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If you’re a casual follower of great relief seasons, this year has probably been all about Mason Miller for you. That’s eminently reasonable. It’s June 4, and his strikeout rate is still above 50%. If there’s a second name in the running, it’s probably Cade Smith, whose 21 saves pace the big leagues. Maybe Cleveland just has a “dominant closer” machine in the clubhouse somewhere. Who needs Emmanuel Clase? But the reliever atop our leaderboards isn’t either of those guys. (They’re second and third, mere hundredths of a win behind, but let me have my bit.) It’s rubber-armed October stalwart Louis Varland, who is most famous for being available a lot.
Varland pitched in nearly every game of the Blue Jays’ playoff run last year, which made him something of a folk hero in Canada. Those appearances weren’t notable for their outrageous quality – he had a middle-of-the-road 3.94 ERA and a 5.01 FIP in 16 innings – but for how impressive it was to take the ball day after day, no matter the situation, and give his team valuable innings. No Toronto reliever entered in more important spots, and while Varland had zero win probability added in the aggregate, that availability was just cool, and particularly noticeable in today’s splintered world of playoff pitching.
This year, Varland is still throwing a ton of innings. He’s 11th in relief innings pitched, but the guys in front of him are pretty much all long relievers. He’s also tied for 11th in relief appearances. Consider this: No reliever who has appeared as often as Varland has thrown as many innings as him, and no reliever who has thrown more innings has appeared more often. You can rack up a lot of innings pitched if you throw multiple frames per appearance. You can rack up a lot of appearances by being a short-stint guy. It’s pretty difficult to be both, but Varland accomplishes it.
Amazingly, he’s also entering in incredibly high-leverage spots while pitching all these innings. Varland’s average entry leverage is also – you guessed it – 11th in baseball. This trifecta should be basically impossible. The 10 guys ahead of him average 24 appearances and 24 innings pitched, to his 28 appearances and 31 innings pitched. Likewise, the guys who have made more appearances than him average a 1.25 leverage index; Varland is at 1.88, with 1 being average and 2 league-leading. The relievers who have thrown more innings than Varland – these are long relievers, remember – average a leverage index of 1.02. He’s either a high-leverage guy with additional innings pitched, or a high-volume guy with additional leverage.
Either of those outcomes would be pretty phenomenal if Varland were merely solid. But he hasn’t been solid this year – he’s been dominant. He’s allowed one single earned run in those 31 innings, good for a 0.29 ERA. No one’s that good, but the peripherals are sterling, too. He’s striking out more than a third of the batters he faces, allowing fewer walks than league average, and keeping the ball on the ground so thoroughly that despite not throwing a sinker, he’s competitive with groundball-types for the lowest average launch angle allowed.
There’s a huge temptation, when you see numbers like this, to look for what’s changed. When someone plays this well, surely (he said suggestively) he’s doing something new to deserve it. The shiny object in Varland’s case is his new changeup. He’s throwing it far more than he did last season and getting great results with it. And indeed, it’s been really good. The key has been pretty obvious. He just throws it a lot harder than he used to:
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Varland’s Changeup Changes
Year
Velo (mph)
HB (in)
VB (in)
SwStr%
PB Stuff
Stuff+
2022
83.8
-14.4
6.0
8.5%
55
91
2023
85.9
-14.2
6.6
11.4%
55
99
2024
89.4
-13.6
5.2
4.3%
56
94
2025
91.9
-14.7
5.0
14.0%
51
84
2026
92.7
-13.1
2.1
22.5%
67
98
“Just throw your changeup harder” doesn’t always make sense, but it fits Varland’s arsenal like a glove. The one he threw from 2022-2024 was a classic big-velo-gap changeup; even with his fastball sitting 93-94 as a starter, he had far more speed separation than he does now. Now that he’s touching 100 and living at 97-98, though, he’s narrowed the velocity separation in search of giving hitters less time to react. It’s also a great sign that whatever new mechanics he’s throwing with, he’s actually better at killing lift on the pitch even as he throws it harder. Most pitchers have the opposite pattern, and the more you can avoid the natural backspin that most changeup grips impart, the harder it is for hitters to avoid swinging over it or hitting it on the ground.
This new shape and speed means Varland has a good three-pitch pairing against whomever he faces. Righties get fastball/slider/curveball, a north/south nightmare with no great solutions. Lefties get fastball/changeup/curveball, with heavy emphasis on fastball/changeup. And with his new, faster changeup, Varland can threaten the bottom of the zone with changeups that tunnel off of high fastballs:
Now, tunneling a changeup off of a fastball is nothing new. But Varland’s is particularly hard to hit, and the most instructive way I can describe it is to compare him to his own past. In 2023, Varland’s changeup dropped 30 inches on its way to the plate, while his fastball fell 14 inches. The changeup had an average velocity that was 9.4 mph slower than the fastball. “League average” is confusing when we’re talking about the relationship between things instead of measuring one variable, but old Varland was broadly in line with the major league average there.
Varland’s new changeup also drops 30 inches on its way home – it’s faster but has less backspin. His fastball now averages 12 inches of drop, and the two are separated by 5.7 miles an hour. Ruminate on that for a moment. Varland’s fastball and changeup diverge by more than they used to in location, but less than they used to in speed. What the heck? No wonder that pitch is performing so well.
We could stop the story there, but I think we’d be missing a big part of it. See, that’s a huge change – but it’s not the whole story. He’s only thrown four changeups to right-handed batters this year, and yet he’s absolutely dominating them, with a 39% strikeout rate and a 0.94 FIP. Even if you leave out this year, he’s demonstrated reverse splits in his career, with better results against lefties than righties. Something else must be new to account for his sudden ability to overmatch righties.
Only, I don’t quite see it. Any improvements in his arsenal against righties have been small compared to his new changeup. He’s perhaps more comfortable with a relief role in his second full-time season in it, and his fastball has gotten a tiny bit harder and a tiny bit spinnier as a result. He’s refined his curveball a bit – slower than last year, with more break in both directions. He’s mixing in an average cutter/slider thing more often. But for the most part, he’s sticking with what was already working.
That’s right – most of the improvements Varland has made were already in place last year. After three years of ineffective work as a swingman, the shift to a full-time bullpen role unlocked his fearsome fastball and nausea-inducing curveball. His overall season numbers hide the fact that he scuffled after being traded to the Jays midseason, but that was mostly about batted ball luck and sequencing; the underlying numbers looked quite good in both spots. And the full-season numbers were great! A 2.97 ERA and 3.14 FIP across a colossal 72 2/3 innings will play anywhere. And he did all of that with a simplified approach in his first year working out of the ‘pen.
In 2025, Varland went from throwing four pitches at least 10% of the time as a starter to throwing just two that often as a reliever. He focused on his fastball/curveball pairing, his best two offerings, and threw them both three miles an hour faster than he had the year before. And this was the second straight time he’d increased his velocity across the board; he also added velocity in the second half of 2024 after losing his spot in the rotation. In fact, his entire big league career has been one long increase in velocity:
So think of 2025 as a training-wheels version of Louis Varland, reliever. He’s never thrown remotely this hard, but he’s always had a good feel for multiple pitches and solid command. Pitching models and scouts agree on this, and it was evident when he was a starter. Add a mid-single-digit number of ticks to every pitch in his arsenal and give him time to refine them, though? This guy might be pretty good.
I don’t think the results are going to continue looking this pretty, of course. But as I write this, I’m talking myself into a lot of the gains being sustainable. He’s kept the ball on the ground at a career-best rate this year, and he’s up to two straight years of superlative groundball numbers. He’s not going to get through the season without allowing a home run, obviously, but he’s not getting these grounders by accident.
Varland’s curveball, changeup, and slider have all undergone a significant overhaul since his starting days, but coincidentally enough, one thing is true of all three. He throws them all faster, but they all drop as much on their path to home plate as they did at their old, slower velocities. Batters perceive location on a sliding velocity scale; they know that fastballs drop less than sliders, which drop less than curveballs, and so on. When you throw a pitch faster, a batter expects it to drop less. But when it drops the same, which is more than they were expecting, that’s a recipe for weak and topped contact, when they’re connecting at all.
There’s always a bit of a cat-and-mouse relationship between unexpected pitch movement and results. Hitters will adjust at least partially; you can’t just get away with “one weird trick” forever. But Varland doesn’t need to keep performing like he has. He can’t possibly do that. He’s been throwing a titanic amount of high-leverage innings while allowing essentially zero runs. But can he keep being one of the best 15 or so relievers in baseball? I definitely think so.
Here’s my pitch for why. Varland was a Top 100 prospect with plus command. Now he throws 98 mph, and he’s also picked up two plus secondaries and an average third one at his new higher velocity level. The changes he made to his game have turned him into a groundball pitcher in addition to a strikeout pitcher. And on top of all that, he throws a ton of innings for a reliever, and very high-leverage innings at that. He’s so good at both of these things – per-inning results and volume – that he can afford to be a little worse at either and still put up good numbers. Baseball analysis doesn’t always need to be complicated. Great pitches, good command, lots of innings, and even a good prospect pedigree? The guy’s probably good.
It’s a good reminder of how hard it is to project pitching prospects. Varland was a 15th-round draft pick with a violent delivery. Then he became one of the best pitchers in the minors. Then he was exactly replacement level in his first two-plus seasons in the majors. Now he’s a reliever who looks nothing like the small-school kid who was topping out in the low 90s. I doubt anyone watching him in college thought he’d turn into a firebreathing bullpen arm who can max out above 100.
Every year, some post-hype sleeper makes good on his promise. Development isn’t always linear; sometimes what the scouts and models saw takes a few years to percolate into on-field results. It’s not just Varland – something has also clicked for Kyle Harrison and Reid Detmers this year, for example. But Varland’s case is particularly delightful to me, just for the sheer improbability of his transformation. No wonder hitting is hard these days. Even the small-school soft-tossers sit at 98 – or at least, one of them does. And by doing so, he’s become one of the best relievers in baseball.
