Dylan Ceases Allowing Hits, Tosses No-No in Washington

This has been a relatively down year for the no-hitter. Entering play yesterday, Ronel Blanco’s masterpiece during the first week of the season was the only no-no of the season, a far cry from the first half of 2021, which saw six solo no-hitters in 41 days, along with the ever-increasing number of combined efforts in the modern era. And while the rookie Blanco was the unlikely hero in baseball’s first no-hitter of 2024, it was an established star who broke the nearly four-month drought: Dylan Cease.

We haven’t written about Cease since his blockbuster trade to San Diego, so let’s check in on his debut season with the Padres. By most metrics, he’s taken a leap forward with his new team. His 32.5% strikeout rate and 7.6% walk rate are both the best of his career, the latter mark a huge development from someone who’s always run a walk rate in the double digits. Both PitchingBot and Pitching+ view 2024 as his finest season; his 3.03 FIP and 3.01 SIERA are also personal bests, and his 3.50 ERA sits behind only his mark in 2022, when he finished as the AL Cy Young runner-up.

The biggest adjustment that’s yielded results for Cease has been an improved ability (or willingness) to throw both his fastball and slider in the strike zone, each landing in there at above-average rates. For the past half-decade, few individual offerings from starters have been as lethal as Cease’s slider, which has generated a +72 run value over that period. Its combination of upper-80s velocity and downward movement makes hitters look absolutely powerless, constantly swinging over sliders that drop below the zone while failing to barrel up those thrown in even the juiciest spots. Since 2020, Cease’s sliders thrown down the heart of the plate have registered a +34 run value, a full dozen more than anyone else on such pitches.

While throwing more strikes has worked well overall for Cease, this adjustment has also contributed to the one below-average piece of his game in 2024 – he’s allowed plenty of hard contact, especially against his fastball. His .392 xwOBACON allowed is about 25 points above the league average, and far worse than the .313 mark he allowed in 2022, his best season results-wise. As a pitcher with an exclusively north-south arsenal (none of his fastball, slider, or curveball averages more than 3.2 inches of lateral movement), he’s one of the more extreme fly ball pitchers in baseball, and hard-hit fly balls mean trouble. As we go through Cease’s no-hit outing, we’ll see how he keeps hitters away from his fastball. He earned 18 swinging strikes and held the Nationals lineup to just three hard hits, only one of which was in the air.

Cease was dominant from the very first pitch, racking up five strikeouts and three weak grounders his first time through the order. The only blemish on his line was a first-inning walk to Lane Thomas, but Cease and catcher Luis Campusano quickly erased him as he tried to steal second. In this first pass through Washington’s lineup, Cease showed a clear change in pitch mix from his norm. While he typically throws sliders 42% of the time, in roughly equal proportion to his fastball, his first nine batters saw 23 sliders compared to just 14 fastballs, along with a few knuckle curves. He leaned on the slider throughout the start, as his 53% overall usage marked his second-highest slider rate of the season.

The decision to throw more breaking balls in this start likely wasn’t a specific game plan to neutralize this Nationals lineup, which ranks in the middle of the pack at handling right-handed breaking balls but performs dreadfully against fastballs, especially heaters with as much velocity and carry as Cease’s. It’s possible that he simply had the slider working best yesterday, as evidenced by his huge cluster of them spotted at the bottom or just beneath the strike zone, and with the best version of the slider came the best version of Cease.

Sliders constituted over half of Cease’s pitches against six of the first nine hitters he faced, including Nationals nine-hole hitter Jacob Young. After quickly claiming strikes one and two on high fastballs, he pivoted to the slider – missing a tad low for ball one, but still hitting his spot on the gloveside. Young stayed patient, taking another breaker that ended up much closer to the zone, but a third offering in the same spot was just too much for him; he chased and came up empty.

The two-strike barrage of sliders was certainly on Young’s mind when he came back up in the sixth, and Cease continued right where he left off, throwing a first-pitch slider low that Young unsuccessfully attempted to bunt into play. (Feel free to debate the morals of this in the comments.) After another slider missed outside, Cease changed his plan of attack, now attempting to put Young away with a fastball. His next three pitches, all heaters, earned a whiff, a foul ball, and another whiff for the strikeout.

Two swinging strikes on immaculately located fastballs are pure joy to watch, but I want to look a bit deeper at the foul ball sandwiched between them. This was one of 12 fastballs that Washington hitters fouled off on the day, compared to just three balls put in play – an excellent ratio, especially for a pitcher whose fastballs can sometimes get tattooed.

He was able to avoid barrels on his fastball despite its lack of horizontal life because of how frequently he threw his slider, which drops more than a ball thrown without spin, a vast difference from the 17 inches of rise on his fastball. Most of the dozen fastballs fouled away were hit in the air, and none were squared up – these were balls hit above the barrel, far from dangerous had they been put in play. While many hitters say their strategy is to “sit on the fastball” and react to everything else, the game plan is flipped when Cease throws a downward-breaking slider 53% of the time.

The other component of Cease’s dominance in this outing can be seen from a quick glance at the Hawkeye readings – he was throwing absolute gas. While his 97 mph average fastball on the season already makes him one of the hardest throwers among starters (trailing only Paul Skenes, José Soriano, Hunter Greene, and Jared Jones in average fastball velo), he sat at 98.3 in his no-hitter, his highest average fastball velocity in any start this year.

Three of Cease’s heaters reached triple digits, including two in that sixth-inning strikeout of Young. He’s always saved a bit of gas in the tank to throw harder at the end of starts, perhaps a necessary adaptation as a two-pitch pitcher to better handle his third time through the lineup. His inning-by-inning splits aren’t as extreme as, say, peak Justin Verlander, who often started in the low-90s before reaching back for triple digits in the seventh, but he rationed his energy enough to continue hitting 98 and 99 as he chased his no-hitter. Seeing that type of stuff late in the game from a starter who finished with 114 pitches is absurd, and it’s no wonder opposing hitters couldn’t deal with Cease’s fastball even as they gained familiarity with it.

As six no-hit innings turned to seven, viewers tuned into the game, their attention fixed not just on Cease’s no-hit bid but also on his pitch count, an inevitable reality of pitchers’ carefully manicured workloads in this day and age. Since 2020, 40 starters have been removed from games after completing at least six innings without allowing a hit, 11 with fewer than the 94 pitches Cease had thrown through seven. But Cease has a longer leash than most – his 13 starts with at least 100 pitches pace the league, while his average pitch count per game is second to only Greene. Manager Mike Shildt considered relieving Cease, but the ace talked the skipper out of it, and he was allowed to get the last six outs of his attempt at history.

Cease cruised through the eighth, striking out James Wood with his 11th and final slider whiff of the game, before coaxing quick groundouts from Keibert Ruiz and Luis García Jr.; the frame took just nine pitches to complete, bringing his total to 103. In the ninth, he looked just as fresh as he did at first pitch, sitting at 99 mph with his fastball and 90 with the slider, immaculately hitting his spots. Ildemaro Vargas grounded out an eight-pitch at-bat, fouling off pitch after pitch before weakly rolling over on the sixth slider he saw. Next up was Young, who grounded out on his first pitch. Cease finally completed the 324th no-hitter in major league history and the second ever for a Padres pitcher when he got former San Diego shortstop CJ Abrams to weakly line out to right field — Washington’s only batted ball with an expected batting average above .500.

With his slider-first approach and premium velocity, Cease was in peak form for this defining accomplishment. The Padres have needed every bit of his excellence this season, as injuries to Joe Musgrove, who threw the franchise’s first no-hitter in 2021, and Yu Darvish have thinned out the pitching staff as they navigate a tight NL Wild Card race. And as a top-10 pitcher in baseball with a piece of history now attached to his name, Cease is showing that he’s the ace his team needs.