With the return of reliever Chad Green after more than a month on the injured list, the Toronto Blue Jays made the surprising yet understandable move to option struggling reliever Erik Swanson to Triple-A Buffalo on Tuesday, hours before the Blue Jays defeated the Chicago White Sox 7-2.
The Blue Jays had other levers they could have pulled in this situation. Relievers Nate Pearson, Zach Pop and Génesis Cabrera have minor-league options remaining, and they all have blemishes on their stat lines. But no reliever has struggled as much as Swanson, who has a 9.22 ERA in 13 2/3 innings (17 appearances) with five home runs allowed. Clearly, the Blue Jays made the difficult decision to option him so he could make his necessary adjustments away from the pressure of the majors.
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Even if the move makes sense from a roster management and competitive point of view, it’s nonetheless stunning when considering how critical Swanson was for the Blue Jays a year ago.
Acquired in November 2022 from the Seattle Mariners for Teoscar Hernández, Swanson was one of Toronto’s best relievers in 2023, when he had a 2.97 ERA in 66 2/3 innings, nearly all of which were in high-leverage situations. The right-hander was tasked with getting some of the Blue Jays’ most critical outs last season, and he handled that job with aplomb.
But 2024 has been an entirely different story for Swanson.
It’s impossible to write about the 30-year-old’s season without mentioning the stress he and his family had to endure during spring training after his 4-year-old son was struck by a car and airlifted to a local hospital. After his son left the hospital, Swanson returned to Blue Jays camp, but he suffered a forearm injury soon after, further disrupting his buildup and preparation.
He began the season on the 15-day IL, but since he returned in mid-April, he hasn’t looked like the reliable reliever he was a year ago. Swanson has seen a steep drop in strikeouts and swing-and-miss, and it’s been replaced by hard contact. His five home runs surrendered are the most among all Blue Jays relievers. Meanwhile, his best pitch, the splitter, isn’t fooling batters like it used to. This season, opposing hitters have teed off the pitch to the tune of a .393 batting average. Last year, the opposition hit just .162 against it.
Erik Swanson has left his splitter over the heart of the plate too often this year, and it's really gotten hammered when he's done so… pic.twitter.com/lsymcGZag0
— Chris Black (@DownToBlack) May 27, 2024
The hope is that, in the minor leagues, Swanson can work on better locating and executing his pitches. The Blue Jays want him to be a part of their bullpen. However, the move to demote Swanson is telling.
It underlines the urgency and desperation the Blue Jays have to play with, considering the hole they have dug themselves in the standings. Sitting last in the American League East, the Blue Jays will have to play at something close to a 92-win pace the rest of the way to stay in the playoff picture. Needless to say, they have little margin for error, and they can’t afford to let Swanson work through his problems on the mound while they’re playing must-win games.
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But Swanson’s struggles and subsequent demotion are also symbolic of one of the major problems with the Blue Jays this season, and it’s that the pitching just hasn’t been as good as it was last year. And for the Blue Jays to compete, it has to be.
When the front office decided it was going to run it back with essentially the same group that won 89 games and earned a wild-card berth last year, it came with two big assumptions: The offence was going to improve, and the pitching was going to be as good (and as healthy) as 2023. None of those things have been true.
The offensive struggles have been well documented, but there has also been a lot of underachieving on the pitching side, and it goes well beyond Swanson.
The Blue Jays bullpen has a collective ERA of 4.95, which ranks 29th — that’s a steep fall from the eighth-ranked bullpen of 2023. Looking through the stats of Toronto relievers, it’s easy to see why the drop has occurred. Outside of Yimi García, nearly every returning reliever is having a worse year than last season, including two of Toronto’s other go-to leverage arms in 2023. Closer Jordan Romano and left-hander Tim Mayza have ERAs above 6.00 and have seen concerning drops in their strikeout rates. Last season, the Blue Jays bullpen had one of the best strikeout rates — 26 percent — in the majors, but this season, they’ve been one of the worst with a 27th-ranked 19.9 percent strikeout rate.
With the offence still struggling to score consistently, the Blue Jays are often playing in close games, and while the bullpen was able to manage that high-wire act last season, it just hasn’t been the case this year.
The starting rotation, meanwhile, hasn’t been as steady as last season either. Blue Jays starters set a high bar in 2023, when they were the fourth-best rotation in MLB, per ERA. This year, the rotation ranks 13th, in part because Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt have ERAs above 4.00, while Alek Manoah, who has made only four appearances, has been a mixed bag with two strong starts sandwiched between two subpar ones. The good news, however, is that Gausman and Bassitt have been pitching better after uncharacteristically slow starts and José Berríos and Yusei Kikuchi have been performing well overall. Between the rotation and the bullpen, the bullpen is the bigger concern.
If the Blue Jays can get Swanson back to his previous form, that will help matters. But Blue Jays pitchers have to get better overall if they want to match their performance from a year ago.
(Photo: Brian Bradshaw Sevald / USA Today)