Better Know Your Blue Jays 40-man: Trevor Richards

Trevor Richards is a 30-year-old right-handed reliever who turns 31 in May. He looks older than that, with gray hair (it happens to some of us).

Trevor came to us in July 2021 in trade from the Brewers and Bowden Francis for Rowdy Tellez. The trade worked out quite well for us, even though we sent a fan-favourite to Milwaukee. It will look even better if Francis ends up our fifth starter (provided he does a decent job).

Richards has pitched out of our bullpen for the past three seasons. He’s pitched in 150 games (putting him 43rd all-time with the Jays) with a 4.78 ERA and 169.1 innings. He has 80 walks and 224 strikeouts.

Considering his 33.3% strikeout rate last year, his 4.95 ERA seems high (4.22 FIP and 3.80 xFIP), but his walk rate was 11.1%. Still, if you strike out one of every three batters, you would expect a lower ERA. He was fourth in the AL in strikeout percentage for pitchers with 70 innings or more. The three ahead of him all have much better ERAs.

So why was his ERA so high? Well, he gave up 13 home runs in his 72.2 innings of work, making his HR/9 innings (1.61) the 17th worst rate in the AL among the 95 pitchers who threw more than 70 innings. His home run rate was much better in 2022 (1.27 home runs/9), so there is hope that he’ll regress (?, no progress) to the mean some this year.

Despite all the strikeouts, he is a little worse than a league-average pitcher. Not that there isn’t value to having a pitcher, even if he is a little less than the league average, especially if the pitcher can relieve for multiple innings (though I don’t know why we can’t use others for multiple innings).

Trevor seemed to be the one guy John Schneider trusted to be a multi-inning reliever. He threw 3 innings four times (ok, three of those were when he was used as an opener). Nine more times, he threw 2 innings, and eleven times, other times, he threw more than an inning.

John tended to use him in mop-up spots. He pitched to 54 batters in high-leverage spots, 89 in medium-leverage spots, and 172 in low-leverage spots.

Trevor is out of options, which limits his value. He’d be an excellent candidate to go up and down when we needed him. But then, if Francis gets the fifth starter spot and Gausman's innings are limited to start the season, we might need someone who can go multi-innings, especially early in the season.

What I’ve left out of the ‘will he or won’t he’ conversation is that he has a $2.15 million contract. That isn’t a lot of money in baseball terms, but it is likely more than the team wants to write off. He’ll get every chance to make the team.

PECOTA figures Richards gets into 52 games, 55.1 innings and a 3.71 ERA.

ZiPS: 50 games, 66.1 innings, 4.21 ERA.

Steamer: 56 games, 56 innings, 3.85 ERA.