MLB trends: Dylan Cease’s new changeup, Matt McLain’s resurgence and the (possible) return of the fastball

The 2026 MLB regular season is one week old and you have my full permission to use “it’s still early” if things aren’t going your way with your favorite team or player. It is early! It is so, so, early. If the 162-game season were a nine-inning game, there would be two outs in the top of the first inning right now. It is a long season, folks. A very long season.

It may still be early, but there are a few things we can glean from the little bit of baseball that has been played. Here now are three trends worth knowing a week into the new season.

Dylan Cease’s new changeup

The Blue Jays gave Dylan Cease a seven-year, $210 million contract this past offseason, not because of who he was last year but for what they believe he can be moving forward. Toronto is one of the game’s top pitching development teams and that doesn’t just mean prospects. They improve players with years of MLB experience too (see: Eric Lauer) and believe they can do it with Cease. They weren’t the only team to think that this offseason either.

Cease’s Blue Jays debut couldn’t have gone much better. He held an Athletics team with a very good offense to one run in 5 ⅓ innings while striking out 12, a new record for a pitcher in his first game with the Blue Jays. Cease walked only two and limited the A’s to an 85.1 mph average exit velocity. Piling up strikeouts while limiting exit velocity is a great recipe for success. The best recipe, really.

“That was a blast,” Cease told MLB.com about his Blue Jays debut. “The minute I walked out, there was cheering and they were being extremely supportive. That was really cool. It’s just an electric atmosphere. I think that really does make a difference.”  

Two adjustments were evident in Cease’s first start as a Blue Jay. First, he threw more sinkers than usual, and they were almost all to righties. Second, Cease broke out a new changeup. He’s tried various changeups and splitters over the years but none of them ever stuck. This new changeup averaged 85.4 mph and that is much, much harder than the previous upper-70s version. It also had a little more fading action than usual. It’s a power changeup, not his old tumbler.

The results were promising. Cease threw eight changeups and the A’s missed with all three of their swings against the pitch. He landed another for a strike. Changeups are typically chase pitches, not something a pitcher throws in the zone, so getting some chases and whiffs on it is encouraging. Granted, we’re talking about just eight changeups here, but only five times from 2023-25 did Cease throw eight changeups in a start. A pitcher throwing a revamped pitch more than usual is a reason to pay attention.

Cease’s performance can be very up and down, even from start to start, though he’s never lacked stuff, and the Blue Jays clearly believe they can get the most out of him. They wouldn’t have given him $210 million otherwise. The floor is an innings-eater who never misses a start and gives you a few high-end performances throughout the season. The ceiling is a Cy Young winner. Cease looked like one in his first start, and the new changeup is a reason to believe he could unlock another level with the Blue Jays.

Matt McLain possibly regaining 2023 form

The last two years were almost lost seasons for Reds second baseman Matt McLain, who starred as a rookie in 2023. Then an awkward landing during a diving catch attempt in spring training necessitated shoulder surgery that wiped out his entire 2024 season. In 2025, McLain returned to hit .220/.300/.343 in just under 600 plate appearances, with underlying numbers just as bad.

After last year, the hope was McLain, 26, would recapture his 2023 form as he got further away from shoulder surgery, and the super early returns are promising. He had a monster spring (.509/.559/.981) and is off to a 4 for 17 (.235) start with a double, five walks, and five strikeouts in the regular season. That includes reaching base five times on Saturday.

The early season tiny sample size performance is what it is. More important at this point are some of the bat-tracking metrics, which show McLain’s bat speed and contact quality, are way up. Entering play Tuesday, his average bat speed is up from 69.7 mph last year to 72.2 mph this year, which is one of the largest year-to-year increases in baseball.

McLain also set a new career high in exit velocity (110.5 mph on that double in the video above) and, including spring training, he’s already hit six of the 20 hardest hit balls of his career in 2026. Of his 13 hardest hit balls the last two years, seven are from 2025 and six are from 2026. The season’s a week old. McLain is swinging harder and hitting the ball harder this year, by a lot.

This points to a healthy shoulder as much as anything. McLain had major surgery two years ago. They had to repair cartilage and the labrum in his left shoulder, and it’s not a quick or necessarily smooth recovery after a procedure like that. It can take time (we’re talking months, not weeks) to gain full strength and range of motion. Two years out from surgery, McLain looks healthy.

“It actually felt 100% (last season). Everyone told me that you have to give yourself two years,” McLain told The Athletic in spring training. “I didn’t want to believe it, but I kind of believe it now.”  

Performance stats a week into the season don’t really matter. There are always ups and downs there. That McLain’s underlying data is trending positively (swinging harder, louder contact, etc.) is most encouraging. He’s doing things he didn’t do last year and maybe physically could not do after surgery. Getting something close to 2023 McLain in 2026 would give the Reds an enormous lift.

Are fastballs coming back in style?

One of baseball’s weird little quirks is that pitchers are throwing harder than ever, yet they’re throwing fewer fastballs. The average fastball was 91.4 mph in 2008, the first year of pitch tracking, and fastballs accounted for 57.3% of all pitches. Last season, those numbers were 94.4 mph and 48.0%. That’s close to a 10 percentage point decline in usage despite a 3 mph increase.

It’s counterintuitive — if you’re throwing harder, why not throw more fastballs? — but it does make sense given that breaking balls and offseason pitches are harder to hit than fastballs. The league hit .261 with a .426 slugging percentage against fastballs last year. It was a .224 average and .337 slugging percentage against breaking balls, hence the gradual decline in fastballs.

In the season’s first week, fastball usage was up compared to the first week of recent seasons. Here are the last few years (to be clear, this is four-seam fastballs and sinkers combined, so we’re capturing all fastballs):

A 1.2 percentage point increase from the first week of last season may not seem significant, but it is on a league-wide scale. There have already been roughly 20,000 pitches thrown this year. It works out to a few extra fastballs per game. The full-season fastball rate was a tick higher than the first-week fastball rate each year from 2023-25. If that holds, we could get 49% heaters in 2026.

This could, of course, be small sample size noise during the season’s first week. Almost everything in this game is cyclical though, and chances are teams will eventually zig back toward fastballs after zagging toward breaking balls and offspeed pitches for more than a decade. The fastball rate this year is the highest it has been a week into the season since 2022. Perhaps the zig has begun.