The Toronto Blue Jays, by all accounts, have been one of the best teams in baseball this season.

Though not necessarily predicted by many to be a serious playoff threat in 2025, they’re now in the final month of the season with a 2.5-game lead on the American League East.

But Toronto’s up-and-down bullpen has led many to be skeptical about their playoff hopes, particularly if they’ll be relying on closer Jeff Hoffman.

Monday’s loss was particularly tough to take: Chris Bassitt pitched six innings while giving up just two runs, before Toronto saw a 4-2 lead in the ninth inning evaporate at the hands of Tommy Nance and Brendon Little, as they fell 5-4 to the Cincinnati Reds.

As for Bassitt himself, he didn’t appear willing to throw his teammates under the bus, suggesting that the starters need to last longer into games.

“I know there’s probably a lot of hatred, so to speak, on the bullpen, but I mean those guys are tired,” he said after the game, per Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith.

How tired has the Blue Jays’ pitching been this season?

It’s worth digging into Bassitt’s claims about how overworked the bullpen might be, and whether the starters should be going deeper into games.

Based on personnel, starting pitching should be an absolute strength for the Blue Jays. Along with Bassitt, a rotation of Max Scherzer, Kevin Gausman, Jose Berrios, and the newly-acquired Shane Bieber is highlighted by some of the biggest names in the sport. But in actuality, Blue Jays starters have a 4.35 ERA, which is 20th in the MLB. They’ve pitched 722.2 innings, which is 15th in the MLB, or exactly bang average.

The bullpen, on the other hand, has an ERA of 4.12, 17th in MLB. It’s slightly better than the starters’ ERA, but far from a strength. On the innings front, they’ve pitched 502.1 innings, 13th most in the MLB: 64 innings more than the least-used bullpen in Tampa Bay, and 62 fewer than the most-used bullpen in the Los Angeles Dodgers.

In any case, Bassitt seemed to be trying to shield his teammates from a bit of the social media wrath, but the claims of the bullpen being overworked compared to the rest of the MLB don’t quite hold up.

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