I like you, you like me, let’s do it.”

While by no means is a fastball that sits at 93 m.p.h. slop, Bassitt and his six-pitch, varied arm-angle repertoire offer a counterbalance to a rotation stocked with the power arms of Kevin Gausman, Alek Manoah, Jose Berrios and Yusei Kikuchi. 

The deep arsenal draws awe from his teammates, Gausman quipping that he throws 10 different pitches while Manoah takes the hyperbole to an extreme by saying “he throws like 40 pitches.”

On a more serious note, Manoah, an AL Cy Young Award finalist, added that watching Bassitt manipulate “the release points and how he uses his body, the mental cues that he uses can help me in many different ways.”

And the baseball IQ behind how he picked up six pitches good enough to throw in the major leagues and the management needed to keep him sharp offers another worthy resource, too.

That Bassitt has produced the type of success he has given where he started is proof of that. 

Selected as a 16^th-round pick in the 2011 draft out of the University of Akron, where he worked out of the bullpen, Bassitt says “everyone in the world projected me to be a fringe bullpen guy.”

He was throwing just a fastball and curveball then, but after some initial success, the White Sox offered him the chance to start at high-A Winston-Salem in 2012. That’s when he picked up a slider and after left-handed hitters kept doing damage against him, he thought, “let's add a pitch to help against lefties.”

“That led to the cutter,” he continues, “and from there it was like, all right, this year you're struggling against this type of hitter, let's develop a pitch that helps. We've done that for years.”

In that way, Bassitt cleverly filled out a toolkit effective enough that he didn’t have to max-out for extra velocity after his elbow was rebuilt. While doing so is far easier said than done since pitchers loathe to surrender hits on their third or fourth-best offerings, a willingness to think in broader timelines allowed him to overcome any such reluctance.

“It's scary to a lot of people because they think it's going to mess up my other pitches or I'm going to get hurt doing it or it's going to be bad,” Bassitt explains. “But I've told a lot of people, a bad pitch thrown in the right spot to certain hitters is better than not having the pitch. That bad pitch, when you keep throwing it, becomes decent, you can have more confidence in it and is eventually going to become a really good pitch for you. For sustainability in the big-leagues, the more pitches you have the longer you can survive, so to speak.”

Last year, Bassitt’s primary offering was a sinker he used 33.4 per cent of the time, followed by a cutter at 17.2 per cent, slider at 16.3 per cent, curveball at 13.9 per cent, four-seam fastball at 13.1 per cent and changeup at 6.1 per cent. Each allows him to attack a different part of the strike zone, matched up to exploit a hitter’s tendencies and weaknesses. 

And on a given day if the feel for one pitch just isn’t there, well, there are plenty of options for him to fall back on.

“Say two of them don't work,” says Bassitt. “I’d say a lot of guys see one pitch doesn't work, they keep on trying to throw it to get it going. For me, I don't bang it for that day, but I have Option B and I can really focus on that pitch that was off in a bullpen (before the next start). It's been pretty easy for me to keep the sharpness of all of them because they're all so different. Each one has a different key to how I throw it so it's easy to differentiate and not blend them together.”

The in-game usage may impact the way he recovers between starts as if, for instance, he goes cutter-heavy in an outing and doesn’t end up naturally pronating his arm as much, some areas get taxed more than others and need to be targeted between outings. But he’s learned his body well enough to understand what he must do between starts to stay prepared.

Bassitt plans to experiment with calling his own game, something he’s always done in the past, with the PitchCom transmitter this spring, curious to see how it feels with the signs coming from him rather than the catcher. He wants to be ready to deliver quickly on the mound to keep hitters from getting comfortable and he and Danny Jansen quickly getting on the same page will be a priority in the coming weeks.

Jansen likens the process with Bassitt to that of learning Hyun Jin Ryu back in 2020, which is why there’ll be an “ultra focus on him with preparation.” But he’ll also want to understand what makes the right-hander tick at a deeper level, too.

“Everybody's got different cues, a lot of guys have different pitches to get back on top of the ball,” says Jansen. “If everything's leaking, everything is late, what's going to get you back on? It might be the slower curveball, you know what I mean? That's all stuff you learn on the fly. We've got lives coming up. We've got games coming up. That's the best time where I feel like I learn the most about these guys before being thrown into the fire.”

Bassitt will be doing the same thing with his fellow starters, watching them with a coach’s eye the way he did analyzing Chris Sale back when they were together on the White Sox or Sonny Gray with the A’s. As much as everyone wants to learn from him, he wants to learn from them, too.

“I enjoy asking, how is Gausman really good, how is Manoah really good, trying to understand their game,” says Bassitt. “I might pick up on one or two things that they do throughout the year, on the field or off the field, and then just add it to my own thing. But for the most part, I'm just trying to learn guys, what makes them really good and what makes them tick. When they're not so good, why (not)? And I just add from there.”