Dylan Cease Has a Whole New Look

[Davy Andrews]

No, it's not just the beard. Cease is bringing in two new pitches and doing some different things on the mound.

Over at FanGraphs, David Laurila recently ran an interview with Dylan Cease. It was a particular style of interview that Laurila has conducted quite a bit lately: he read Cease several lines from an amateur scouting report and asked Cease to repsond to them. I found it really fun; there were some parts Cease agreed with and some parts he didn’t. The best part came at the end, when Laurila revealed that the scouting report predicted Cease as a mid-rotation arm, or maybe just a bullpen piece. “I do remember seeing that a lot as a young player, the bullpen aspect,” Cease said. “But yeah, pretty much it was, am I going to develop a third pitch, or get one or two pitches that are swing-and-miss, that can buy me multiple times through the order? I added a slider, which I didn’t have at that point. So I added my best pitch. I always had the velo, and if you have two good pitches you can kind of sprinkle in everything else and have them essentially play off each other. That’s worked out for me.”

As Cease indicated, that’s how things tend to work. Relievers can get by with a good pitch or two, but starters need a full repertoire. By the time he made it to the majors in 2019, Cease had added his world-class slider as well as a changeup, and he even threw the occasional sinker, though he abandoned he pitch in 2020. As a result, Cease has been a four-pitch pitcher for most of his career, relying on a four-seam fastball, slider, knuckle curve, and the changeup. However, he has toyed with other pitches. The sinker made a brief comeback in 2022 and 2024, and he threw a few sweepers in both 2021 and 2024. Moreover, Cease has relied on his changeup less and less. He threw it just 1% of the time in 2024. If Cease’s first start on Friday was any indication, he's going to look very different this year, and not just because of the increased bushiness of his beard.

On Friday, Cease brought back the changeup and the sinker. As Lance Brozdowski noted, the changeup looks different than it used to. In 2024, the pitch averaged just under 70 mph. On Friday, it was nearly 80 mph, where the pitch sat from 2019 to 2021. It also appears that Cease has been tinkering with the movement profile as well. The pitch averaged a career-high 8.5 inches of arm-side run, as well as 17 inches of rise, also very nearly a career-high. I put a graph of the year-by -year movement below, but in short, the pitch has never featured as much movement as it did on Friday.  

We’re only talking about 10 changeups here, so maybe these numbers will come back down to earth, but for now, it seems like Cease has clearly been working on the pitch. He’s going for more velocity and more movement, presumably in an attempt to earn more swings and misses against lefties. Cease has pretty much never thrown the changeup to righties, and that looks unlikely to change any time soon.

For righties, he’s got the new sinker. It doesn’t really sink much – Cease excels at getting rise on his pitches but struggles to get drop, except with his changeup – but it does rise a bit less than his four-seamer and feature a few more inches of arm-side run. He threw it 20% of the time against righties, and it will be interesting to see if he sticks with it throughout the season. Cease has always been very nearly a two-pitch pitcher against righties, shelving his changeup entirely and keeping the curveball usage down around 10%. Even though the sinker isn’t all that different from the four-seamer, flashing this other look could be enough to throw righties off balance just a little bit and give some depth to Cease’s arsenal.

There’s one other trend that we should be looking for this season. Cease has always run one of the game’s higher arm angles, coming from straight over the top, which helps him generate so much vertical break on his pitches. However, Cease dropped his arm angle a bit on Friday. He actually throws all of his pitches from fairly different arm angles – he releases the slider the lowest and the changeup the highest – but on Friday, all of his pitches came out at a slightly lower arm angle than they had in recent years. Generally speaking, when you lower your arm angle, throwing the ball from a wider release point, you give up some vertical break for some horizontal break, and that was the case for Cease on Friday. Once again, we’ll see if that was just a one-off, or whether he really will be modifying his normal over-the-top delivery to get a bit more East-West movement.

As for how Cease actually did on Friday, the top-line results weren’t fantastic. He went 4 1/3 innings and allowed three earned runs on four hits, two walks, and one homer. However, the underlying numbers were encouraging. He racked up seven strikeouts and his fastball velocity ticked up to 97.4 mph. That’s really something keep an eye on. Cease hasn’t averaged 97 mph on the pitch since 2020. The two walks weren’t great, but with more velocity and an expanded repertoire, Cease should be fun to watch this season.

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