Why Bowden Francis has struggled to replicate the success of last season ...Middle East

While the Toronto Blue Jays’ offence has tended to get the most criticism when the team has struggled this year, the club’s greatest weakness has been its rotation. 

The Blue Jays come into Thursday’s game ranking 25th in starting-pitching ERA (4.39) and 25th in fWAR (1.7). Outside of Chris Bassitt, every Toronto starter has contributed to the collective’s underperformance, but Bowden Francis has experienced a particularly rough time. Through nine starts, the right-hander has a 5.63 ERA with a 6.03 xERA and 6.50 FIP, suggesting his results aren’t driven by poor luck.

Nine starts may seem like an arbitrary number to evaluate, but it’s an interesting time to check in on where Francis is at, because that’s exactly how many outings it took him to become the Blue Jays’ best story at the end of last season and lock in his rotation spot. 

From Aug. 7, he was a full-time starter and posted a 1.53 ERA with four separate outings that included seven or more innings pitched and a single run allowed. His results in that time differ massively from his nine-start opening to this season.

Season

IP

K/9

BB/9

HR/9

ERA

FIP

WAR

2024

59

8.54

1.07

1.07

1.53

3.42

1.3

2025

46.1

6.99

2.63

2.72

5.64

6.50

-0.5

There were some elements of 2024’s finishing stretch that Francis was never going to replicate, which the gap between his ERA and FIP hints at. Leaving 99.2 per cent of runners on base was clearly unsustainable, and so was allowing a .125 batting average on balls in play. The magic was always going to dry up to some degree, but it’s still surprising just how much Francis has scuffled.

Just about everything has gone wrong for Francis this year, and we can get a better idea of what’s happening by breaking things down into a couple of categories.

Stuff

When a pitcher hits a rough patch, it’s always worth wondering whether his repertoire has lost some bite, but Francis is broadly featuring the same stuff that was so successful for him at the end of 2024.

His fastball velocity is down a very small amount, going from a 92.4 m.p.h. average to 92.2 m.p.h. — and the movement on most of his pitches is within an inch or two of what he featured last year. The one major exception is a major vertical movement deficit on his sinker, but that’s a pitch he’s thrown just 15 times in 2025, so it’s tough to take much from that.

The one pitch that seems like it might be notably diminished is his splitter. His velocity on that pitch is down from 83.5 m.p.h. in his last nine starts of 2024 to 81.9 m.p.h., with the almost identical vertical movement, giving hitters additional time to react to it. The Stuff+ rating on the pitch has gone from an above-average 102 last year down to 91.

That change has led to moments when Francis floats it in the zone at the lower end of his average, and it looks almost like a slow curveball with less break. This home run by Heston Kjerstad, for instance, came on a 79.9 m.p.h. pitch — an offering more than two m.p.h. slower than any Francis splitter that was put in play last season.

It’s also worth remembering that this splitter, which even last year had slightly below-average vertical break for its velocity, is much more familiar to hitters now, too. In 2024, it was an emerging pitch from a new starter. Now it’s a slightly less imposing version that opponents know to look for as the second-most common offering from a pitcher that the league had an off-season to figure out.

The result is a pitch that is getting clobbered. After not allowing a single extra-base pitch on his splitter last season, Francis has already conceded five home runs on it, and its Statcast run value (minus-7) is by far the worst in the majors, with no one else touching minus-5.

Considering Francis lacks a big-time fastball, a faltering secondary offering is going to have a significant effect on his success.

Approach

With the notable exception of his splitter, most of the stuff Francis is throwing looks roughly the same, but his pitch mix has shifted slightly.

Season

Fastball

Splitter

Curveball

Slider

Sinker

2024

47.9%

23.4%

9.6%

11.9%

5.4%

2025

55.6%

23.2%

14.6%

4.6%

2.1%

Nothing here is too radical, but the uptick in curveballs is surprising considering that moving away from that pitch in favour of the splitter was such a big part of the right-hander’s success in 2024. 

This season, it has been hammered to the tune of a 1.231 SLG with three home runs against and minus-4 run value — the fourth-worst number in the majors. It’s probably safe to say it can be saved for occasional strike-stealing duty at this point. 

Essentially, shelving the slider is also odd considering the pitch had a 44.6 whiff rate against last season, but it also led to some hard contact. Even during a strong campaign, Francis’s breaking ball run value was in the seventh percentile, so while tweaking around the edges here might help, the upside is probably limited. 

It’s also possible that Francis has reached a tipping point with his fastball. It was an extremely effective pitch for him last season, and it remains his best weapon, but just four qualified pitchers use the four-seamer more frequently. Francis has a respectable 3.72 ERA the first time through the order in 2025 and 7.00 from that point on, which could speak to a predictability issue.

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Execution 

Any pitcher who’s struggling will tell you they need to execute better, and there are certainly things Francis could do to get closer to his 2024 that don’t require a philosophical adjustment or going under the hood and examining the movement of his pitches.

For example, in his final nine starts last season, he did an outstanding job of earning first-pitch strikes (65.4 per cent) and was fearless when it came to pounding the zone (55.3 per cent). He’s no slouch in either category in 2025 (63.2 per cent and 52.3 per cent), but there’s room for improvement.

Overall command is difficult to measure, but Francis has an Edge% (43 per cent) better than the MLB average and what he did last year. His location+ of 105 closely matches last season’s stretch run (106). Both of those metrics suggest that he hasn’t suddenly become a meatball machine, even if that’s what an elevated home run rate sometimes indicates.

Although Francis has slightly above-average movement on his fastball and good extension that makes it more difficult to hit than its modest velocity would suggest, he’s still not overwhelming many hitters. The best way forward for him is to locate at an extremely high level, which he showed himself capable of doing over nearly two months last season.

He came into this season as a starter with a relatively low margin for error, but he looked so capable of working within his limitations that it seemed fair to expect solid back-of-the-rotation production — even if his gaudy numbers from the end of 2024 were well out of reach.

Several factors have prevented him from clearing that bar, from a slipping splitter to a puzzling curveball usage increase to a failure to get ahead of hitters quite as well as he did when he was at his best.

While it may seem improbable for a starter who was so successful could be completely undermined by these things, Francis always had a bit of a precarious formula going. The good news for the Blue Jays is that the right-hander has already shown an aptitude for adjustment. 

It took some significant tweaks to propel him to his 2024 breakout. It might take a little bit more tinkering to find more sustained success.

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