I don’t want to be overly redundant here. I wrote a piece about Casey Mize several weeks ago, outlining my concerns about him. I felt like anyone expecting him to build on his 2025 success was going to be sorely disappointed. I try not to take spring results too seriously. Guys are working on new things. If you’re a veteran pitcher, your goal is to figure out ways to build yourself up. I have no problem with that. What I do look for is stuff. Generally speaking, when we talk about a pitcher having a good spring, it’s because there’s something that looks pretty good. But spring is meant for that. You’re playing in warmer weather, and you haven’t pitched in months. The only time I’ve ever been truly concerned about a pitcher is when I feel like there’s stuff in spring that looks diminished, compared to where it was a year or two ago, and when you look at some of Casey Mize's underlying metrics, there are reasons to be skeptical.
It would be easy for me to break down the six earned runs that Casey gave up in his recent outing against the Pirates, but as I said, results are only a small part of this. Casey Mize has been trying to find his splitter ever since he was called up to the big leagues. He tried looking under the couch cushions and everything, but he still hasn’t been able to find it. I’m at a point now where I’ve just accepted that that pitch, which was lauded as a devastating putaway pitch when he was drafted out of Auburn, is never going to develop into the chase pitch that people expected it to be. In fact, and I said this in a video last year, I almost wonder if you would be better off not throwing it. The splitter had a -12 run differential a year ago. His inability to turn his splitter into a strikeout pitch has lowered his ceiling by quite a bit, but I’ve still maintained that he can at least be a suitable middle-of-the-rotation guy. Given the way things have looked in spring, I’m starting to wonder if even that is possible.
The one thing we all saw from my last season was a pitch with greatly improved stuff. He essentially missed two full seasons while recovering from Tommy John’s surgery, and his first year back was relatively unimpressive. He didn’t even make the postseason roster in 2024. But last season, both in spring and in the first part of the regular season, he pitched like he had something to prove. It’s in there somewhere. The problem is that Casey Mize is not a durable pitcher. Except for his rookie season, where he was on a serious innings limit for the last few months of that campaign, Mize has shown himself to be a pitcher who fades. His career ERA in the second half of the season is almost a full run higher than it is in the first half, and I could be willing to accept that, but we’re not into the dog days of summer right now. We’re in the middle of March, and it feels like there’s something slightly up with Casey Mize.
I’m not saying that Mize is in danger of not making the team. He will get his starts throughout the year, and he deserves to get those reps. He won 14 games a year ago; you can’t just brush that aside. But I do think that we’ve seen a lot of depth emerge within this organization, and if the velocity continues to trend downward, and the strikeout numbers continue to be pedestrian, I could easily see Drew Anderson sliding into that final rotation spot at some point this season. It doesn’t mean that Mize won’t have a role. I would like to see what his stuff might look like coming out of the bullpen, but he’s one of the few guys in spring training whose performance legitimately has me concerned.