Blue Jays Take a Necessary Risk With Patrick Corbin Deal

In the wake of losing yet another starting pitcher to injury, the Toronto Blue Jays are trying to cut their losses by signing a veteran option to eat up some innings. On Saturday, the Jays signed Patrick Corbin to a one-year, $1 million contract and he made a start for the Single-A Dunedin Blue Jays for his first action in the organization.

Toronto currently has Trey Yesavage, Cody Ponce, Shane Bieber, and José Berríos on the IL at the moment, and Corbin is just one extra option to fill one of these spots. The Jays have gotten solid outings from their rotation thus far thanks to efforts from veterans like Kevin Gausman, Dylan Cease, Eric Lauer, and Max Scherzer, but they need another option for the time being.

The Jays need innings from healthy pitchers more than anything, and nobody could’ve predicted they’d be in this predicament coming into the season. It’s hard to believe that they’ve only played 10 games and things are already coming apart at the seams with the pitching staff.

Toronto is going to seriously need to rely on heavy workloads from their top arms while hoping and praying that the bats can wake up and nobody else gets hurt.

The World Series Champ

A former teammate of current Blue Jay and future Hall-of-Famer Max Scherzer, Corbin helped the Nationals win the 2019 World Series alongside Scherzer.

Corbin had an incredible 2019 performance in the Nationals’ World Series-winning season, going 14-7 with a 3.25 ERA with 238 strikeouts in 202.0 innings. It was good enough to garner him an 11th-place finish in NL Cy Young voting.

In the postseason, Corbin made three starts for the Nats and appeared out of their bullpen five times to help them take home the World Series title. In Game 7 of the 2019 World Series, Corbin fired off three shutout innings in relief of Scherzer to finish off a strong season.

Corbin was one of five pitchers to tally at least 10.0 fWAR between 2018 and 2019, trailing only four Cy Young Award-winning arms in DeGrom, Scherzer, Cole, and Verlander. At his peak, Corbin was a force to be reckoned with, and he’s looked for a return to the postseason ever since the Nats’ 2019 title.

In fact, he hasn’t been a part of a team with more than 81 wins since that year, so joining the Blue Jays is beneficial for Corbin, too.

Before the 2019 season, Corbin inked a six-year, $140 million deal with the Nationals that ended up being — aside from his great 2019 season — one of the worst contracts of the last decade. Simply put, things just got difficult for Corbin going forward.

Now the burden of this contract is off his back, and his $1 million price tag makes accepting his role as a depth option more believable for both sides.

The Transformation

From 2021-2024, Corbin was one of, if not the worst pitcher in MLB. Over this span, he sported the following average rates: 5.71 ERA, 170.0 IP, 134 K, 31 HR, and 1.53 WHIP. He led all pitchers in earned runs surrendered in 2021, 2022, and 2024 and gave up the most hits in baseball in 2020, 2022, and 2024 including 13+ losses in all of these years.

In 2025, Corbin signed a one-year deal with the Texas Rangers, where he had his best season since 2019.

He went 7-11 with a serviceable 4.40 ERA over 155.1 innings, by far his most impressive season total in many years. His 1.9 fWAR was the fifth-most valuable on Texas’ pitching staff that year, and it looks like the Rangers’ pitching lab may have fixed him. He’s still not an ace or a strong option by any means, but given his track record, this seems to be a strong version of Corbin.

Six times last year, Corbin pitched at least six innings and twice he reached the eight-inning mark. His best performance of the season came on August 28 against the Los Angeles Angels, where he threw eight shutout innings with eight strikeouts while only allowing three hits and a walk.

While he wasn’t an incredible pitcher for the entire season necessarily, there were stretches that showed he was back to his old self.

Over five July outings, Corbin posted a 2.30 ERA with 28 punchouts in 27.2 innings and he threw at least five innings in each of these appearances. This was part of a 16-game consecutive streak of pitching at least five frames, showing that he can be a durable and reliable arm over a long-term span (3.77 ERA in these 16 games).

If this is the Corbin the Jays can get, it makes it even stranger how long he was left as one of the top remaining arms in free agency.

Toronto’s Dire Need for Corbin

The Blue Jays have a lot of injuries to their starting pitching depth early in the 2026 season and they have sorely needed someone to fill in the gaps.

Corbin has already started a Single-A game in Dunedin for the Jays, and it seems as though he’s fully stretched out already to begin the season. It likely won’t be long until he appears for them at the MLB level.

The Jays’ regular season began with Yesavage, Bieber, and Berríos on the IL and in the first week of the season, Cody Ponce went down with an ACL sprain, and Toronto had to fill his next scheduled start with a bullpen game (6-3 loss against the White Sox).

Over their last few games, Eric Lauer’s start was cut short (2+ innings) following a bout of sickness that had already delayed his start by a day, and Max Scherzer’s start on Monday against the Dodgers was cut short at 2.0 innings because of forearm tendinitis.

Both of these games required 6-7 innings of relief from a bullpen that is already taxed from having to fill in for Ponce’s spot in the rotation, so a starting option is badly needed.

The Jays have already taken flyers on relievers like Austin Voth (who’s since been designated for assignment), Josh Fleming, Lazaro Estrada (back in Triple-A), and Joe Mantiply to fill in some innings. None of these names, outside of Estrada, are likely to factor into many games this season given their lack of success in their limited outings thus far.

Simply put, Corbin bringing some stability to this rotation, even if he’s not the best at limiting runs against, will be a breath of fresh air for the Blue Jays. They just need someone to start games and pitch the bulk of them so the bullpen can get some rest.

Closing Thoughts

Patrick Corbin’s not at a point in his career where he’s going to be blowing hitters away with insane velocity and strikeout rates, but he’s going to give you all he’s got. He’s already made his big-league money with the Nationals, and now he’s focused on earning a spot on an MLB roster and earning his keep.

After showing what seemed to be the Corbin of old in 2025, he’s already dazzled in his Single-A organizational debut for the Blue Jays and signs all seem to be pointing toward him making the MLB team sooner rather than later. The Jays are going through a myriad of injury issues and concerns with nearly the entire roster, so stability is the most important thing to achieve at the moment.

If Corbin can even be how he was last year, the Jays will more than take it. It seems as though there’s a mountain for Toronto to climb in their quest to return to the World Series, and maybe Patrick Corbin can give them a few big steps up that mountain.