Why Dylan Cease Is Actually Fine and Everyone Can Calm Down

[Connor Richards]

The Padres' ace has the third-highest ERA among qualified starters. That doesn't actually affect his rest-of-season outlook.

Acquired from the White Sox in early 2024 for a haul that included major pieces of the Juan Soto trade, Dylan Cease was dominant for the Padres last year. Alongside Michael King, who headlined the Padres' return in the Soto trade, Cease anchored the Padres rotation in a year marked by injuries. King and Cease threw 359 2/3 innings for the Friars, making them the only pitchers besides knuckleballer (or perhaps knuckleball-throwing is more appropriate?) Matt Waldron to eclipse 100 for the Padres.

Cease finished the year with a 3.47 ERA, while King ended up posting a sub-3.00 ERA at 2.85. King ended up fifth in baseball in ERA among qualified starters, while by K-BB% and SIERA, both pitchers ranked as Top 20 starters. This season, King took the ball on Opening Day and has already turned in his first career complete game shutout against the Rockies. Cease has struggled. This tale of two aces may leave people concerned about Cease, whose 6.64 ERA is the third highest among qualified pitchers, spared the top spot by Aaron Nola's 6.65 and Charlie Morton's 8.84. 

Early-season struggles for a high-profile player in a contract year are bound to inspire buzz. It could involve anything and everything from how it impacts potential contract or trade value to whether they are broken. These discussions are often bereft of nuance, as panic and clickbait rule the day, so allow me to throw my hat into the ring with a take: everyone is overreacting and Cease is fine.

Cease's ERA is eye-watering, courtesy of an Opening Series matchup against the Braves and, principally, a nine-run drubbing in the home of the Sacramento River Cats at the hands of the team formerly from Oakland. Cease surrendered nine hits and three walks over four innings (20.25 ERA) in the hitters' paradise that is Sutter Health. He has allowed six earned runs over 16 1/3 innings across his other three starts this season, for a 3.30 ERA. While it is true that an early-season start in Sutter Health is as good a candidate as one will ever encounter for tossing out a start as an outlier, that explanation is a bit unsatisfactory. That feels a bit like a hitter saying "if you ignore all the games where I went 0-for at the plate...". We can try to do better.

When trying to judge pitchers and identify those who may be getting lucky, or unlucky, stats like strand rate (LOB%), batting average on balls in play (BABIP), and home runs per fly ball (HR/FB) are reliable bellwethers that can very quickly help give a sense of how sustainable someone's numbers are. Potential exceptions (such as strikeout rate helping to sustain elevated strand rates and the debate about pitchers' ability to control BABIP and hard contact) notwithstanding, strand rate, BABIP, and HR/FB tend to regress towards league average pretty reliably as the sample size grows. Currently, 2024 averages among starters are .280 BABIP, 73.2% LOB%, and 11.7% HR/FB, which are all marginally "luckier", relative to the pitchers, than the 2025 season-long averages of .290 BABIP, 72.5% LOB%, and 12.0% HR/FB. That difference is likely that it's still April, meaning we have yet to play summer baseball in the hot and humid air whose reduced density creates a hitters' paradise, but the agreement between those sets of numbers should help drive home the point that these are essentially fundamental constants of our game. Any given pitcher, in the long run, can count on their LOB%, BABIP, and HR/FB to tend towards these league averages. Lower LOB% means the pitcher is getting less luck and more runners who reach base are being allowed to score, just as higher BABIP and HR/FB indicate less luck for the pitcher, as more balls in play wind up as hits and more fly balls end up as HR. 

With the preliminaries about our luck stats out of the way, we can ask: who is getting lucky this year, and who is getting unlucky? 

FanGraphs leaderboard showing league-low BABIP among qualified starting pitchers.

FanGraphs leaderboard showing league-high BABIP among qualified starting pitchers.

On the low end of BABIP, someone like Kevin Gausman stands out for his .172 BABIP, a full .102 below his career best single-season BABIP. At the high end, we have a smattering of high-profile starters, including Cease, running unsustainably unlucky BABIP numbers. Cease's .379 BABIP, for example, is even further from his 2024 BABIP (.263) than Gausman's current BABIP is from his prior career high. 

The story is similar when we look at league leaders in LOB%, with a few pitchers standing apart with unsustainably high strand rates which will find their way into runs soon, compared to pitchers who are getting extremely unfortunate as seemingly all of their runners come in to score. 

FanGraphs leaderboard showing league-high LOB% among qualified starting pitchers.

Shane Baz, Brandon Pfaadt, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Chris Bassitt are all stranding more than 90% of the runners they allow to reach base, an entirely unsustainable rate that's due for regression. In 2024, the qualified starter with the highest LOB% in baseball was Houston's Ronel Blanco, who posted a season-long mark of 83.6%. Even this number is likely unsustainable, though, as regression seems to have come for him a season late, given his 6.48 ERA and 63.5% LOB% to start 2024. 

FanGraphs leaderboard showing league-low LOB% among qualified starting pitchers.

On the other end, we again find our friend Dylan Cease, who trails only Paul Skenes on the list of pitchers with the most unsustainably low LOB%. Cease stranded 69.4% of runners in 2024, a far cry from his current 53.2%. By both LOB% and BABIP, Cease is getting terribly unlucky, a standout league-wide by both metrics. His HR/FB is the only of the three by which he is actually at a reasonable, or perhaps a bit lucky, value. His 8.3% HR/FB is consistent with his 9.1% HR/FB in 2024, and should remain roughly stable other than a slight increase as the weather warms. 

So, if we believe that Cease is getting extremely unlucky, what can we expect him to do once the ball starts bouncing his way? Based on projections and ERA estimators, Cease figures to be a low- to mid-threes ERA pitcher, just like the workhorse that anchored the rotation last year. Projection systems have him right around 3.50, while in-season ERA estimators range from a 2.95 FIP on the low end to a 3.80 xERA on the high end, with a 3.36 SIERA and 3.37 xFIP in the middle. 

Put differently, among all qualified starting pitchers, based on his rocky 2025 start, Dylan Cease ranks:

• Eighth in Pitching+ (117)
• 24th in FIP (2.95)
• 29th in xFIP (3.37)
• 29th in K-BB% (18.7%)
• 30th in SIERA (3.36)
• 43rd in xERA (3.80)
• 90th in ERA (6.64)

If there were a single metric to point to as a legitimate point of concern for Cease, it would be his whiff rate, which is sitting at 25.6%, down from 32.4% in 2024. His chase rate has remained stable, so assuming that this whiff rate movement is small sample variation and Cease is able to continue to recover upwards towards his 30% marks from the past four seasons, there's no reason to fret. Padres fans should sit back and enjoy the show. The Team is team trotting out three legitimate Cy Young candidates in Cease, King, and Nick Pivetta. 

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