The first major free agent domino of the offseason fell Wednesday night, as starting pitcher Dylan Cease inked a 7 year, $210M contract with the Toronto Blue Jays.
The deal is still pending a physical, and will ultimately net the San Diego Padres a compensatory pick after he turned down a $22.025M qualifying offer from the team. According to reports, Cease’s deal will feature some deferred money as well, bringing his salary under the listed $30M per year AAV. Nevertheless, it’s the largest free agent contract in team history for a team that’s amongst the richest in baseball, but hasn’t spent like it over the last dozen years.
The 6’2″ right hander joins a formidable Jays lineup that came agonizingly close to dethroning the Los Angeles Dodgers in this fall’s World Series. Cease has made at least 32 starts in each of the last 5 seasons, eclipsing the 200K, and 165+ innings pitched thresholds in each of them. He’s finished top 5 in Cy Young Award voting in 2 of the last 4 seasons, and brings a career WAR of 16.7 to the table. No small feat considering he spent 5 of his 7 pro seasons with a bottom feeding White Sox club.
His addition bolsters an already solid starting rotation, and gives the Jays the ability to get creative with their matchups this season. Cease will join Kevin Gausman, Trey Yesavage, Shane Bieber, Jose Berrios, and Eric Lauer as pitchers who figure to see a few turns through the rotation in 2026.
It also gives the Jays some insurance beyond the upcoming MLB campaign. Gausman, Bieber, and Lauer are all free agents at season’s end. Meanwhile, Berrios can opt out after the upcoming season as well via a player option. By locking up Cease through 2032, the team has a front end starter under team control for the foreseeable future which helps extend their window to compete.
The only minor nit to pick here is that it makes the Jays lineup extremely righty heavy, with Lauer being the only left hander amongst potential starters. Nevertheless, with Chris Bassitt and Max Scherzer likely to depart via free agency, the team’s rotation is on much more solid footing today that it was 24 hours ago.
On the surface, Cease’s 2025 numbers aren’t anything to write home about: 4.55 ERA, 1.32 WHIP, and an 8-12 record. However San Diego is a clear step below Toronto defensively, and there was some quirky batted-ball luck working against him which should regress back to the mean next season.
When the 29 year old is on, there are few pitchers in the Majors better at missing bats than him. The one knock on him has been his propensity to issue free passes, having led the league in walks in both 2020 and 2022. However, he makes up for this with a full arsenal of 6 pitches, a fastball that averages 97.1mph and a devastating slider that he leans on roughly 41% of the time.
Cease is very much a pitcher who knows what he does well, and doesn’t try to dally into areas of weakness. His four seamer and slider made up 82% of his total pitches thrown in 2025, with a whiff rate ranking in the 95th percentile. His expected ERA of 3.46 was more than a full run lower than his actual ERA, meaning he’s due to come back closer to his career average of 3.88 when he heads north of the border.
But most exciting of all for Jays fans is the fact that the team finally landed an impact free agent after multiple offseason of playing the bridesmaid to other clubs free agency successes. In fact, they appear to have taken a page out of the Dodgers playbook by adding in deferred money as part of their pitch to land Cease. While LA certainly didn’t invent the concept of adding deferred money to deals, they’ve become the poster child for it in recent years, most notably with Shohei Ohtani’s record setting deal.
Any club across the league is welcome to include that kind of language in a contract, but it also means you need to ensure you have enough cash on hand to continue paying that out into the future. Which for teams like Pittsburgh, or Miami appear to be a bridge too far. With Toronto being owned by Rogers, they’re one of the deepest pocketed ownership groups in the sport. But they’ve been reluctant to fully weaponize that cash to their advantage, for whatever reason, of late.
Evidently the way that the entire country was galvanized in their support of the Jays World Series run, and how close they came to winning it all was enough to prove that this team was on the cusp of doing something special, and the floodgates have finally opened.
In addition to Cease, Toronto remains very much in the mix for outfielder Kyle Tucker, and have been telling just about anyone who will listen that they remain committed to fielding as competitive a roster as possible. Could that also mean backing up the Brinks truck to re-sign infielder Bo Bichette as well?
Time will tell. However it’s hard to make an argument that the team will have improved if they also feature a glaring hole in their infield heading into Spring Training. All in all it’s a welcome sign to fans that after years of patience and continued support, ownership appears to be ready to spend with the other premier teams across Major League Baseball.
And that’s a scary thought for the rest of the American League.
Photo: Evan Delshaw. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.