Jeff Passan went on ESPN this week and named the two most obvious suitors for Tarik Skubal. Dodgers. Mets. Toronto didn’t come up at all.
Mitch Bannon of The Athletic, who actually covers this team, put it more gently in a Reddit AMA. The Blue Jays will be involved, he said, they leave no stone unturned, and Skubal is a stone as shiny as any. But they probably won’t sign him.
I think they’re much closer to the front of this than that, and the reason was sitting in a press release yesterday that most people skimmed past.
The Receipt
On Monday, Dylan Cease was named a finalist for the American League Cy Young Award.
Rewind twelve months. Cease was a free agent coming off an 8-12 season in San Diego with a 4.55 ERA, 71 walks and a 1.327 WHIP. An evaluator quoted by MLB.com at the time put it about as cleanly as it can be put. His stuff is still elite. His command isn’t. Toronto gave him seven years and $210 million anyway, the largest free-agent contract in franchise history, and a decent share of baseball thought they’d overpaid for a number two.
Here’s the part that should stop you. In 2025 he threw 168 innings and struck out 215. In 2026 he threw 169 innings and struck out 239. One more inning. Twenty-four more strikeouts. And his ERA fell from 4.55 to 2.40.
He led the American League in FIP at 2.56, in hits allowed per nine at 5.8, in homers allowed per nine at 0.6, and in strikeouts per nine at 12.7. He started the All-Star Game. On a 79-83 team that lost fourteen different starters to the injured list, he was the best pitcher in the league for long stretches.
Here is what that gives Toronto in a meeting with Scott Boras that no other club in this market has. Not a projection. Not a PowerPoint. A receipt, one year old, on the exact transaction they’re proposing to run again.
What Cease Said in the Room
The part I keep coming back to is why Cease picked Toronto in the first place.
He was asked about it last winter and his answer had nothing to do with the city or the lineup or the division. “For me, it’s the business,” he said. He wanted to know how a team was going to make him more consistent.
Then he described the meeting. “It’s honestly really impressive.” They showed him how small changes could move the needle on his stuff. “They show you how if you change your grip with this pitch, you can get this kind of movement.” They told him they could add a pitch, or sharpen one he already had.
That’s a pitch-design presentation, and it won a bidding war for a $210 million arm against teams with more money and better weather.
Now think about who’s sitting on the other side of the table this time. Skubal is a Tommy John survivor from college who rebuilt himself into a two-time Cy Young winner. He is, by reputation and by biography, exactly the sort of pitcher who finds that conversation interesting rather than insulting.
Pete Walker Has Been Doing This Since 2012
Toronto named Pete Walker its pitching coach on November 24, 2012. He has held the job ever since, through three managers, two general managers, a teardown, a rebuild and a pennant. There is nobody else in the sport with that kind of tenure in that chair.
The flagship case is still Robbie Ray. Arizona traded him to Toronto in 2020 with a 7.84 ERA and a walk rate of nearly eight per nine innings, which is not a pitcher so much as a rain delay. He finished that season at 6.62. The next year he threw 193.1 innings with a 2.84 ERA, cut the walks to 2.4 per nine, led the AL in ERA, innings, strikeouts, ERA+ and WHIP, and won the Cy Young.
Louie Varland is the version of that story currently in progress. Minnesota ran him out as a starter in 2024 and he posted a 7.61 ERA in 49.2 innings, which is the kind of number that ends careers quietly. The Twins shipped him to Toronto in July of 2025 in a deal nobody wrote about. This year he took over as closer in April, threw 78 innings with a 1.27 ERA and 97 strikeouts, saved 35 games, made the All-Star team, and is a finalist for AL Reliever of the Year.
Then there’s Trey Yesavage, who started the 2025 season at Single-A Dunedin and started Game 5 of the World Series that October at age 22. A hundred and five pitches against the Dodgers. The organization had piggybacked him behind Gage Stanifer for his first eleven appearances, kept his counts between 55 and 80 for most of the summer, and brought him 139.2 innings and through a World Series without an arm problem.
Ray was a reclamation. Varland was a salvage job. Yesavage was a manufacturing run. Three different problems, same building.
The Building Is Real, and It Cost $100 Million
When people say pitching lab they usually mean an iPad and a Rapsodo unit in a corner of the bullpen.
Toronto spent close to $100 million over two years on the Dunedin player development complex. Six full fields, two half fields, twenty mounds, a two-storey weight room, a hydrotherapy pool built to a custom depth. Three sport science labs, one of them dedicated specifically to pitching.
The organizational logic when they built it was that they were tired of sending players somewhere else to find out how their own bodies worked. They wanted objective data on deliveries and movement patterns in-house, on their own mounds, with their own staff. They toured other organizations’ labs before building their own.
You don’t spend that to be a destination for guys you’ve already signed. You spend it to become the reason someone signs.
The Part Where I Argue Against Myself
Here’s the problem with everything I just wrote.
Skubal doesn’t need fixing. He threw a 2.72 ERA with a 0.96 WHIP and 186 strikeouts in 158.2 innings this year, split between Detroit and Los Angeles, and his changeup held hitters to a .192 average with a 46.9 percent whiff rate. He has a 2.13 ERA in eight career postseason appearances. The pitch-design meeting that wowed Cease is a harder sell to a man with two Cy Youngs who already knows precisely what his arsenal does.
And the health pitch has a visible crack in it. Toronto used fourteen starting pitchers in 2026. José Berríos and Bowden Francis both had Tommy John. Cody Ponce tore an ACL in his first appearance. Shane Bieber, Trey Yesavage, Patrick Corbin, Max Scherzer and Jameson Taillon all spent real time hurt. If your argument is that this organization keeps arms intact, the 2026 Blue Jays are Exhibit A for the defence.
So I’d make a narrower argument, and I think it’s the one Toronto will actually make.
Skubal had a NanoScope procedure on his left elbow this past season and missed roughly six weeks. He had flexor tendon surgery in 2022. He had Tommy John in college. He is about to sign a contract that Passan expects to clear $300 million and possibly reach $400 million, over six or seven years, starting at age 29.
Nobody buying that contract is buying 2027. They’re buying 2031. The question that actually matters isn’t who can make Skubal better, because the answer is probably nobody. It’s who has the best shot at still having him in year six. And the organization that brought a 22-year-old from Single-A to a World Series start without hurting him, in a building with a lab dedicated to exactly that question, has a better answer than most.
The Money and the Clock
Toronto ran a luxury-tax payroll north of $300 million this season, the first time in franchise history. They have roughly $195 million committed for 2027.
Do that subtraction. Then remember Mark Shapiro saying at the end-of-season press conferences that Ross Atkins is not going to rest on what they have, and Atkins calling Cease, José Soriano and Yesavage a “really good starting point,” which is front office language for we are shopping.
The clock matters too. The collective bargaining agreement expires December 1 and almost nobody expects a deal before it. Passan thinks Skubal signs before the lockout. That compresses this market into about four weeks, and a short market rewards the club that knows what it wants, has the room to pay for it, and doesn’t need three internal meetings to approve the number. Toronto spent $259 million on starting pitching in a single offseason last winter. They’re not going to be the slow bidder.
Where That Leaves Me
I’m not telling you Toronto is the favourite. Los Angeles has a roster he just pitched for and said glowing things about, and the Mets have the ability to make any number disappear.
I’m telling you that a market this short, with this much Blue Jays money uncommitted, a franchise-record pitching contract that already paid off, a pitching coach with fourteen years in the same chair, and a hundred-million-dollar lab built for precisely the question Skubal’s agent should be asking, adds up to something better than the fourth name on everybody’s list.
For years the running joke was that this franchise always finishes second. Ohtani, Soto, Sasaki, all of them went somewhere else while Toronto made the final round.
Then they signed Dylan Cease and he turned into a Cy Young finalist. At some point the story stops being about the ones that got away.
