What the Blue Jays' lack of high-end velocity means

When the Toronto Blue Jays wrapped their 2025 spring schedule on Sunday, they finished up in a place of positivity.

The team is relatively healthy, catcher Alejandro Kirk signed an extension that will keep him in town through his prime at a reasonable rate, and its position players are swinging the bats well, with nine of the 13 guys on the opening-day roster posting a Grapefruit League OPS above .800.

While the Blue Jays saw more encouraging signs than concerning ones during the spring, their games in Florida highlighted an issue lurking beneath the surface for this team, specifically that Toronto has a notable lack of high-end velocity to throw at its opponents.

Not every pitch in spring training is tracked because not all ballparks have Statcast installed, but the Blue Jays combined to throw just 20 tracked pitches at 97 mph or harder. That may sound like a tough bar to clear, but keep in mind that last season the average MLB four-seam fastball sat at 94.2 mph.

For a little context, 65 pitchers threw more elite-velocity heaters than Toronto’s entire staff.

If we look at the Blue Jays' most direct competition in 2025 — American League teams projected to have records of .500 or better — each of them that had Statcast in their spring home threw at least three times as many 97 mph-plus pitches as Toronto.

There is plenty of room for quibbling with these numbers because some of the heaters in question came from pitchers who won’t see the field in 2025 and the clubs played a different number of games in ballparks without Statcast. If the Blue Jays were somewhere near these teams, it wouldn’t be worth highlighting at all, but the gap is significant.

None of this doesn’t come as a massive surprise considering the Blue Jays’ personnel, particularly in the rotation where the team features durable veterans rather than live-armed youngsters.

At the same time, it has gone under the radar that Toronto has moved on from the pitchers who threw the hardest for them in 2024 — Nate Pearson, Yusei Kikuchi and Génesis Cabrera — and onboarded Max Scherzer (26th percentile fastball velocity in 2024) Nick Sandlin (28th percentile) and Richard Lovelady (23rd percentile), while giving Bowden Francis (30th percentile) a chance to be a full-time starter.

The team reunited with Yimi García while newcomers Jeff Hoffman, and to a lesser extent Jacob Barnes can dial it up — but precisely 70 per cent of the 97-plus mph fastballs the team threw in 2024 came from pitchers no longer with the organization. 

Right about now, you might be thinking something to the effect of It doesn’t matter how hard guys throw, if they can get hitters out, velocity is a means to an end. That’s true to an extent, but it doesn’t capture the whole picture.

In the same way that some hitters are vulnerable to breaking balls, changeups or pitches in a specific area, plenty struggle with top-notch velocity. 

Below are a few notable examples of hitters with wOBAs below .300 against 97-plus mph heaters over the last three seasons.

Having fireballers on hand is helpful from a matchup perspective, as velo is simply the best tool to attack certain hitters. Freddie Freeman is the perfect example here as he’s hit .321/.395/.532 against all pitches below 97 mph over the last three seasons — good for the sixth-best wOBA of all hitters (.397) — while struggling with MLB’s hardest fastballs.

Yordan Alvarez didn’t quite crack our <.300 wOBA criteria, but he’s another example of a player who crushes everything but top-end heat.

Not only are there certain matchups where elite velocity is particularly handy, but the recent results from low-velo teams have not impressed. The table below shows how teams with bottom-five fastball velocity have ranked in key metrics over the past five years.

Although the Blue Jays aren’t certain to meet this criteria, it seems like a reasonable bet based on their modest ranking last season (19th), their off-season moves, and the lack of big arms at the triple-A level. 

These numbers might not look too grim, but just five of 25 low-velo teams over the past half-decade have posted top-10 ERAs, three reached that standard on K rate, and the only one to do it by fWAR (the 2020 Minnesota Twins) made that happen in a shortened season.

Last year provided some hope on the ERA front, as three velocity laggards finished in the top 10 in ERA (the Cleveland Guardians, Milwaukee Brewers, and Chicago Cubs) and all three of them were bolstered by top defences, something the Blue Jays have on their side.

Realistically, that’s the way forward for Toronto. The Blue Jays' lack of hard throwers is likely to translate into fewer strikeouts and more reliance on the team’s top-notch gloves. 

That can work to a point, but the 2024 Blue Jays led the majors in DRS (102), UZR (28.1), and Fielding Run Value (43) and only eight clubs gave up more runs. That won’t necessarily be their fate in 2025, but this year’s group will have to show there’s more to pitching these days than lighting up the radar gun.