Blue Jays’ Bassitt ‘playing high-level chess’ during strong run

HOUSTON — In between innings of Chris Bassitt’s starts, as the right-handed veteran is pacing up and down the dugout, stretching out his neck, shooting that thousand-yard stare towards the field, Max Scherzer leaves his old friend alone. The last thing he’d want during his own starts is suggestions. But over the four days following?

“I’m like, ‘Hey, that sequence, did you see that sequence? They fouled a ball, did this, did that, did that,’” Scherzer said, chattering a mile a minute. “’Hey, this guy is dragging you out. This is why you were effective. I can see it from the other side. Hey, when you’re pitching from this side, you forgot about this.’ Those are the fun details.

“And when he’s pitching the way he is, when he’s locating the ball the way he is, it makes it fun for us to watch. Especially for me to watch because now a lot of different pitching concepts come into play. You’re not just throwing the ball.”

No, Bassitt’s never just throwing the ball. He’s crafting with it; snookering with it. He’s running elaborate counterintelligence operations with his vast arsenal, targeting vulnerabilities and setting traps that won’t even be revealed until innings later. As Scherzer puts it, “everything he does feeds off itself. It starts with locating the ball. And he’s doing that at a really high level.”

Like, a top-10 starter in all of baseball level. With a 1.88 ERA, 23.5 K-BB percentage, 1.3 fWAR and zero home runs allowed, Bassitt ranks near the top of the league in a host of categories one wants to. Sure, his 82.9 per cent strand rate is unsustainable. But his .351 BABIP and 1.49 FIP suggest fortune hasn’t always been on his side during this run.

Even Tuesday, in a tough start, when Bassitt gave up four runs over 5.1 innings in a loss to the Houston Astros, he didn’t allow a ball in play with an exit velocity over 100 m.p.h. It took a bad-luck sequence of singles — one off a first baseman’s glove, another blooped softly into left, a third that barely made it halfway up the third base line, and a fourth that went under Bassitt’s left foot, bounced off second base, and ricocheted into right field — for the Astros to score three against him in a BABIP-cursed first inning. And they got only one more the rest of the way.

“Unfortunately, with the way my pitching style is, throughout the year you’re going to give up a lot of those weak-contact hits,” Bassitt said afterwards. “You just hope they don’t string them together the way they did. And, unfortunately, they did.”

Yet even following that, Bassitt remains one of only 11 qualified MLB starters with an ERA below 2.00, which reflects how well he’s pitched out of the gate. And you can even trace this run back to late last season, when he finished an inconsistent 2024 with a 2.77 ERA over his final five starts.

Piece those two bookends together, and Bassitt’s running a 2.30 ERA with a 25.3 per cent strikeout rate over his last 10 outings. We aren’t used to seeing Bassitt fan batters at this high of a clip. His career average strikeout rate is 22.1 per cent.

We aren’t accustomed to seeing him avoiding the long ball like this, either. Bassitt hasn’t allowed a homer in his last 44 innings dating back to his first start last September. One thing he’s always done is attack the edges of the strike zone effectively. But again, not quite this well. Bassitt’s 48.9 per cent edge rate this season is a top-five mark in the game.

And the fact he’s doing all this with a tick less velocity on most of his pitches this year makes it all the more eye-catching. It certainly caught Blue Jays manager John Schneider’s attention during spring training.

“He was pretty deliberate with what he wanted to do and how much he wanted to throw (during spring training.) It was a totally different script from last year to this year,” Schneider said. “He was almost looking for results as a veteran pitcher in spring training. Not just workload, but executing.

“He’s one of the guys that we had a lot of conversations with in the offseason and in spring training. And he is all about winning. I think last year kind of just snowballed for him in the second half. But he is one of the most focused and aware guys that I’ve been around.”

It can be tricky to credit a run of success like this for Bassitt to one particular tweak or adjustment because the guy’s perpetually tweaking and adjusting. He was out in front of MLB’s lowered arm angle trend, first dropping his last season to juice the horizontal movement on several of his pitches before dropping it even further this season. Offerings come and go from his arsenal; situational usage fluctuates. In 2022, with the Mets, lefties seldom saw sinkers in two-strike counts. Now, they’re liable to get one nearly a third of the time.

But one macro adjustment he’s made over these last 10 outings is his positioning on the rubber. After spending most of his career pitching closer to first base, he’s taken up residence on the third base side.

Bassitt made the move late last August ahead of a start at Fenway Park against the Red Sox. Below on the left is where Bassitt stood beginning an outing in Boston last June — and on the right is where he was in that late August start:

Interestingly, Bassitt entered the league pitching from the third base side but adjusted to the first base side to resolve issues pitching in to left-handed hitters. Now, he’s flipped back, hoping to continue working effectively inside to lefties with cutters and breaking balls while targeting his arm-side lane more consistently with sinkers and splitters, forcing batters to honour that outer-third of the plate.

“When we initially did it last year in Boston, there was concern about the lefties,” said Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker. “Obviously, he’s very effective against righties anyway. And moving him to the third base side made it even moreso — with the sweeper, the breaking ball, the sinker in, and the backdoor sinker. He can do a lot of things with those guys.

“But with the lefties, it’s about getting to his glove side and being able to get the cutter to the right spots. And seeing how the breaking ball plays,” Walker continued. “But also commanding the outer third of the plate with the split and even the backdoor cutter and the curveball. While being able to get inside.”

That speaks to how much this remains an evolving process. Through his first five starts of the season, Bassitt’s cutter has been an extremely useful weapon against left-handers. He’s earned a 33.3 per cent whiff rate with the pitch and used it to finish eight of his 17 strikeouts against the side of the platoon. Left-handed hitters have put Bassitt’s cutter in play only four times — a groundout, a flyout and two singles.

But his splitter — a pitch Bassitt worked thoroughly on this spring, intending to use it frequently against lefties in-season — hasn’t played as well. Left-handed batters are hitting .571 off of it with an xSLG of .835. There were a couple hard-luck singles mixed in there, but some well-struck balls, too.

And yet, maybe it’s the threat of that splitter, and the fact hitters are aware Bassitt intends to throw it, that’s helping his sinker, cutter and curveball — which have all been tremendously effective against lefties — play up.

“I think the fact that he’s throwing a split, not his changeup, is a big part of his success. I think that’s a good pitch for him,” Walker said. “He’s gotten some outs on it. And he’s still able to keep some hitters off balance.”

For his part, Scherzer loves Bassitt’s splitter. When the veterans were first teammates in 2022, Bassitt was still throwing a changeup instead. But after lefties hit .400 against it last season, the pitch has completely disappeared from his arsenal.

“That new splitter, it really opens up a lot of doors with what he can do with the baseball. It makes his other pitchers better,” Scherzer said. “It seems like he’s got more feel for locating his cutter. He’s doing a good job with his curveball. He understands what to do with the sweeper. He’s just doing a great job of mixing and matching, sequencing, changing looks.”

Scherzer and Bassitt’s shared modus operandi is that a pitcher only finishes learning and evolving when they’re finished pitching. And Bassitt doesn’t think he’s anywhere near his finish line. So, to that end, he may not be finished moving on the rubber.

If the third-base side grows uncomfortable partway through this season, he reserves the right to move back in the opposite direction. If lefties keep hitting his splitter, he’s liable to drop it or use it differently.

After Tuesday’s start in Houston, Bassitt wasn’t bothered by his hard-luck results. He was most frustrated that he didn’t make an in-game adjustment quickly enough when he realized the Astros were on his sweeper. Next time that happens, he’s throwing more curveballs. It wouldn’t be a Bassitt outing if he didn’t learn something.

“He’s so locked in on putting everything together. He’s so deep into the nuances of the game,” Scherzer said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, you’re playing high-level chess here. You’re really thinking through a lineup.’ It makes it really fun to watch when you see a pitcher throwing the ball like that.”

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