Yariel Rodríguez Is at His Best Out of the Blue Jays Bullpen

The Toronto Blue Jays featured one of the worst bullpens in baseball last year, and in 2025 they rebuilt it to be much more competitive. Among new faces on Toronto’s back end, some lingering names from previous seasons have been performing much better than last year, one of the most being reliever Yariel Rodríguez.

Rodríguez was signed as an international free agent prior to the 2024 season, and Toronto inked him to a five-year, $32 million deal. While he played a hybrid starter/reliever role in his first season in MLB, the 2025 season has seen Rodríguez exclusively pitch out of the bullpen and he has run with the opportunity.

Stats were taken prior to play on June 23.

Adjusting to MLB Competition

In 2024, Rodríguez was part of a Blue Jays team that ranked fifth worst in the American League in ERA (4.29).

He had a bumpy rookie year but wasn’t necessarily one of the worst arms in Toronto’s ‘pen. Rodríguez went 1-8 with a 4.47 ERA across 21 starts and 86.2 innings of work, but there were still four other pitchers on the team who pitched 40+ innings and had a higher ERA than Rodríguez.

For the most part, his rookie struggles can be blamed on his inexperience with MLB-caliber competition, as he was signed as an international free agent following a stint in Japan’s NPB for the Chunichi Dragons.

In his last season in NPB, he went 6-2 with a fabulous 1.18 ERA and a WHIP of 0.915, so it’s easy to see why Toronto chose to take a chance on him at the MLB level.

In this last season in Japan, Rodríguez was given the NPB Central League’s Most Valuable Setup Man Award for his outstanding season, but evidently he had some adjusting to do when he came over to the MLB.

While he was facing the best competition in NPB, the jump from NPB to MLB is sometimes viewed as a larger gap than the leap from Triple-A to the MLB level.

Rodríguez’s real problem when he came to MLB was his control. He walked nearly 11% of batters in his 2024 season, and Baseball Savant ranked him in the 16th percentile of the league in this stat. This could surely be looked past if he was similarly striking out a very high portion of batters, but his 23.1% strikeout rate sat him around league average.

He had above-average movement on every one of his breaking pitches (78.3 mph curveball, 88.9 mph splitter, 84.6 mpg slider), but both his four-Seam fastball and sinker boasted below-average vertical and horizontal movement.

His curveball, while having very high levels of movement, had a horrendous -6 Run Value in 2024. This was good enough to rank it as the league’s sixth-worst curveball in this metric last season (among pitchers who threw at least 100 curveballs).

This year, he’s taken a new approach with his pitch mix, and it’s done wonders for him.

Pitch Arsenal Changes

Coming into the 2025 season with a subpar rookie campaign under his belt, Rodríguez looked to redefine his performance in the second year of his five-year deal with the Jays. Needless to say, he’s done a good job thus far.

Y-Rod is currently sporting a 2.61 ERA over 38.0 innings out of the bullpen with 36 strikeouts to just 12 walks, significantly improving his percentage of free passes.

His H/9 rate of 7.7 a year ago was strong, but now it’s dropped to an incredible 5.0. Rodríguez’s WHIP of 0.868 is a noticeable drop from his 1.32 mark a season ago. And his BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play) ranks fourth best in MLB among relievers at .179.

A simple answer to his newfound success in 2025? He’s throwing harder and he’s been able to hone his pitches better as a reliever.

His four-seam fastball increased in velocity from 93.9 MPH last season to 96.2 mph in 2025, and his sinker went from 93.3 MPH to 95.7 mph as well. He also dropped his curveball from his repertoire, instead focusing on improving the rest of his pitch arsenal.

Rodríguez has elevated the usage of his splitter, and its velocity has increased by about 0.5 mph, making it one of the hardest-thrown splitters in the league at 89.5 mph. His splitter ranks fourth in MLB in horizontal movement (15.4″) and is one of four Blue Jays pitchers within the top six.

Future Closer?

While Rodríguez was primarily used in his rookie season as a starter, it was always in the cards that his stuff might work better out of a long-relief or bullpen role. He’s shown this season that his skillset is put on better display in higher-leverage outings from the ‘pen.

He’s come out of Toronto’s bullpen in the 8th inning or later 11 times in 2025, and in them he’s thrown 12.2 innings to the tune of a 3.55 ERA with a 1.03 WHIP and 11 strikeouts to five walks.

However, just simply pitching late into a game might not necessarily prove one’s worthiness of being a closer. Some of these appearances came in blowout games in which his pitching wouldn’t have made a difference on the game’s outcome.

In comes a stat called the Average Leverage Index (aLI). This is a number to express the stress or importance level of a pitcher’s appearance and is calculated based on the number of baserunners and the score among other things. The average aLI a pitcher can enter a game with is 1.00, and the following are Yariel Rodríguez’s numbers in his appearances with an aLI of 1.00 or above.

These 10 games span 14.2 innings in which Rodríguez notched the following rate stats: 5.52 H/9, 11.05 K/9, 2.45 ERA, 1.02 WHIP. Not only this, but he’s efficient in these outings as he only threw approximately 14.6 pitches per game.

Rodríguez has brought his best performances this year when the Blue Jays have needed him most. Over the past month or so, he’s been one of the league’ most reliable bullpen arms, and he even boasted a 16.2 scoreless inning streak in May.

Could he find himself closing out games for the Blue Jays this season? It’s doubtful because of the team’s free agency acquisition of closer Jeff Hoffman with the intent of him playing the most important role in their bullpen.

If the Hoffman experiment dies out, however, then Rodríguez should be one of the first in line for the job.

The Blue Jays have done a great job making sure their bullpen was a lot better than last season, and Rodríguez has played no small part in bringing that to fruition. He deserves plenty of credit for the changes and adjustments he’s made to his game and the level of excellence he’s been performing at for the Jays.