Blue Jays: 3 relief pitchers the Jays should be looking at in free agency

LHP Matt Moore

In one of the best feel-good stories of the 2022 season, Matt Moore completely remade himself as a shutdown relief pitcher for the Texas Rangers.

Moore, 33, has made over 160 starts in his career, most of them coming as a member of the division-rival Tampa Bay Rays. After a slew of injuries began to pop up as he aged as well as overall poor performances, he fell out of grace in the baseball world and was not a lock to play anywhere in the majors last season.

63 games and a 1.95 ERA later, Moore is now one of the best relief pitchers available this offseason. To be honest, I'm shocked he's still unsigned.

Moore struck out 10.1 batters per nine innings last season, by far the best of his entire career. He also only allowed four home runs in 74 innings, good for an HR/9 of 0.4. His Baseball-Savant page is extremely impressive and it's not hard to see how he would be a good fit on this Blue Jays club.

Do I need to go on?

Moore has a strong three-pitch mix that he can regularly rely on including a pretty straightforward fourseam fastball that he throws roughly 45% of the time, a mid-80's curveball that he throws around 38% of the time and an occasional changeup here and there.

RHP Alex Reyes

I could keep going with the left-handers (sorry Brad Hand and Will Smith) but Alex Reyes is too good to pass up.

Reyes, a former highly-touted prospect of the St. Louis Cardinals, is yet another one of those stories about a young pitcher who shows so much promise but just cannot for the life of him stay healthy.

Since his big league debut in 2016, Reyes has been placed on the injured list five separate times. Tommy John surgery kept him out of action in 2017, a season-ending LAT strain in 2018, a season-ending right shoulder injury came up in 2020 and another shoulder injury kept him out of the entire 2022 campaign.

To this point, he has only pitched in 145 innings across parts of five seasons. My argument for the Jays interest isn't going in the right direction so let me tell you what he does well.

When Reyes is on, he has shown that he is an arm capable of truly elite things. In 2021, his first and only full season in the majors, the Cardinals decided to give up on him as a starting pitcher and instead use him in a brand new role: closer.

In 69 games that year, he went 10-8 with a 3.24 ERA, 122 ERA+ and 11.8 SO/9 to go along with 29 saves. He made his first-career All-Star Game appearance as well and (finally) gave the fans the long-awaited breakout season that everyone knew was coming.

When he's on, his fourseam fastball, the primary pitch in his repertoire, comfortably sits at 97mph and even reaches triple digits. He pairs that with a wiepout slider that often makes the opposition look silly in the batter's box.

While the inning count isn't quite there over the course of Reyes' career, there's something to be said about the fact that batters have hit a combined .189 off of him, including just .176 in his breakout 2021 performance.

As I did with Matt Moore on the previous slide, let me show you some of the numbers for Reyes in his elite 2021 season to show how he stacked up against the competition.

Something to keep in mind is that the Cardinals chose to non-tender Reyes instead of paying him just $3M in arbitration. Now that he has hit the free agent market, there's little doubt in my mind that his new contract will be even lower than his arb number for St. Louis. For the Jays, this should be a no-brainer signing.