Returning to the White Sox beat after seven months off, it's going to take some time to get my bearings. One of the first things I had to check and confirm is that Dylan Cease is still on the team.
It turns out he's still here; or more specifically throwing bullpens at Maven Baseball Lab in Atlanta, preparing to leave for Camelback Ranch in a few days, and answering his phone.
"It wasn't like it was coming out of nowhere, there were a couple factors that I feel like kind of made it reasonable," Cease said of being at the center of trade talks all offseason. "It feels like in the blink of an eye, these last four or five years have passed. It's pretty wild to go from kind of seeing the beginning of a window to basically that team getting broken up and sort of onto whatever's next. It's been extremely interesting. I guess it really happened a lot quicker and in, I guess, a lot more disappointing fashion than we would have all liked."
While Cease being traded as part of the White Sox would-be contention window being broken up still feels inevitable, he's transitioned from getting regular updates on the situation from his agent, to trusting he will get warning from GM Chris Getz if anything gets close after they spoke this offseason on where things stood. His pitching lab readouts from Maven are still going to Ethan Katz, "someone who's able to decipher it a little bit better," than Cease himself.
That Cease is headed toward Glendale by the end of the week is rooted in some faith that he can maintain, or ideally boost his trade value off the heels of a 2023 season he regards as "pretty disappointing," and marred by "some really bad blowup starts and just a lot of inconsistent performances." It's a risky path just by nature of Cease being a pitcher, and being a pitcher whose style lends itself to variance. By FanGraphs' WAR, Cease has been the eighth-most valuable pitcher in the game over the last three seasons, ahead of Max Scherzer and Shohei Ohtani. He's also issued the most walks in the sport, closely followed by reigning NL Cy Young and unsigned free agent Blake Snell.
Yet getting scratched from a 2017 playoff game for Low-A Kannapolis due to shoulder stiffness represents Cease's last earnest stint on an injured list, which is supposed to be the specter of doom hanging over holding onto a pitcher as an asset. Part of his accumulation of value is rooted in making the most starts in baseball since 2021. The durability is a point of pride for Cease. But he also looks at something like Tim Lincecum's workload during his four-year peak, and sees a helpful contrast in how he's been managed, even if he admits "most of the situations where I get taken out it's pretty warranted" by game situation.
"The staff has done a really good job of not over-extending me," Cease said. "It's been the first offseason in a while that I haven't had various sorenesses that show up. I was able to stay on top of it. Where I've train we've got a physical therapist that I was working with on a daily basis to keep everything feeling good. It really helps me not fall behind on my throwing. Arm feels good, body feels good."
Cease had some conversations with Brian Bannister near the end of last season and has been regularly in touch with Katz, but it's really the physical side of his preparation that he feels he can control in the offseason. To that end, the lab readouts have confirmed to Cease that his pitch shapes and movement profiles are where he wants them to be. And while he wouldn't want to be sitting 99 mph with his fastball at this point--
"I mean actually, you know, I wouldn't mind it," Cease countered.
--or he wouldn't expect to hit 99 mph at this point, is more accurate. After a season where he lost a tick on his heater, and being down roughly 2 mph from his 2020 fastball velocity, Cease is encouraged by hitting 94 mph in his last bullpen. More encouragingly, it means he's meeting his goal of gaining a mile in every session after starting in the high-80s during his first bullpen.
More velocity could only help, as Cease's fastball (.271 batting average against, .436 slugging) was once against his most vulnerable pitch. He also feels there's always room to be more vigilant against tipping, which fueled at least one second half blowup start. But a smoking gun for why he slipped from Cy Young finalist to a league average ERA is elusive.
"If I had that answer earlier in the year, I would have had a better year," Cease said. "I really think it's just being more consistent. It's kind of a boring answer."
For Cease, that could still largely be boiled down to the more he is able to locate his monstrous slider in the zone early in the count, the less he has to challenge hitters with his fastball in the zone later on in more desperate situations. That the more dominant version of his signature pitch emerged mid-way through 2022 muddles the picture a little, but the trend line is still pretty clear. If there's a vertical limit for when Cease can spam his slider in the strike zone too much, he hasn't found it yet and might as well keep climbing until he does--if he can.
| FB zone % | SL zone % | Chase rate percentile (per Statcast) | |
| 2021 | 52.4 | 41.9 | 58 |
| 2022 | 47.1 | 41 | 69 |
| 2023 | 53.1 | 37.6 | 41 |
"You obviously don't want to just lob everything down the middle," Cease said. "You want to have your pitches be sharp and in spots that are more challenging to hit for the batters, especially in today's game, where we have a lot of information on which batter may specifically not like a certain pitch in a certain area and all that. But the simple answer is executing better. I do know if I fill up the zone, more times than not, I'm gonna get a lot of outs. Getting the swing and misses and foul-offs does maybe make it a little more challenging to go deeper [in games], but I fill up the zone, there's no reason why I shouldn't go six, seven-plus [innings] every start."
It's all stuff Cease has done before, but like any pitcher trying to complete the journey from fabulously talented to consistently dominant, he wants the mechanical adjustments, corrections of tipping, reactions to how hitters are attacking to happen faster: mid-game and mid-at bat. It's just that in this current circumstance, the faster he achieves it, the faster it could send Cease out of town for good.
But that's something he's already adjusted to.
"[Getz] reached out and we started talking, and he pretty much let me know if anything was going to be imminent or happening, he was going to give me a heads-up. So that wasn't something I was too worried about."
