With big spin and electric fastball, Lazaro Estrada has put himself on Blue Jays prospect radar

DUNEDIN, Fla. — Lazaro Estrada’s father, Federico, pitched parts of five seasons in the Cuban National Series for Pinar del Rio, the western Cuban province that contains the family’s remote hometown, Mantua. His uncle, Jose Antonio, was a centre fielder who played over 1,000 CNS games and won a pair of Olympic gold medals with the Cuban national team in 1992 and 1996. Estrada had other uncles who played at high levels, too.

Growing up, his choice wasn’t whether he’d play ball himself — it was whether he wanted to pitch or play the field.

He chose second base initially. Then, third. The outfield after that. But when he first took the mound at 16, the choice was made for him. His fastball’s velocity was ordinary, but hitters still couldn’t touch it. They said his heaters moved late and appeared to rise as they neared the plate — as if they were jumping right over their bats. And his curveball was even better. It was slow but it dropped like a hammer. And it was clear to anyone who knew what they were looking for that Estrada could spin the seams off it.

“It comes naturally. I can’t explain it,” Estrada says now, a decade later, through Toronto Blue Jays club interpreter Hector Lebron. “That’s what helped me realize that I could compete at the next level and someday get to my goal — which is, of course, to be in the big leagues.”

This spring, participating in his first major-league camp with the Toronto Blue Jays ahead of his age-26 season, Estrada’s goal has never been closer. Platforming from a strong, healthy 2024 that saw him pitch to a 3.29 ERA over 22 starts before going to the Arizona Fall League and striking out over 40 per cent of the batters he faced, Estrada has come out of nowhere and inserted himself into Toronto’s upper tier of minor-league starting depth.

And he’s continued impressing this spring, averaging 94.4 m.p.h. with his riding, running fastball while showing off his bread and butter — one of the highest-spinning curveballs in the organization. Here’s one to a righty and one to a lefty from Estrada’s spring training debut on February 25:

Notice catcher Tyler Heineman’s reaction to the second one, which started at the batter’s chest and plummeted to their shins. Heineman’s entering his sixth big-league season. He’s caught a lot of curveballs. But this one stood out.

Why? Because Estrada wasn’t using it off the plate with two strikes to try to get chase. He was throwing it in-zone early in counts to steal strikes, induce weak contact, and set up the out pitch he used to finish his two strikeouts on the day — his fastball:

Dot fastballs on either side of the plate like that and coaches will take notice. Produce pitch metric data like Estrada’s this spring and analysts will take notice, too.

Estrada’s fastball features exceptionally high induced vertical break (IVB) — a measurement of how much a pitch moves up or down due to the spin a pitcher imparts on the baseball. The higher a fastball’s IVB, the more its backspin fights gravity, giving it what pitching coaches call “ride” or “carry.”

High-IVB fastballs drop less than hitters expect as they near the plate. And thanks to the power of pattern recognition and muscle memory, those hitters — just like the Cuban teenagers who first remarked at the life on Estrada’s heater — are prone to swinging under high-IVB fastballs, creating weak contact in the air or whiffing entirely.

Last season’s MLB average four-seamer had 15.7 inches of IVB. Anything 17.6 inches or above ranked within the 80th percentile. MLB’s best pitchers at creating this effect — Alex Vesia, Nick Pivetta, Colin Poche, Triston McKenzie — average over 20 inches.

During that outing against the Cardinals, Estrada’s four-seamer IVB averaged 19.8 and touched 22. That’s how this 94 m.p.h. challenge heater, thrown over the plate in a 3-1 count against a top-100 prospect who made his MLB debut last season, gets swung right through:

Estrada’s ability to impart spin on the baseball isn’t limited to his four-seamer. The curveballs he’s thrown so far this spring average out to a 2,834 RPM spin rate. That would have ranked within MLB’s 88th percentile last season. The 55 inches of drop he’s averaged on the pitch would have placed Estrada within the upper-third of curveball throwers in the league.

And we’ve seen the pitch move more than it has this spring. In 2021, when Estrada was pitching for the Dunedin Blue Jays, his curveball averaged an absurd spin rate of 3,314 RPM with 67.5 inches of drop. In 2022 it was at 3,271 RPM and 61.6 inches. These are figures that would rank among the top five per cent of curveball throwers in the game.

Rounding out the arsenal he has shown off this spring is a tight, mid-80s cutter — pitch tackers register it as a slider — with late life thanks to over seven inches of induced vertical break:

And a nifty splitter he’s been working on for a couple of years, trying to design a change-of-pace weapon that pairs well with his fastball:

A goal for pitchers developing splitters is to kill as much of the ball’s spin as possible to give it natural, late downward movement. According to Statcast’s run value metric, Bryce Miller and Mark Leiter Jr. threw the two most effective splitters in baseball last season. Miller’s average spin rate on the pitch (912 RPM) was the seventh lowest in baseball. Leiter’s (769) was second lowest.

The spin of the six tracked splitters Estrada has thrown this spring averages out to 919 RPM. That would have been the eighth lowest average spin rate, right behind Miller, among the 50 pitchers to throw at least 150 splitters last season. Turns out Estrada isn’t only gifted when it comes to adding spin to the ball — he can remove it, too.

“I have to thank my dad for that,” Estrada says. “He used to have a great curveball. And he taught me how to pitch.”

It’s not often a pitcher with this kind of natural ability goes unnoticed — even internationally. So, where did the Blue Jays find this guy? On a small, dusty baseball diamond at an old Dominican Air Force base in Boca Chica, D.R.

It was May 2016, and the Blue Jays were there to see Naswell Paulino, a big-armed Dominican outfielder they wanted to convert into a pitcher. The club was preparing to offer Paulino $70,000 and wanted one final look at him on the mound before sealing the deal. But they had to wait until the pitcher currently throwing was through — some Cuban kid working in the high 80s.

While they waited, the kid began snapping off curveballs. Good ones. Not that there was any Trackman data to confirm it. It was that obvious the shape and spin of Estrada’s breaking ball was different. Harry Einbinder, Toronto’s assistant director of international scouting, pulled aside his boss, Andrew Tinnish, the Blue Jays VP of international scouting, and told him they had to sign this kid.

Sure, why not? It was the year after the Blue Jays obliterated their international bonus pool to sign a 16-year-old Vladimir Guerrero Jr. for $3.9 million, incurring substantial penalties in the process including a $300,000 bonus limit for any international players signed over the ensuing two years. As a result, Toronto’s international strategy shifted dramatically from chasing quality to quantity. They’d take a shot on anyone with talent, provided they’d accept $300,000 or less.

Estrada, that Cuban kid, needed only $30,000. He’d defected from Cuba months earlier, leaving his family behind and making his way through Haiti to the Dominican, where he had a connection who could get him in front of MLB scouts. He worked out for the St Louis Cardinals and Colorado Rockies, who each passed. Estrada was already 18 and his fastball was sitting in the high 80s; clubs were after younger pitchers who threw harder.

But the happy coincidence of the Blue Jays needing to take chances on overlooked talent and being in the right place at the right time that day at the Air Force base created an opportunity. Soon after, Estrada came in for a private workout and to get assessed by club training staff. They had his signature on the contract before he left the facility.

Estrada’s early years in the organization were anything but easy. After dominating players younger than him as a 19-year-old in the Dominican Summer League, he arrived in North America for the first time in 2019, joining manager Luis Hurtado’s rookieball Bluefield Blue Jays. Life in Virginia, as you might imagine, was a bit different than what Estrada was accustomed to.

“It was really hard for him,” says Hurtado, who’s now a bullpen catcher with the Blue Jays. “That’s for any Latin guys, any Cuban guys. To adjust to a new culture, a new language — it’s tough. It’s tough to talk to people. It’s tough to order food. It’s a lot of the little things that people don’t think about being really different in other cultures and countries.”

Coming up on two-and-a-half years since he last saw family or friends, and struggling to build new connections with little grasp of English, Estrada battled feelings of isolation and loneliness off the field that bled into his performance on it. He pitched to a 5.85 ERA over 11 outings, losing 13 points off his strikeout rate from the year prior.

Then, a pandemic wiped out a season. A year later, only seven outings into his 2021 season, Estrada blew out his elbow. He opted for an internal brace procedure rather than a full Tommy John surgery to minimize recovery time. But his rehab didn’t go as expected. There were setbacks. He didn’t pitch in a game for over a year.

“Mentally, it was very difficult. I felt negative a lot. Very negative mentally,” Estrada says. “I wasn’t recovering the way I wanted. I wanted quick results after the injury. But I didn’t see it the way I wanted to see it.”

Estrada finally returned in the summer of 2022 and got into seven games with the Dunedin Blue Jays, working to a 2.33 ERA while striking out a third of the batters he faced. His fastball velocity, which long lagged behind his ability to impart spin, was suddenly sitting 93-94 and touching 96. Turns out, a benefit of Estrada’s extended rehab was the time it gave him to work on his overall strength and conditioning while instilling the habits and routines necessary to maintain it throughout a long season.

That 2022 stint alone would have been enough to get him to high-A Vancouver for a stiffer test the following year, but Estrada was applying for permanent U.S. residency at the time and couldn’t leave the country. So, 2023 saw him repeat A-ball as a 24-year-old pitching in a league where the average age was two years his junior.

Estrada didn’t get a chance to truly show what he could do until 2024 — now a 25-year-old with only 69 appearances over the last six years — which he began with two A-ball starts before getting to Vancouver for nine more (including a seven-inning no-hitter) and carrying a 1.96 ERA with rock solid peripherals and a 68 per cent strike rate to double-A New Hampshire upon his promotion in early July.

Cesar Martin, New Hampshire’s manager at the time, was hearing plenty about his new starter from other developers in the Blue Jays organization but had never worked with him one-on-one. As Estrada jogged to the mound before a home crowd to face the Binghamton Rumble Ponies in his debut, Martin watched his body language closely.

“First outing in double-A coming from high-A, you expect the guy to be a little timid, a little nervous, all that kind of stuff,” Martin says. “But he just went out there like he belonged. How composed he was on the mound, that was really, really impressive. You don’t see that all the time.”

Estrada’s mettle was tested from the jump, as Binghamton’s leadoff hitter worked a 10-pitch walk after falling behind, 0-2. But following his fifth inning, after getting that same hitter to pop up weakly with a first-pitch fastball, Estrada walked back to New Hampshire’s dugout having allowed only a run. He’d just surpassed his 80-pitch workload limitation, but he still lobbied Martin to let him go back out for one more.

“That’s the way he is,” Martin says. “He’s not afraid. He competes.”

Estrada finished the year with New Hampshire before being sent off to the Arizona Fall League where Blue Jays personnel will tell you he did some of his most impressive work of the season. Facing top prospects from around the game and getting them out consistently, Estrada’s confidence grew as he struck out 19 over 11.2 innings. His final appearance was in the Fall Stars game where he worked a clean seventh, finishing his season by getting Leo De Vries — a consensus top-25 MLB prospect — to look at a called third strike.

That confidence has carried over this spring. He’s thrown first-pitch strikes to nine of the 14 batters he’s faced in tracked games; he’s gone right after big-leaguers like Nolan Gorman and Spencer Torkelson; he’s tunneling fastballs off sliders and landing curveballs for first-pitch strikes. And he’s carrying himself like a big-leaguer on the mound.

“From when I saw him after he first came over, he’s always had control, he’s always been a guy who throws strikes. But it wasn’t even close to what I see now,” Hurtado says. “I never saw that. He’s got the electric fastball now. He’s got that splitter. He’s developed and improved a lot.”

Playing with his splitter grip at his locker in the Blue Jays spring training clubhouse early one morning this March, Estrada finished telling his long, winding story — the defection, the culture shock, the injury, the loneliness, the starts, the stops — and began speaking in future tense. Describing what his big-league debut would look like, he didn’t frame it as an if, but a when. He said he doesn’t think it’ll happen this year. He knows it will. And he knows exactly how it will feel.

“That it was worth it,” he says. “That all the sacrifice — for me, for my coaches, for the family that I left behind — was worth it.”

More from Sportsnet

There’s no pitcher quite like Ryan Yarbrough — it’s why the Blue Jays brought him back

Michael Stefanic had a job in a law office — now he’s in Blue Jays camp