Cease strengthens his Cy Young case with one-hit shutout of Red Sox

BOSTON -- Dylan Cease, standing on the mound with his hands reaching for the sky after throwing 120 pitches, didn’t look like a man on a 48-57 team. That’s why this matters.

Cease’s talent is only matched by his stubbornness on these special days, creating an unstoppable force. In Saturday’s 6-0 win over the Red Sox, he threw the Blue Jays’ first complete game one-hitter in 16 years, another night flirting with history after he took a no-hitter into the ninth inning earlier this month.

This matters to Cease, a pitcher who openly chases greatness.

Manager John Schneider would have had to drag Cease off that mound in the ninth. On the second-last batter of the game, an animated Cease called his own challenge, then pumped his fist when it was overturned for strike three. He was ready to challenge the final pitch of the game, too, which was called for his 12th strikeout. For two hours and twenty-five minutes, he owned Fenway Park.

"You don’t see this very often,” Schneider said. “Dylan is kind of a throwback pitcher. He’s durable and he thrives on that stuff. You don’t see this much. The no-hitter attempt in San Francisco, you just don’t see this much. Dylan is evolving as a pitcher. I wanted to give him every chance to finish it.”

By the numbers:

• This was Cease’s third career complete game. He threw another one-hitter in 2022 and his no-hitter against the Nationals on July 25, 2024.
• The first one-hitter by a Blue Jays pitcher since Shaun Marcum on August 16, 2010. Eight days prior to that, Brandon Morrow had done the same while striking out 17.
• Only 10 pitchers in franchise history have thrown a complete-game shutout with one or zero hits allowed (a combined 15 times).
• His 120 pitches are a career high, the most in MLB this season and the most a pitcher has thrown since Justin Verlander threw 121 on Aug. 31, 2025.
• Cease is the first pitcher to throw at least 118 pitches in two outings in the same season since teammate Shane Bieber, who did it in 2021 with the Guardians.
• Cease is the second pitcher in the modern era to go eight-plus innings, allow no more than one hit and strike out 10 or more batters in consecutive road starts, joining Nolan Ryan in 1989, according to OptaSTATS.

Let’s throw a fun fact on the pile, too. Schneider was Shaun Marcum’s roommate in High-A Dunedin and Triple-A Syracuse back in his playing days. It’s been a while.

Whether a team loses it was for a week, a season or a decade, there need to be reasons to watch. The late 1990s and early 2000s were bleak times for the Blue Jays, but Carlos Delgado was in the lineup every night, and every fifth day, Roy Halladay took the hill. The ‘26 Blue Jays aren’t about to tailspin into another ice age in Toronto, but still, this feels like a lost season in need of some memorable moments.

Even if the season-long results aren’t there, fans just want to see their own passion reflected back. That’s why it’s so important to see Cease doing this exactly how he did it, asking for more and proving that he could do it. It’s another sign of the incredible trust he’s earned from Schneider and pitching coach Pete Walker, too, who just keep letting the big dog eat.

“That means a lot to me,” Cease said. “I went in after the seventh and I was like, ‘Can I get 110 today?’ Just to see if I could get a complete game. They let me go 10 over. There were a lot of foul balls in that last inning, but it was awesome. I’m very happy they let me go for that."

A few pitches into this game, you would have never seen it coming. Frankly, it looked likelier that Cease would last just a few innings. He sat near 93 mph in the first inning, a worrying number from a pitcher who typically lights up the radar gun and can touch 100 mph. Oddly enough, though, this forced Cease to “pitch”, as Schneider put it, and find some weak contact to keep him above water.

“My body was cranky early, so I was just working with what I had and making sure I threw strikes,” Cease said. “When we got to the fifth and I’ve got a no-hitter going, my body was loosening up a little bit. By the end, I had the kill in sight. I was just going for it.”

The race is officially on, too, between Cease and Cam Schlittler for the AL Cy Young Award, and games like these just keep reminding people why Cease has a shot.