Dylan Cease: MLB's Every-Other-Year Ace Pitcher

Dylan Cease: MLB's Every-Other-Year Ace Pitcher Dylan Cease has demonstrated one of MLB's weirdest patterns for the last six years: Amazing in even years, not so great in odd years.

In September of 2022, I watched as a lifelong White Sox fan as starting pitcher Dylan Cease came agonizingly closeone out away! from completing what would have been his first career no-hitter against the Minnesota Twins.

He was undone by the worst possible opponent; the best contact hitter in baseball, Luis Arraez, who softly lined a ball into right field to spoil Ceases shot at history.

Yesterday, we saw a near repeat: Dylan Cease, now a member of the Blue Jays,but it was broken up slightly earlier by another well-placed base hit.Fortunately for Cease, a man who for a few seasons rocked one of baseballssandwiched between those dates, twirling his first career no-hitter against the Nationals as a member of the Padres in 2024.

Taken together: 2022, 2024, 2026.

Three seasons in which Dylan Cease was among the best starting pitchers in baseball.If you average just his statistics from these three seasons, he comes out looking like an unquestioned ace, sporting an ERA of 2.78 and a WHIP around 1.10, while also racking up strikeouts and being one of the most durable starters in the game.

Since 2022, in fact, no other pitcher in baseball comes even close to the gaudy strikeout total Cease has assembled, at 1,017 Ksthe next person on the list, his Blue Jays teammate Kevin Gausman, is more than 100 behind him.This is a Cy Young Award caliber of performance, and Cease has indeed been close on that front, finishing as the #2 vote-getter in 2022, and #4 in 2024.

If the voting for this season was held today, he would probably finish #2 in the American League again, behind only the Yankees budding ace Cam Schlittler.

So clearly, Cease is a dependable, bankable MLB ace, right? Well, not quite.Unfortunately for him, they play the game in odd-numbered years as well, and his numbers over the last six seasons inyears have been a rather different story.

Averaging the 2021, 2023 and 2025 seasons together like we did before, he now sports a 4.36 ERA and 1.33 WHIP for that three-year span, which is no ones idea of an ace.

Thats barely a serviceable starter at all, especially on the WHIP front.Its become an odd trope with Cease, in fact: For every great year he has on the mound, a not-so-great one seems to follow, and vice versa.

This trend has been playing out since roughly 2021, with no end in sightDylan Cease is an incredible pitcher in even-numbered years, and then he struggles much more the year that follows, a true cycle of boom and bust.It has led to something of a conundrum for fans and analysts in determining which version of Dylan Cease is closer to the true one: Is he a scintillating power pitcher with occasional command problems who sometimes loses his way for a whole season at a time, or is he a walk-ridden, thoroughly average starter who occasionally pitches his way to greatness for an entire season? Will the real Dylan Cease please stand up?The book on Dylan Cease has never been all that complicatedhe has had a fairly simple profile as a pitcher, and especially in his earlier seasons, he got by mostly on the strength of his raw stuff, which has alwaysvia pitch models such as Stuff+.

For years, he has mostly paired a high-velocity four-seam fastball that can touch 100 mph with one of the games best, hard-breaking sliders.Hes also spent years chasing after a genuinely effective third or fourth pitch, tinkering with a not-very-effective changeup or sinker that failed to generate much deception, but mostly settling for a loopy curveball that is aesthetically pleasing more than it is genuinely effective.

But that didnt really matter for Cease in a year like 2022, when he was just shoving fastballs and unleashing knee-buckling sliders, much like Spencer Strider was for the Braves at the time.So many batters were made to look foolish by Ceases slider this year that the man ended up writing a mildly cringe-inducing poem about it,which even made it onto White Sox tee-shirts.

You really have to read it to fully appreciate how geeky this is.Ceases swing-and-miss stuff is so strong, in fact, that he has frequently worked around in his best years another facet of his game that would be a death sentence to most pitchers: Hes consistently near the top of the league in walks, thanks to command that can be less than stellar.

As the likes of Blake Snell have demonstrated, though, this doesnt have to be a big problem if you can limit hits and hard contact, which his sliding slider so often allowed him to do.In 2022, when he finished #2 in the AL Cy Young voting and sported an ERA of 2.2, he simultaneously led ALL OF BASEBALL in walks allowed on the year.

In the last 67 years, only the aforementioned Snell has actually won the award while leading the league in walks, because pitching success and oodles of walks simply dont go hand in hand ..

unless youre also striking out a crazy number of batters.Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, this propensity toward walks and dependence upon strikeouts makes Cease a whole lot more inherently volatile than most pitchers.

Those negatives, for whatever reason, have come around to bite Cease each time he has a career yearwhenever fans or baseball GMs think that he has ascended or taken his game to new heights, he reverts back to odd year Dylan Cease, and that can be an ugly thing to see.In years like 2021, 2023 and 2025, the approach that works so well for him in even-numbered years suddenly starts to falter, even though Cease doesnt really seem to make his approach in a noticeably different way.

Hitters chase the slider less often, but the walks remain.

The hitter is more able to wait for a choice fastball, or pounce on a hanging curveball.And when they make contact, they registeredin these three years according to Baseball Savants data than hitters did against Cease in 2022, 2024 and 2026.

This has the effect of suddenly making all of those walks into a much more significant problem, when more of them come around to score.

Is there an element of luck in there as well? Sure, a high BABIP has occasionally played into his odd-year dips.But it certainly cant explain three years worth of subpar results, in comparison with three other years of superlative results.

Everything about Cease in one of his odd years just seems to take a bit of a dip, from his pitch selection, to his mechanics, to the quality of his stuff, which all come together to yield more pitches being driven with authority.And unlike so many other starting pitchers, injury is one thing Cease cant blamehes been one of the games most dependably durable starters and has barely seen any time on the injured list in his entire career.

This year, in fact, was the first time he was ever out for even a week at a time, and its his eighth year in the bigs.

Thats a level of durability almost unheard of for pitchers in modern MLB.The fandoms of the three clubs Dylan Cease has played for so far have probably heard this before, but heres the good news: I think this time might be different, when it comes to Ceases prospects to actually maintain the elite level hes currently pitching at, and break his odd-even curse in 2027 once and for all.

And the simplest reason why is that after turning 30, Cease seems to have finally matured beyond thinking he can get by with only two real pitches, and a substandard third.The Cease were seeing in 2026 is truly a different guy, for the very first time in his career: Hes suddenly sporting a genuine mix ofpitches, which most critically now features an entirely retooled changeup that is successfully getting chase from lefty hitters.

And heres the thing, about developing more genuinely good pitches: They dont take anything away from the elite stuff you already have.In fact, a solid changeup only makes Ceases foundational fastball and slider that much better and more unpredictable.

This is arguably the missing piece that the man has been looking for his entire career to date.

The results speak for themselves.In 2026, Cease is allowing hits at a far lower rate than hes ever done before, and his strikeout rate has simultaneously climbed even higher than its ever been in the pastbecause theres more uncertainty in what hell be throwing, hitters are having a harder time than ever even making contact against him.

Hes giving up fewer home runs than ever, and sporting the lowest exit velocity of his career when hitters make contact.Hes excelling at practically every marker an analyst would use to predict success for an MLB pitcher ..

except for the fact that hes still walking folks.

Oh well, you cant have everything.

And when youre pitching like Dylan Cease is now, you dontto have absolutely everything.He has undergone the kind of genuine evolution that I would expect to finally, once and for all, put his boom-and-bust cycle of the last six years behind him, making 2027 the year that Dylan Cease hopefully conquers odd numbers.

Assuming we dont have a year-long MLBPA work stoppage, of course.

And if he sucks again next year?Then well just be forced to sit back and marvel at one of baseballs most enduring curses.