New year, new looks: Jays covering all angles in building '26 pitching staff

The Blue Jays, who already had baseball’s highest pitching release point in Trey Yesavage, have recently added to the mix submariner extraordinaire Tyler Rogers, who essentially scrapes the ground with his knuckles when he throws. There’s a 5.8-foot gap -- that’s more than one Jose Altuve -- between where Yesavage releases the ball (7.1 feet high) and where Rogers does (1.3 feet.).

It’s a very funny visual.

Now, consider that the Blue Jays also traded for Tigers sidearmer Chase Lee, and added Dylan Cease’s high arm slot. Factor in solid reporting that indicates they value the ability to deploy varied looks in their Minor League prospects, and you might think you’ve found Toronto’s secret sauce: Confound hitters by throwing out different look after different look, much like the 2020 Rays did on their own way to a World Series appearance.

That may very well be what they’re after in 2026. Here’s the thing, though: It very much was not true in 2025. It actually couldn’t have been further from the truth, because no team had more similar pitcher looks (less varied, if you prefer) in 2025 -- or 2024, or 2023 -- than the Blue Jays did.

The 2026 Jays may not look a lot like the 2025 Jays. We mean that a little more literally than usual. It’s all about the looks.

There are a lot of different ways to express the physical way in which a pitcher throws the ball, but we’re going to stick with the three most easy to understand here. There’s arm angle, traditionally expressed as overhand, or three-quarters, or sidearm. In Statcast terms where 0° is directly sidearm, Yesavage is up at 64° and Rogers is down at -61°. Then there’s vertical release point and horizontal release point, which are just feet off the ground (vertical) or middle of the rubber (horizontal).

We have averages for all of these things: That’s 37° for arm angle, 5.8 feet for vertical release point, and 1.9 feet for horizontal. Therefore, we can show you something like “the most average look a pitcher can give belongs to Pittsburgh’s Mitch Keller,” who essentially nailed all three of those things exactly, and who sure looks like textbook definition of what a standard righty delivery looks like.

It’s worth noting that when we narrowed down pitchers to find that “most average release” that resulted in Keller, three of the 10 finalists pitched for Toronto in 2025: Kevin Gausman, Jeff Hoffman, and Yariel Rodríguez.

So, let’s look at teams over the last three seasons to find the most consistent looks. You can probably guess where this is going.

The three team-seasons with the highest percentage of their pitches coming in a range of plus or minus 5° around the average arm angle? The 2025 Blue Jays, just ahead of the 2023 Blue Jays, with the ’24 Jays in fourth.

Add in a range of plus or minus half-a-foot around the average vertical release, and now it’s the 2025 Blue Jays, ahead of the 2023 and ’24 editions. Cap it off by adding in a range around the average horizontal release point -- righty pitchers only here, for simplicity -- and if the question is, “Which team in the last three years has the highest rate of pitches thrown from near-average angles and release points?” it’s the 2025 Blue Jays, ahead of … well, you know. Nearly 58% of their righty pitches last year were thrown from this “average” box, more than double the Major League average of 26.6%.

(The team with the lowest rate of “average righty looks” in the last three years? The 2024 Red Sox, at just 8%. Yes, that’s the same team that made it clear they had little use for establishing the fastball. The 2023 Braves and 2024 Dodgers and Astros, all successful teams, followed closely.)

As the trend in the Majors moves away from consistent looks -- the average has dropped by about 1 percentage point in the last three seasons -- the Jays were, intentionally or not, going the other direction.

Now: You might reasonably point out here that the Blue Jays did make it to the World Series in 2025, so is it necessarily a bad thing not to have had varied looks? Public research is mixed here, though it’s worth noting that Toronto’s success was far more based on a strong lineup and excellent defense -- and, at the end, Yesavage -- than it was about their pitching, which was average to slightly below by most meaningful metrics in 2025.

Besides, “having a lot of looks” isn’t exactly a new idea. Remember what Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto once said, when trying to add some new views to a bullpen that had tilted heavily towards similar right-handed arms: “You want to create as much diversity as you can.” Wise words, except that wasn’t Mariners exec Jerry Dipoto; that was Angels exec Jerry Dipoto, because he was talking about it in 2012.

Still, was Yesavage so nasty because batters weren’t used to seeing a pitcher look like that? Or because his splitter was such a plus-plus pitch that the release point didn’t matter? It might be “both,” to some extent, though the words of Dodgers vet Kiké Hernández, speaking to long-time MLB vet Adam Ottavino last month, help to explain.

Hernández, who had been limited by a shoulder injury that later required surgery, was unable to take as much live batting practice as he was used to. In an attempt to catch up in the World Series, he swung at simulations of Toronto pitchers off a Trajekt pitch replication machine, which is capable of mimicking any real-life pitcher’s release point and pitch movement.

Well, almost any pitcher.

“We start moving the Trajekt,” said Hernández, “and sure enough, the Trajekt doesn’t get as high as [Yesavage’s] release point.”

“There’s a couple of guys … it’s Yesavage, Verlander,” he said, noting the two highest release points in the game in 2025, high enough that the machine apparently couldn’t get them quite right, “and one of the Rogers twins … the submarine guy. The Trajekt doesn’t get that low.”

That’s Tyler, now Yesavage’s teammate. He wasn’t there last year, and for the most part, neither was Yesavage, who for all of his heroics, didn’t really pitch that much for the Blue Jays in 2025, making just three regular-season starts before the playoffs. (He remains rookie-eligible for 2026, despite pitching more playoff innings -- 27 2/3 -- just this October than Hall of Famer Jim Kaat -- 24 2/3 -- pitched in his 25-year career.)

It’s going to be a different-looking team, and we can show you exactly what that means.

Last year, there were 13 Blue Jays who threw at least 500 regular-season pitches. This excludes Yesavage, who again barely appeared in the regular season. Those 13 looked like this, and for the most part: Pretty standard stuff. Braydon Fisher was a bit of an outlier, but on the whole, most of these pitchers looked similar.

For 2026? Let’s remove righties Chris Bassitt, Max Scherzer, and Chad Green, none of whom are under contract. Add in Lee and Rogers, throwing low and lower. Add in Yesavage, who isn’t new to the organization so much as he is new to being relied upon in the regular season. Add in Cease, who has a well above-average release slot. While Cody Ponce, freshly back from Korea, had a relatively standard look when we last saw him in the Majors in 2021, he’s the only one who wouldn’t stand out in some way, and that’s if he still looks the same as he once did.

It'll look a little different, no?

As we said above, no team had a higher rate of pitches from their righties in that “average look” box than Toronto, at 58%. If we swap out the departed players and add in the new guys, according to 2026 number of projected innings, that drops to under 40%.

“It's unique,” Ottavino said about Yesavage, “and that's part of the problem. Like … you just don't see this arm angle.”

You don’t. Rogers’, either. They’re looks the technology just can’t replicate -- at least not yet, anyway. It’s not clear that there’s a 1:1 relationship between “varied looks” and “team success.” It is clear that no team in the last three seasons had more consistent looks than the Blue Jays offered. That changed a little with Yesavage, late. It’ll change a lot with Rogers, and Cease, and whatever Lee offers too. It’ll look different, because it’ll look different.