After falling in the divisional round of the playoffs last October, the San Diego Padres came into 2025 again counting themselves among the expected contenders in the National League. The major source of that optimism was the significant investment the team has made in its roster over the past few seasons, which included the trade acquisition of right-handed starter Dylan Cease from the White Sox before the start of last season.
While starter Nick Pivetta was their only major roster addition, and there were persistent rumors they were exploring salary-shedding trades, including of Cease, the Padres have started fast and are just a game and a half behind the juggernaut Dodgers in the NL West standings as of May 21.
The club has gotten fantastic work from Pivetta and Michael King in its rotation, but Cease has lagged behind those two after ten turns. Coming off a season when he finished fourth in the NL Cy Young voting and provided a 3.47 ERA across 189 and ⅓ innings, Cease sits with a 4.50 ERA through his first 54 innings this season. Among the 79 qualified starting pitchers thus far, that mark ranks just 67th.
In his platform season before his first crack at free agency, this probably was not what Cease had in mind. Moreover, if the Padres are going to hang around with the Dodgers, they will need Cease to pitch like a front-of-the-rotation starter.
Both Cease and the Padres can exhale, however, because the data suggests that his rough start to 2025 has little to do with his skill and ability, and a lot to do with a run of rotten luck and a less capable defense playing behind him.
The More Things Change…
In assessing what might be going on with Cease, I constantly double-checked my work because seemingly all the numbers I looked at were nominally the same as they typically have been. I won’t drag you through a comprehensive set of charts, graphs, and tables, but I will show you some examples of some of our favorite pitching metrics:
Striking batters out and avoiding giving them free passes and home runs are the basic building blocks of effective pitching. In each of those areas, plus some of our Pitcher List staples called strike plus whiff rate and PLV, Cease is right in line with his past work. The same is true for the location component of PLV.
Cease’s fielding independent pitching (FIP) is 3.51, not that far off last year’s 3.10 and ranked 30th. The 0.99 run gap between Cease’s ERA and FIP is the 4th-largest difference in MLB this season.
As the PLV consistency would suggest, there’s been no change in Cease’s velocity — he’s averaged just under 97 mph with his four-seamer, just like in the past.
In terms of pitch mix, he has turned to his slider more often this season. He used it 43% of the time last season, and it was the single most valuable pitch in the game by run value (25 cumulative pitcher runs, per Statcast). This season, he’s thrown it 49% of the time, and the increased deployment hasn’t diminished its effectiveness. The pitch has returned 5 runs and generated a 43.1% whiff rate.
If we want to squint to find differences, we can argue that the shapes of Cease’s four-seamer and slider, which comprise almost 85% of his pitches, have changed slightly. His four-seamer has a touch more arm-side movement and a little more vertical movement, while his slider has a touch less vertical and glove-side movement. Cease has acknowledged working through some mechanical adjustments early this season. Still, though, neither of those changes seems outside the normal variation, and the pitches are little changed in effectiveness, especially for drawing whiffs and suppressing contact quality.
Balls in Play and Sequencing
The biggest thing that stands out in Cease’s data is his luck on batted balls and stranding base runners. Craig Edwards, formerly of FanGraphs, wrote a piece back in 2019 that showed that about 75% of the difference between a pitcher’s ERA and FIP can be explained by batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and strand rate (LOB%). When we look into those for Cease, we find that the 2025 season, so far, has been a challenge in those two categories:
That 67.0% left on base percentage would be his lowest strand rate as a big leaguer. His .301 BABIP is a touch elevated, even though it’s come down over the last few starts. If it held for the rest of the season, it would be the highest his final season in Chicago when his 4.58 ERA was 86 points above his 3.72 FIP. In the context of the rest of the league, his strand rate is 73rd out of 79, and his BABIP is 62nd.
As the strand rate suggests, that misfortune has been exacerbated further because much of it has happened when there have been runners on base:
I’ll point out here that 5 of the 7 home runs that Cease has allowed this season have come with the bases empty, which has helped prevent this from being worse. But he’s been victimized by BABIPs well north of .400 when runners have been on base and in scoring position.
It’s fair to wonder then if Cease has allowed more or harder contact when he has been forced to work from the stretch, but the data doesn’t reveal that to be the case.
He has allowed an average exit velocity of 89 mph with the bases empty, and 87.6 mph and 89.8 mph with runners on and in scoring position, respectively. He’s drawn a whiff on 27.8% and 31.8% of opponent swings with runners on and in scoring position, which are plenty strong, albeit slightly beneath the 35.1% he’s gotten with the bases empty.
Defensive Shuffling
Some measure of this is attributable to the work of the Padres’ defense. Last season, Statcast had San Diego as a roughly average defensive club, ranked 15th with 2 runs prevented and 2 outs above average as a group. Last winter, the Padres chose to let shortstop Ha-Seong Kim, a strong defender, leave in free agency. The domino effect included moving Xander Bogaerts and Jake Cronenworth up the defensive spectrum to shortstop and second base. Luis Arraez, who primarily DH’d last season, became their most frequently used first baseman.
The early collective returns on that shuffling haven’t been very good, despite Bogaerts holding his own at shortstop. The team is currently 23rd in OAA, and first base (-3 OAA) and second base (-8 OAA) have been weak spots.
Cease has been particularly affected by these changes on the infield. The infielders behind Cease have accumulated -3 OAA and converted only 64% of their defensive opportunities when he’s been on the bump, a 5% delta from the estimated 69% success rate of those opportunities. That OAA figure is near the very bottom of the 224 pitchers on the Statcast OAA leaderboard.
Going Forward
So it appears that Cease’s stuff is as good as ever and that he’s just been hit by some bad luck and unfortunate timing to start this season. While I wouldn’t bet on the Padres’ defense improving significantly behind him, his batted ball and sequencing luck should normalize as the season progresses, and Cease’s top-line numbers should start to look more like they usually do as he gets more innings that blunt the effects some of his rough early season starts have on his seasonal numbers. In his last three starts, Cease has worked into the 7th inning in each and allowed a total of 6 runs while striking out 25 batters and walking four. If those are any indication, the buy-low window might be closing quickly.
Photo courtesy of Icon Sportswire | Adapted by Aaron Polcare (@abeardoesart on Bluesky and X)
