The Blue Jays' pitching plan that could give opponents fits

The Toronto Blue Jays' pitching staff will be able to use a unique strategy not seen since the 2020 Tampa Bay Rays this season. Using pitchers with different arm angles in a game to throw off batters' timing and approach. Last season, the Blue Jays saw success using their rookie pitcher, Trey Yesavage's unique straight-over-the-top arm angle in his nine starts and one relief appearance.

This offseason, the Blue Jays stuck to the unique arm angle as they reloaded their pitching staff. Their strategy added two relievers who possess unique release points. The team traded for sidearmer Chase Lee from the Detroit Tigers and signed free agent Tyler Rogers, who has a submarine pitching style.  

Lee will likely begin the season in Triple-A, but should make an appearance in MLB at some point during the season. When he returns to the big leagues, the Blue Jays could use a unique pitching sequence in games Yesavage starts. The team could next alternate between Lee and Eric Lauer, a left-handed pitcher, depending on who is coming up to bat. After these two pitchers, Rogers could then come in to hold onto the lead before turning to closer Jeff Hoffman.

The Blue Jays employ a number of pitchers with unique arm angles that can mess up opponents timing

Taking a deeper look at how this strategy could play out. Yesavage had a 64-degree arm angle, compared with Erik Swanson's 53 degrees, the closest among Blue Jays with at least 50 pitches last season. Yesavage’s pitching arsenal includes the following three pitch types:

Yesavage uses his 6'4" height and his arm angle to achieve a 7.11-foot release point, the tallest in MLB. He'd get ahead in counts with the fastball and slider, then with his arm action, combined with his splitter, produced a 57.1 whiff rate on 63 pitches, fooling batters and leading to swing-and-misses. Out of his 16 strikeouts in his three regular-season starts, 10 came from the splitter. The important strategy this season will be to monitor Yesavage's workload to keep him healthy this season and in the future.

Since Lee likely won’t begin the season with the Blue Jays, we will build this scenario to have a few lefties coming to bat so that manager John Schneider will use his left-handed reliever, Lauer. He has a more traditional arm angle of 39 degrees. He, however, has a six-pitch arsenal that he uses with varied movement to keep batters guessing at the plate.

Lauer threw his four-seam fastball 46.5 percent of the time last season and then nearly evenly mixed in the other pitch types, though he only threw his sinker once. He only struck out one batter on his changeup, but of the other four pitches he threw regularly, he could throw them at any time, with all ranging from an 18 to 24 put-away percentage. Lauer's role could change throughout the season if he's needed to start games.

Now hopefully, the Blue Jays have a lead in the eighth inning so Schneider can call on his submariner, Rogers, who has an astounding -60-degree arm angle. He keeps it simple, only throwing two pitches, so he lets the arm angle do the deceiving.

Rogers' release point is 1.33 feet off the ground, the lowest in MLB. He threw his sinker 74 percent of the time last season, but his slider had a 27.9 whiff percentage compared to only a 12.4 percentage for the sinker. However, he mixed up which count he threw these pitches with: 23 strikeouts on his sinker and 25 on his slider.

So the Blue Jays have the pitcher with the highest release point in Yesavage and the lowest release point in Rogers. Then the team will be able to keep batters off balance by using different arm angles, such as Yesavage's 64 degrees, Lauer's 39 degrees, and Rogers's -60 degrees. For context, when Lee makes his MLB return, he has -4-degree arm angle, giving Schneider another unique delivery weapon to keep batters off balance. It'll be fun to watch how this sequence plays out over the season.

*All charts came from Baseball Savant