There’s still one thing holding Dylan Cease back from becoming one of baseball’s most dominant aces: pitch efficiency.

When the 30-year-old starter agreed to join the Toronto Blue Jays last off-season, inking a seven-year, $210 million contract, the second-richest in franchise history (behind only Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s 14-year, $500 million mega deal), he did so with the goal of elevating his game to the next level.

Cease was already a “really good” pitcher and among the sport’s premier strikeout artists. But the biggest separator from good to great is consistency — another core characteristic he’s yet to establish early on in his tenure north of the border.

Back in November, the Blue Jays organization proposed solutions to the right-hander’s consistency dilemma, formulating a blueprint to help maintain his Cy Young-calibre form each season, rather than having it disappear every other year as it has since 2022. And he certainly appears to be on the right track thus far, but isn’t quite where he wants to be just yet.

Through five starts, Cease has punched out more batters than any other pitcher in baseball, leading the majors with 44 strikeouts and a career-high 39.6 per cent clip. He’s also the only hurler to record 12 strikeouts in a start this season, a feat he’s already accomplished twice — first during his Blue Jays debut on Mar. 28 and again Monday night in Anaheim against the Angels.

In addition to piling up strikeouts, Cease hasn’t surrendered more than two earned runs in any of his five starts with the Blue Jays, producing a 2.10 ERA and 1.46 FIP that’s second lowest among qualified major league starters, trailing only New York’s Cam Schlittler (0.86 FIP). He’s also been worth a team-leading 1.2 fWAR, tied with Seattle’s Bryan Woo for second in the majors — behind Schlittler’s 1.5 rating.

All these numbers are great. But the one that sticks out, and not in a positive way, is his innings total of 25.2, which sits tied for 40th out of 77 qualified big-league starters entering Tuesday’s slate.

Strikeouts are important. However, so is pitching deep into games, which Cease hasn’t done outside of his six-inning performance versus the Milwaukee Brewers on April 15 — and achieved in just over a third of last season’s 32 starts with the San Diego Padres.

High pitch counts, which are often associated with elite strikeout pitchers such as Cease, have been the leading contributor to his shorter-than-anticipated starts as a Blue Jay. He’s now eclipsed 100 pitches in back-to-back starts, needing a season-high 110 to make it through five innings of two-run ball in Monday’s 5-2 win over the Angels.

But the double-digit strikeout performances aren’t the problem here. They aren’t the main culprit behind this concerningly high workload during the first of a six-month marathon to October. Instead, it’s been the veteran righty’s inconsistent command — a byproduct of his career-high 12.6-per-cent walk rate (excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign), ranking in the 25th percentile of the majors.

Cease has always been a stuff-over-command guy. That’s part of what makes his stuff so electric. But his usual accuracy woes haven’t been, well, usual early on this season. His zone rate has plummeted almost six per cent from a season ago, dropping to a career-worst 40.8 per cent.

Falling behind hitters is a pitcher’s worst enemy, and as we’ve seen with Cease in ’26, it’s forced him into far too many deep counts that have made his outings more stressful than they’ve needed to be.

There’s a sure-fire solution for this, though, and it involves getting ahead with strike one more consistently. That way, he’ll have control over count leverage more often than he has across a handful of starts with the Blue Jays.

Cease owns the lowest first-pitch strike rate (52.3 per cent) of his career this season, nearly eight per cent lower than last season’s percentage. Of the five starts he’s made thus far, he’s yet to finish higher than 59 per cent in any of those outings and has already produced his second-lowest clip (43.5 per cent) from the last three seasons, ahead of only his miserable 42.1 per cent rate on Aug. 16, 2025.

Examining his most recent start versus the Angels, he threw first-pitch strikes to only half of the 22 batters he faced, and five of the 11 who didn’t receive them ended up reaching safely either via walk or hit.

Throwing more strikes, particularly early in counts, would be a solid first step for Cease. Another solution that’ll likely prove beneficial, though, is inducing quicker outs. That’s already been a point of emphasis from Toronto’s coaching staff over these first few weeks, as manager John Schneider has indicated multiple times this season.

It’s part of the idea behind expanding Cease’s repertoire beyond his overpowering fastball-slider combination. Those are still his bread and butter, the primary sources of his elite swing-and-miss outputs. But by incorporating more knuckle curves, changeups, sweepers and sinkers, the hope is that he can increase the amount of ground and fly-ball outs that he generates, which should at least offer marginal support in reducing his pitch count.

So far, the early results appear encouraging, as his increased changeup and sweeper usage have been two of the biggest components fueling his career-high and 88th percentile ground-ball rate (55.8 per cent).

Broadening Cease’s arsenal has also kept opponents off his four-seamer and slider more effectively, the latter of which has proven extremely difficult to square up in ’26. That’s not only seen its ground-ball rate soar above 50 per cent, climbing more than 10 per cent from last season, but it’s also one of the primary reasons that he — along with San Francisco’s Landen Roupp — are the only major-league starters (min. 20 innings pitched) who haven’t been barreled up once this season.

It’s a thin line between being considered a solid No. 2 starter and one of the sport’s fiercest aces that opposing lineups dread any time his turn comes around against them — and Cease certainly has the tools to embody that type of persona.

All things considered, the first few pages of his Blue Jays career have been remarkable, but there’s even more room to grow over the next several dozen chapters of this story. And if he can clean up things around the edges a bit more, good luck to anyone who has to stand in the box against him.

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