5-31-2025 – By Michael Castrignano – @412DoublePlay on X
Despite a rough month where the Pirates have won just 9 of 27 games, the team will look to end May on a high note against the struggling former Cy Young-winner, Dylan Cease.
Cease enters play today with a 1-3 record and 4.58 ERA through 11 games, striking out 72 batters while walking 20 over his 59 innings pitched.
Despite the Padres prevailing in the last matchup with Cease as starter, the Bucs managed to hold him to his shortest outing of the year as he pitched only 4 innings and allowed 2 runs off 3 hits, 3 walks and a hit batter with 3 strikeouts – however, Cease has been looking closer to his old self since that outing, posting a 3.20 ERA with a 33/5 K:BB ratio in his last 4 games.
I detailed his pitch mix last time around but this time, I want to focus on what he has done to try to determine what he will do today.
In that game against Pittsburgh on May 2nd, Cease leaned heavily on his high-80s slider (59% versus season average of 49.3%) and less so on his mid-90s fastball (32%, 36.5% on the season) with a low-80s knuckle-curve comprising the remaining pitches thrown.
The slider is already his preferred primary pitch but, even knowing that, the Pirates struggled to make contact consistently on the offering.
All 10 of his whiffs generated were against the slider but the Bucs did make contact on occasion when he hung them up in the zone.
As you can see from the graph, Cease mostly drops the slider down low/off the plate as occasionally will bounce them in the left-handed hitter’s batter box. He can, at times, miss his spots and hang pitches up in the zone as indicated by the pitch Reynolds was able to drill to right field for an RBI single.
A big piece of the Pirates success – or, as indicated yesterday, failure – is their awareness of the strike-zone as the team’s chase rate against Cease was 37% (38.7% is average for opponents against Cease’s slider) but with a 45% contact rate (29.6% is the season average).
So, in these situations where Cease is throwing his slider, the Pirates were seeing the spin early enough and identifying whether or not it will be in the zone – or close enough – to merit swinging.
Given Cease’s proclivity for relying on a slider/fastball mix (only 8 of his 88 pitches thrown his last time out came from his other offerings), Bucs bats need to hold to high heat and hanging sliders.
He’s still prone to fits of wildness and the Pittsburgh offense needs to be wary of this to take advantage of free passes once again but honing in on one of these two pitches could pay dividends if the Pirates are able to get a good enough piece of the ball.
Steel City Pirates 