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‘Feel like I’m in a pretty good spot’: Dylan Cease leaning into mechanics obsession with Blue Jays
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Photo credit: Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images
Thomas Hall
Mar 10, 2026, 16:30 EDT
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Each of baseball’s brightest stars has their obsessions. They spend more time focusing on the finer details of the game than most would ever think to. That’s part of what makes them so great.
For Toronto Blue Jays right-hander Dylan Cease, his obsession revolves around pitch mechanics, which go hand in hand with perfecting his arsenal.
“Delivery, delivery, delivery,” manager John Schneider said Tuesday morning at the club’s player development complex. “He talks about it all the time, where his arm is in relation to his lower half [and] exactly what that means for his stuff.
“I think the reason why he obsesses about it is when that’s in a good place, usually the stuff takes care of itself.”
So far this spring, through two official exhibition starts and one live BP outing, Cease has shown that he’s exactly where he needs to be with his movements and pitch shapes. In fact, he’s actually been perfecting his craft in that regard, disengaging with the catcher’s glove — looking away from his target — as he begins coming down the rubber and towards home plate.
It’s something he’s been doing for almost a month now, saying it’s helped with his shoulder rotation and has kept him more “in sync” with everything, particularly his timing. Since it’s been working so well, allowing him to attack the strike zone the way he desires, he plans on bringing this new quirk into the regular season with him.
Given Cease’s previous command concerns, resulting in a 20th percentile walk rate (9.8 per cent) last season, throwing more strikes is definitely a sound game plan. But this adjustment has also had a positive impact on his primary fastball, with his four-seamer sitting 97-98 m.p.h. over his first two Grapefruit League starts.
His first time out, however, the hard-throwing righty’s average fastball velocity dropped from 98.1 to 96.6 m.p.h. during his second inning of work. But on Tuesday against the Atlanta Braves, he held his velo the best he has all spring, averaging an identical 97.9 across the first two innings and 97.7 in the third — hitting 97.5 with his final four-seamer as part of a 54-pitch outing.
And there may even be room for additional velo as Cease continues to add more power to his mechanics through his lower half as he disengages from the mound.
“I really feel like I’ve got a little more room to drive a little bit harder with power,” he explained. “But it’s early and it’s spring [training], so leaving healthy — threw pretty hard today — I feel like I’m in a good spot.”
Cease also threw several quality sliders (his primary swing-and-miss weapon), inducing four whiffs on 17 swings, leading to a pair of swinging strikeouts — two of his three versus Atlanta’s minor-league-filled lineup.
But of the 54 pitches he did throw, none of them included the new changeup (the infamous kick-change) he’s been working on this spring. That’s had to take a back seat for now, as he’s had to prioritize refining the other, more important, facets of pitch mechanics and shapes.
“It’s still in development,” as Cease admitted. But once he’s comfortable with where everything else is, he plans to return to “changeup development,” hopefully before camp concludes in two weeks.
Adding an off-speed weapon like that to his tool belt remains high on his to-do list, and rightly so, as it’d offer him another out-pitch against left-handed batters, which slugged .389 and .403 versus his four-seamer and slider, respectively, in 2025. Against his knuckle-curve (his third pitch in these matchups), however, that figure soared to .536.
With one, likely two, more starts left before the Blue Jays head north for Opening Day, Cease still has time to debut his new-look changeup before spring training wraps up. If it matches the theme of his early tenure so far, though, it’ll also provide plenty of excitement leading into the first season of his seven-year, $210 million contract with the franchise.

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