DUNEDIN, Fla. — When Brett Cecil stands on the mound, staring 60 feet and six inches towards home plate, he thinks about how the guy in the batter’s box is trying to take money out of his pocket. He thinks about how that man with the bat wants to take food off his family’s table. He thinks about how much he wants to beat the snot out of that dude.
“I’m not gonna literally do that,” Cecil says, “but that’s the mentality you’ve gotta have. You have to want to fight the guy in your head.”
So there’s a peek into what runs through the mind of a pitcher who comes into the game when the leverage is at it’s highest. And one who’s damn good at it, too.
According to FanGraphs, Brett Cecil faced the second-most “high leverage” situations on average for the Blue Jays in 2014, following Casey Janssen who spent most of the season as the team’s closer.
Almost a third of Cecil’s 2014 innings were classified as “high leverage” by FanGraphs and Cecil raised his game significantly in those situations, upping his K/9 to 15.98, more than four strikeouts higher than his K/9 in “low” or “medium leverage” spots. Simply put, when the Blue Jays were most in need of a strikeout, they often turned to Cecil. And he delivered.
“He can get that strikeout,” says his manager John Gibbons. “He doesn’t rattle. He’s pretty confident and calm when he’s out there. That’s a big part of it.”
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Since the Blue Jays abandoned the idea of using Cecil as a starter during the 2012 season, he’s emerged as one of the team’s most reliable bullpen arms, being called upon in a litany of situations. The 28-year-old has a 2.76 ERA over the last two years, striking out 11.5 batters per nine innings and allowing just six home runs to the 484 batters he’s faced, despite playing most of his games at homer-happy Rogers Centre.
This spring he appears to be the logical choice to take over as the Blue Jays closer after the off-season departure of Casey Janssen, who held the job for the better part of the last three seasons. Aaron Sanchez and Aaron Loup are the other two apparent candidates, but Loup may be more valuable as a workhorse lefty in the seventh and eighth innings, while Sanchez could pitch his way into the rotation with a strong spring. Sanchez is also just 22-years-old and has limited experience pitching as a high leverage reliever in the majors.
But sometimes you get the sense that Gibbons feels Cecil is so valuable — “I don’t think there’s a better curveball out there,” the manager says — he might not even want to make him his closer. If there’s a situation in the seventh or eighth inning with a slim lead, runners on base and a desperate need for an out, Gibbons may opt to go to Cecil for that crucial moment, rather than hold onto him for a ninth inning save opportunity that may never come.
“It could be one of those deals where one night he’s closing, the other night he’s coming in at the end of the seventh or eighth,” Gibbons says. “Do you want to save him until the ninth? If the game’s on the line a little earlier than that, he may be the guy there, you know?”
The obvious line of thought is that relief pitchers always want to be closers. Closers get saves and saves get money in arbitration and contract negotiations. Cecil’s said he wants the ninth inning job — who wouldn’t? But when you ask him to really think about his favourite moments from the last two years, he comes back to the times he entered a game in the middle of an inning with runners on base and a slim lead, parachuting in to save a teammate from a jam.
“I love those situations. It gives me the chance to help out a teammate. I’m sure he didn’t like it, but I did it a couple times for Casey [Janssen] and loved it,” Cecil says. “There’s no better feeling than coming in with one out and the bases loaded and being able to get your buddy out of it. There’s no bigger high in baseball for me than something like that.”
Cecil came in for plenty of seventh- or eighth-inning jams last year, but it’s the two times he entered in the ninth to replace the struggling Janssen that he remembers most.
The first was on July 22 against the Boston Red Sox when Janssen entered the top of the ninth with a six-run lead. Two batters and a home run later it was a four-run lead; four batters after that there were two runners on with David Ortiz coming to the plate. Gibbons went to Cecil, who got Ortiz to ground out weakly and end the game.
The second was August 24 against the Tampa Bay Rays. With the game tied heading into the top of the ninth, Janssen came on and gave up back-to-back singles, which were then moved into scoring position by a sacrifice bunt. Any ball hit reasonably deep to the outfield would have likely given the Rays the lead. Gibbons pulled Janssen and went to Cecil, who got back-to-back strikeouts to preserve the tie.
“Some guys call those high stress situations,” Cecil says. “But I call them high adrenaline.”
A bout of tenderness in Cecil’s throwing shoulder caused him to miss his scheduled outing on a rainy Friday in Dunedin, and will hold him out for at least a week, although Gibbons said “we don’t think it’s a big deal.” Assuming he’s healthy, Cecil will no doubt play a major role in the Blue Jays bullpen, whether the inning reads seventh, eighth, ninth or all of the above. And no matter how or when he’s used, Cecil knows one thing for certain.
“Coming out of the pen, you’ve gotta be a bulldog. You can’t be afraid,” he says. “You’ve really just gotta be a prick. Yeah. A real prick on the mound.”