As the Toronto Blue Jays‘ off-season has marched on, the team’s intention of adding to its starting rotation has emerged as a throughline.
To date, the rumblings have not resulted in anything concrete, and the supply of credible starters is dwindling to the point that the Blue Jays may not make good on this idea. Still, the idea remains appealing primarily due to two commonly held beliefs about Yariel Rodríguez:
It’s tough to be totally confident in what he can offer as a full-time starting pitcher, and it seems pretty likely that he could make a difference in the bullpen.
The first idea is difficult to refute. Rodríguez had some good moments during an unorthodox rookie season that required severe workload management, but he’s still a high-variance option in a starting role.
The notion that part of the reason adding another starter makes sense is that he can thrive out of the bullpen is worth interrogating. Throughout his professional career, Rodríguez has been primarily used a reliever just once (2022 in Japan).
He was excellent that season (1.15 ERA in 54.2 IP), but it was in a different league some time ago. Rodríguez could probably survive in an MLB ‘pen, but it’s worth asking how much of a difference-maker he might be.
To answer that question, we looked at pitchers who split time between starting and relief in the last four full seasons since the shortened 2020 campaign to see what might be fair to expect of Rodríguez.
Our sample includes 39 pitchers who pitched at least 100 innings in one of the four seasons with 10-plus starts and 10-plus relief appearances. Choosing pitchers’ results from within individual seasons makes it less likely pitchers have reinvented themselves in a way that would mess with the results or experience significant velocity jumps.
Blue Jays fans likely recall the rapid turnaround of Bowden Francis in the middle of the 2024 season, but there are always outliers. In each of the last four seasons, the improvements pitchers see when working out of the bullpen are notable:
|
Season |
SP ERA |
RP ERA |
SP K/9 |
RP K/9 |
SP Velocity |
RP Velocity |
|
2021 |
4.69 |
3.62 |
7.53 |
8.84 |
92.1 |
93.2 |
|
2022 |
4.64 |
3.41 |
7.86 |
8.41 |
93.7 |
94.2 |
|
2023 |
4.75 |
3.90 |
8.12 |
9.25 |
93.2 |
93.9 |
|
2024 |
4.26 |
3.69 |
7.07 |
7.23 |
91.8 |
93.5 |
In every case, these pitchers used in dual roles saw an average decrease in their ERA between 1.23 and 0.57 points, a jump in K/9 between 0.16 and 1.13, and a velocity bump ranging from 0.5 to 1.7 mph.
If we take the midpoint of all those improvements and apply them to Rodríguez’s rookie season, the change looks like this:
|
SP vs. RP |
ERA |
K/9 |
Velocity |
|
Actual 2024 season |
4.47 |
8.83 |
93.9 |
|
RP adjustment |
3.57 |
9.48 |
95.0 |
That’s a result the Blue Jays could probably live with, but to take things a little farther, we can find some pitch comparisons in our sample — specifically for Rodríguez’s four-seam fastball and slider, which he threw 68 per cent of the time in 2024, and would likely lean on even more in relief.
Of our 39 pitchers, the player whose fastball most resembles Rodríguez’s is 2022 Brad Keller when he was with the Kansas City Royals. His velocity as a starter that season (94.3 mph) closely matches the Blue Jays right-hander. Like Rodríguez, Keller’s four-seamer was also extremely straight, breaking two-plus inches below average vertically and horizontally. Rodríguez is even more extreme in this area at four-plus inches below average each way, but that is a rare profile.
Here’s how Keller’s fastball fared as a starter and reliever in 2022:
|
Role |
Velocity |
Run Value/100 |
|
SP |
94.3 |
-0.75 |
|
RP |
95.7 |
+1.89 |
Getting a velocity boost on a straight fastball out of the pen greatly benefited Keller. Although Rodríguez might not be able to match a gain of 1.4 mph, this is an encouraging comp for a pitcher whose fastball had a run value of minus-5 last season.
When it comes to the slider, Rodríguez’s has an approximately average vertical break (0.5 inches below average) and strong horizontal movement (3.7 inches above average) and comes in at 84.8 mph. Once again, there wasn’t a perfect one-to-one.
But a recent example of a right-hander with a slider that sees far more impressive horizontal than vertical movement is the Athletics’ Mitch Spence last season. His slider velocity as a starter (84.3 mph) is relatively close to Rodríguez’s, and his horizontal movement (9.3 inches above average) dwarfs the vertical drop (2.2 above average).
That is more impressive than the raw movement on Rodríguez, but its strengths are the same, and not many sliders in our sample are close to the Blue Jays righty’s from a velocity/movement standpoint.
As a bonus, Spence has a lesson to teach us — breaking balls don’t necessarily get the same boost from a move to the bullpen that fastballs do.
|
Role |
Velocity |
Run Value/100 |
|
SP |
84.3 |
+0.02 |
|
RP |
84.3 |
-0.03 |
Spence threw the exact same pitch as a starter and a reliever with the exact same results. This is not guaranteed to happen with Rodríguez, but it’s helpful to know that an outcome like this is absolutely on the table and the upside of a move to relief is more about fastball gains — and pruning less effective tertiary pitches from an arsenal — than finding a new gear atop his breaking ball.
Until we see Rodríguez pitch out of an MLB bullpen, there will be some uncertainty about his performance in that role. But he seems likely to at least give the Blue Jays above-average production, and any starter the team adds should give the squad the dual rotation-bullpen upgrade it’s been seeking all off-season.
from Sportsnet.ca
via i9bet
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