SAN DIEGO – Before Sunday’s game, Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker grabbed a dry-erase marker and got to work on a whiteboard in the visiting clubhouse at Petco Park.
Walker drew a cat in a top hat, some oysters and a pitching mound. At the bottom of the whiteboard, he wrote a message announcing Dylan Cease as the American League’s starting pitcher in Tuesday’s All-Star Game. And before the final game of the first half of the season, manager John Schneider flipped the whiteboard toward Cease and his teammates to reveal the news.
“It’s pretty surreal,” Cease said. “I didn’t know what to say. Everyone was saying ‘speech,’ and I’m like, I don’t know- I was pretty speechless. It’s just a really cool experience.”
Cease will become the fourth Blue Jays pitcher to start the All-Star Game, joining Dave Stieb in 1983 and 1984, David Wells in 2000 and Roy Halladay in 2009. Yet it wasn’t until Saturday night that Schneider made the final call to go with Cease over other all-star pitchers, most notably Cam Schlittler of the Yankees.
Schlittler certainly had a strong case for the honour with an American League-leading 2.05 ERA and 20 more innings than Cease (118.2 to 98.1). Yet Cease leads the league with 148 strikeouts, and the pitchers are comparable in WAR, with Schlittler leading 4.2 to 3.6 on Baseball-Reference and Cease leading 3.7 to 3.5 on FanGraphs.
But after considering both pitchers, Schneider elected to go with Cease. While the Yankees and their fans may not like the decision, Schneider earned the right to make that call by beating the Yankees and Mariners in last year’s playoffs and representing the AL in the World Series.
“Whenever a guy’s leading the league in strikeouts in an era like this (and) you’ve got really good stuff, you’re a very good representative of the American League,” Schneider said. “So I came to that conclusion.”
Schlittler announced on Sunday morning that he wouldn’t be pitching in the All-Star Game, but Schneider decided to go with Cease first.
“If Cam was going to pitch, my decision was still going to be Dylan,” the manager explained. “After careful consideration, obviously.”
Ultimately, Schlittler’s having a great season, as both Cease and Schneider have acknowledged. As the season progresses, he and Cease may be battling for a Cy Young Award as well as a 2026 playoff position.
But for now it’s Cease who earns the starting honour thanks in part to a nudge from his manager. Speaking in the visiting dugout shortly before first pitch Sunday, the first-time all-star spoke highly of his first-half season in Toronto.
“It’s been great,” he said. “I mean, in a lot of ways, those results speak for themselves even though, to be honest with you, I think there’s a lot more room for consistency. I still had a lot of starts between the walks (that could have been better), but, you know, it’s baseball, so it’s been a great first half, and I just want to keep it rolling.”