Taking a closer look at the secondary piece the Blue Jays got in the Guardians trade

On Tuesday night, the Toronto Blue Jays struck a deal with the Cleveland Guardians in which they swapped infield utility-man Spencer Horwitz and minor-league outfielder Nick Mitchell in exchange for All-Star second baseman Andrés Giménez and righty reliever Nick Sandlin.

While the slick-fielding Giménez is the most prominent return piece in this trade for the Jays, Sandlin shouldn't be forgotten in this deal. His numbers are worth much more than a surface glance and he could actually play an important role in Toronto's bullpen in 2025.

Sandlin's 2024 campaign was perhaps the worst of his four-year MLB career thus far, but he still performed well in the league's best bullpen this season. He notched an ERA of 3.75 over 57.2 innings of work while striking out 68 batters and walking 27.

He boasts a four-pitch mix of the following pitches in order of usage: Slider (34.8%), four-seam fastball (29.5%), splitter (26.5%), and sinker (9.2%). Both his fastball and sinker reside around 93mph in velocity and are overall the least valuable part of his arsenal. The best weapons Sandlin has are his slider and splitter.

Firstly, his slider, which is his most frequent pitch, sits just below 80mph on average, making it the eighth-slowest slider of all qualified pitchers in 2024. A slow velocity doesn't necessarily mean much in terms of the pitch's effectiveness, however. Sandlin throws his other three pitches with an arm angle of about 15º, but he drops his arm angle down to about 8º for his slider. This allows him to play with the movement of the pitch in a different way than most other sliders.

His slider ranks about league average in vertical drop, but because of his low arm slot, this pitch is still effective in its above-average horizontal break. Sandlin notched a 41.3% whiff rate on the pitch which was good enough to rank it as the 37th-best slider in this stat in all of MLB. His slider is certainly a weapon he can make good use of, but his best pitch is by far the splitter.

Sandlin's splitter ranks third-best in MLB in Baseball Savant's run value metric and seventh in whiff percentage at 48.3%. Even better, he only allowed an opposing batting average of .100 on the pitch last year. Baseball Savant also gives him an offspeed run value ranking in the 97th percentile and an overall whiff percentage ranking in the 95th percentile league-wide.

For added context, the Blue Jays' top qualified pitcher in whiff rate in 2024 was Genesis Cabrera, who ranked in just the 54th percentile. His 12º average arm angle also sticks out dramatically from the rest of Toronto's arms, so he'll definitely be giving opposing hitters a different look on the mound.

It might be easy enough to take a quick look at Sandlin's surface stats in 2024 and assume he's not going to be much help to the Jays' bullpen next season, but a closer look actually shows that the engine under the hood is running a lot better than you'd think.

While obviously Andrés Giménez is the more lucrative piece coming to Toronto in this trade, Nick Sandlin shouldn't be glossed over at all as he could prove to be very beneficial for a struggling bullpen next season.