BALTIMORE – Somewhat fittingly for a team forced to make TBA a regular part of its starting rotation, Toronto Blue Jays ace Dylan Cease is finishing a Cy-Young calibre season in limbo after an MRI revealed inflammation but no structural damage to his right shoulder.
The 30-year-old, who’s struck out 239 in 169 innings while carrying a 2.40 ERA over 29 starts, said upon rejoining the team Monday that he and the club “are still drafting a plan” for his next steps, although he hasn’t been ruled out from starting again this year.
For him to pitch this weekend against the Cincinnati Reds, manager John Schneider said, Cease will need to be “feeling better with this time down and feeling like himself, and obviously the game meaning a lot” for the Blue Jays, who are nearing elimination in the wild-card race. If not, the first season of his $210-million, seven-year deal will have ended with a messy outing Friday in Texas where his career-low average fastball velocity of 93.6 m.p.h. was concerning enough for him to be sent out for imaging the day after.
“It’s good news, I'm not having surgery, there's nothing that's going to keep me out next year or anything like that,” said Cease. “It's just some inflammation of various kinds.”
Regardless, the disappointing way his season is ending is yet another blow for a Blue Jays rotation that lost Bowden Francis and Shane Bieber before spring training began, Trey Yesavage and Jose Berrios during camp, Cody Ponce 2.1 innings into his first start and Max Scherzer in late April, triggering an ongoing roster churn that had them opening the final week of the season with just two healthy starters.
Even after Yesavage’s activation from his second injured-list stint Monday to start against the Baltimore Orioles, the Blue Jays still had seven starters on the sidelines. A revolving door of arms made “trying to stay mentally positive about it” a challenge, said Schneider, while regular bullpen games meant extra strain on reliever workload not only on the day of, but the days before and the day after, too. There was so much up-and-down that three pitchers, Chad Dallas, also recalled Monday, Chase Lee and Lazaro Estrada, each were optioned the maximum five times allowed without needing to clear waivers.
All of that’s made sustained winning — a 15-14 May and a 17-11 August are their only winning months so far — especially difficult.
“I always say in order to win a few series in a row or to reel off seven or eight in a row, you've got to have a couple turns through the rotation that are pretty good,” said Schneider. “That's been hard to do this year.”
Throughout the season, Cease, along with Kevin Gausman until he was traded, held a threadbare staff together with elite innings every five days, helping to keep a struggling team afloat. But his velocity has been declining for a couple months and he first remembers his shoulder feeling “achy” before his July 25 one-hit, 120-pitch shutout at Boston.
Cease’s fastball averaged 95.8 m.p.h. that afternoon, his first time this season under 96, and hovered in that range through Sept. 2 before dropping to 94.9, 94.8, 93.6 in the three starts that followed.
“I've never really experienced this, it's always been pretty easy for me to throw hard effortlessly. I never really experienced max-effort throwing and it not coming out and all that,” said Cease. “But at the same time it still felt good to compete. And I feel like I've grown a lot as a pitcher in terms of using my pitch mix and executing and locating the fastball and stuff like that. It wasn't anything that was like end of the world. It was just kind of something that had to be dealt with and a part of trying to win is going out and taking the ball, no matter what.”
Trying to describe the feeling in his shoulder, Cease said, “I don't know if I would fully use the word painful, definitely a bit heavy and achy, just not normal,” and doesn’t believe it resulted from a single moment, but rather the wear and tear “of being a thrower.”
“I will say I think I learned a lot from this year in terms of going forward, how I maybe want to manage things a little better,” he said. “I've learned my body better from a season like this.”
Among the lessons he’s identified is the amount of throwing in-between bullpens he does and finding more opportunities to sneak in additional rest.
Bigger picture, the Blue Jays aim to search for some learnings as to why they’ve had so many pitching injuries this season. Other than playing in the World Series last year, there are no real through lines but they’ve already started looking.
“I think you look at each individual guy and what their workload was this year and what you can try to stay ahead of,” said Schneider. “I feel like we've done a fairly good job with that, with our relievers going back to spring training, trying to ease them in a little bit. And we'll have to look at that again with the number of appearances with some of these guys. We've already started to look at it and start thinking about throwing load in the off-season when it starts, how much rest is going to be needed before you do start and making sure that everyone comes in where they should be next year.”
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