Blue Jays' Manoah is testing out a new pitch in spring training
The Toronto Blue Jays are hoping for a bounce-back season from starting pitcher Alek Manoah, and it seems like he’s got at least one new trick up his sleeve.
Manoah had a 3-9 record with an ERA of 5.87 in 19 appearances last season, pitching just 87.1 innings for the Blue Jays in 2023. Expected to be one of the aces of the team’s rotation, Manoah never quite found his footing and wound up bouncing up and down between the MLB and minor leagues for much of the year.
But after storming through the 2021 and 2022 seasons — his first two years in the league — as one of the MLB’s best pitchers, perhaps Manoah has found a new weapon to help reclaim some of that magic once again.
As per TSN’s Scott Mitchell, Manoah is experimenting with adding a cutter to his four-pitch arsenal in spring training.
New pitch alert: Alek Manoah is testing out a cutter this spring.#BlueJays
— Scott Mitchell (@ScottyMitchTSN) February 22, 2024
As per MLB.com’s Baseball Savant feature, here’s how Manoah’s pitch distribution was in 2023:
- Slider 30%
- Four Seamer 29%
- Sinker 28.2%
- Changeup: 12.8%
In each of the first two seasons of his career, Manoah had been more reliant on his fastball, using it 35.8% of the time in 2022 and 36.3% of the time in 2021. Perhaps the cutter will give him a bit more unpredictability in his pitching mix and allow him to return to the dominant force Jays fans had come to know him to be in his first two years with the team.
The Blue Jays play their first spring training game of the year this Saturday, where they take on the Philadelphia Phillies.
Meanwhile, the regular season is a little over a month away, with Toronto’s first game of the year coming on March 28, when they visit the Tampa Bay Rays.