What new acquisition Erik Swanson brings to the Blue Jays' bullpen

TORONTO — This sequence, from a late-April strikeout of Nikki Lopez, is Erik Swanson in a nutshell:

That’s Swanson’s fastball. It’s a pretty unique pitch. Swanson typically throws it with a near-perfect spin efficiency of 98-99 per cent. All that active backspin helps the ball fight gravity as it nears the plate, causing it to drop less than a league-average fastball and dart over the bats of hitters expecting it to arrive lower than it does. It also creates life, which in Swanson’s case leads to the pitch breaking horizontally to his arm-side by an average of 10 inches — four inches more than the average MLB fastball.

To Lopez, Swanson located his fastball perfectly. Right at the top of the zone and riding away from the left-handed hitter’s barrel, where it was likely to be called a strike, fouled off, or swung under thanks to its rising effect. Lopez didn’t even swing at it. And after taking a waste pitch to even the count, Lopez didn’t swing at this offering either:

That’s Swanson’s slider. He uses it primarily against right-handed hitters. But as he’s showing you and Lopez here, Swanson isn’t afraid to throw it to lefties. Still, it’s his least-used pitch and for good reason. Its action is unexceptional and it can get hit hard when Swanson misses arm-side and lets the pitch leak out over the plate.

But that’s OK because all Swanson needs the pitch to do is exist in a hitter’s mind as a possibility. He needs to steal just enough strikes with it — as he did against Lopez — to force opponents to guard against the possibility of it. He wants hitters to know that when they see him throw an off-speed pitch down it could be one of two things — either his slider or this one:

That’s Swanson’s splitter. It’s his most important pitch. It isn’t hyperbole to say it resuscitated his career when he began throwing it two years ago. The pitch, which drops over 34 inches as it sails to the plate, is a perfect complement to Swanson’s fastball. Hitters can only execute against one of them in the tenths of a second they have to make a swing decision. There’s just too much discrepancy in their locations and movement when Swanson’s throwing them where he wants to. And the 10-m.p.h. difference between the pitches doesn’t hurt, either.

So, there’s the formula for Swanson, who the Toronto Blue Jays acquired Wednesday from the Seattle Mariners as part of the return for Teoscar Hernandez. Deceptively rising fastballs up. Diving splitters down. Just enough sliders down-and-away from righties, down-and-in to lefties. Tunnel the pitches off of one another and you’re cooking with gas. Here’s an overlay of Swanson’s fastball and splitter, which are really his bread and butter:

If you watched Kevin Gausman at all this season, you’ve seen the pitch patterns Swanson’s trying to create. Gausman’s fastball is harder and his splitter is nastier, which is why he’s earning nine figures to turn lineups over three times while Swanson's earning seven to get three outs at a time. But it’s the same basic idea. 

And you can bet the Blue Jays thought about how important Alejandro Kirk’s exceptional receiving of low pitches was for pitchers like Gausman and Alek Manoah when acquiring Swanson to bolster the back end of their bullpen. Baseball Savant has graded Kirk as a top-three framer across baseball each of the last two seasons on pitches at the bottom of the strike zone. And where does Swanson locate his splitter and that slider he’s trying to steal strikes with?

But you knew that. Where else would he locate those secondaries off his elevated fastball? What you might not know is that of the 40 MLB pitchers to throw at least 50 splitters last season, Swanson finished second in called strike rate with the pitch at 13.5 per cent. 

Stealing strikes with splitters at the knees has been a huge part of Swanson’s success. Some of the credit ought to go to Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, who graded very well as a bottom-of-the-zone framer last season. But one of the few catchers who rated better than Raleigh was Kirk.

All things considered, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Swanson up his splitter usage in 2023, continuing a trend that began in earnest several years ago. Entering his age-29 season and under club control through 2025, Swanson’s relatively new to relief and still has room to improve. Even coming off a 1.7-fWAR campaign that saw him strike out 34.5 per cent of the batters he faced.

“We feel his fastball plays above average with a slightly above-average slider that attacked right-handed hitters and left-handed hitters exceptionally well,” said Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins. “Could pitch really in any inning for us. The strikeouts are big. That's been talked about a lot, obviously for some good reason. That's an opportunity for us to improve.”

As with most relievers, Swanson’s path to this point was a winding one. Still working as a starter when the Mariners acquired him from the New York Yankees in November 2018 as part of a package in return for James Paxton, Swanson made his MLB debut the following April and struggled substantially, allowing 11 homers and 28 earned runs over his first 31.1 big-league innings.

That performance got him demoted to triple-A, where he transitioned to relief before being called back up mid-summer and working to a 3.04 ERA over 20 appearances in a mostly low-leverage role out of Seattle’s bullpen. It’s the same role Swanson served for the 2020 Mariners during an injury-shortened, pandemic-altered season that, suffice to say with 11 earned runs allowed over 7.2 innings pitched, didn’t go much better.

But 2021 brought a return to normal ballplayer routines and with it some runway for Swanson to iron out the adjustments he was undergoing as he adapted to his new role. The problem was obvious — Swanson’s fastball was getting hammered. He allowed a 93.5-m.p.h. average exit velocity against it in 2019, and 95.9 in 2020. The pitch still got him a decent amount of swing-and-miss. But when it was hit, it was barrelled.

Swanson needed to diversify his pitch mix and find a way to keep hitters off his heater. So, after leaning heavily on his high-spin fastball as a starter — using it 74 per cent of the time in his small-sample 2020 — Swanson lessened that reliance on his primary offering and began incorporating a splitter.

Well, was it a splitter? Or was it a changeup? Pitch trackers were uncertain for a while in 2021, as the pitch mimicked the velocity of the changeup Swanson threw around 15 per cent of the time in 2019. But as he used the pitch more and more in 2021, it became clear that Swanson was doing something different. His new splitter was spinning less than his old changeup and dropping more. While the changeup moved only 24 inches vertically, the splitter was falling close to 34.

And the results were encouraging. Swanson’s splitter supplanted his slider as his go-to secondary offering in 2021 and generated a whiff a third of the time. He allowed just seven hits off the pitch in 2021 and only one for extra bases. It helped him wrestle his career back on the tracks and pitch to a 3.31 ERA over 35.1 innings — he missed six weeks due to a mid-season groin strain — while earning the odd high-leverage appearance.

Meanwhile, the splitter’s extreme drop down in the zone lowered eye levels and kept hitters off his elevated fastballs. That, along with decreasing his fastball usage to a more reasonable 60 per cent, allowed Swanson’s heater to play better on the plate. He still gave up four of his five 2021 homers off fastballs. But that was a marked improvement from the .700 slugging percentage hitters put up against the pitch in 2020, and the 12 homers he allowed off fastballs in 2019.

With the hard contact reigned in, the feel for his splitter getting better with time, and the confidence in his fastball returning, Swanson began 2022 on a tear, putting up a dozen scoreless innings over his first 11 appearances while striking out 16 and walking only one. His fastball usage decreased even further to around 55 per cent; his splitter was untouchable most of the time, a soft-contact guarantee the rest; and even his slider played up against left-handed hitting, producing a near 30 per cent whiff rate.

Through the end of August, Swanson carried a 0.84 ERA with 54 strikeouts against only seven walks over 43 innings. Four of the 10 earned runs he allowed on the year came in back-to-back, late-September outings rife with shoddy defence played behind him and bad batted ball luck. Among MLB relievers to throw at least 50 innings, Swanson finished top-10 in fWAR, ERA, FIP, K-BB%, hard-hit rate, and average exit velocity allowed.

“His peripherals have been good. The strikeouts have been there. The stuff has been improving and I feel like we have him at a very strong point in his career,” Atkins said. “He's still very young. So, I think that the case with relievers sometimes is that there is some level of transition, especially through a pandemic.”

But what was most encouraging about Swanson’s 2022 was that he didn’t allow a homer off his fastball all season long. As Swanson reinvented himself on the fly, from floundering, back-end starter to dangerous, late-game weapon, what was once his greatest weakness became a complete non-factor. By eliminating the hard contact he was allowing off that pitch, while maintaining the strong walk and strikeout rates he’d run throughout his career, Swanson created the circumstances needed for a dominant season of back-end relief. The results simply followed.