Tommy Nancy is a 34-year-old (35 in March), right-handed reliever, from Long Beach, California. He was undrafted (is that a word?), and signed as an amateur free agent in 2016 by the Cubs, after playing in an independent league in 2015.<\/p>\n
He had a rather slow climb up the minors. When you are undrafted, you have to prove yourself every step of the way. He missed the 2017 season with a shoulder nerve injury, and then the 2020 season because COVID-19 led to its cancellation.<\/p>\n
Tommy made it to the majors in 2021, pitching in 27 games and posting a 7.22 ERA. Before the 2022 season, he was taken by the Marlins off waivers. He pitched in 35 games for them with a 4.33 ERA. From there, he went to the Padres as a free agent and then, in August of 2024, the Jays traded (bought?) Nance for cash.<\/p>\n
Tommy pitched in 20 games for us in 2024, with a 4.09 ERA. At the start of the 2025 season, the Jays DFAed him, but he stayed in the organization.<\/p>\n
Then, in late July, Nance was called up again and stayed up with the team the rest of the way. He ended up pitching in 30 games, in half the season, with a 1.99 ERA. Batters hit .214\/.262\/.231 against him, with 5 holds. He moved up to pitch in higher-leverage spots as the season went on. I don\u2019t know if there was a pitching coach that unlocked something, or it was just a run of good pitching, but he was pretty amazing.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, he had a rough couple of outings in the ALDS against the Yankees.<\/p>\n
Nance got a lot of ground balls, 52.9% ground ball rate, which, considering our infield defense should be even better this year, is a very good thing.<\/p>\n
Spring Training will be interesting. We have 11 or so relievers, all trying for 8 spots. Hoffman, Garcia, Rogers, Varland, Little, Fisher, and Fluharty all, at least in my mind, are very likely to make the team. If Lauer is pitching out of the pen, that would be 8 spots. But then injuries tend to happen in spring training.<\/p>\n
And then there is Miles, Lee, and Bastardo.<\/p>\n
Steamer thinks he\u2019ll pitch in 58 games with a 3.80 ERA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tommy Nancy is a 34-year-old (35 in March), right-handed reliever, from Long Beach, California. He was undrafted (is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":580641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2378],"tags":[5,377,2554,4,282,70,38962,2553],"class_list":{"0":"post-580640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-toronto-blue-jays","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-blue-jays","10":"tag-bluejays","11":"tag-mlb","12":"tag-toronto","13":"tag-toronto-blue-jays","14":"tag-toronto-blue-jays-opinions","15":"tag-torontobluejays"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116095996536904378","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}