Earlier this afternoon, the Cleveland Guardians announced that they had acquired left-handed relief pitcher, Justin Bruihl, from the Toronto Blue Jays for cash considerations. The corresponding 40-man roster move saw Jhonkensy Noel designated for assignment.
Though losing Big Christmas this close to the holidays feels like a lump of coal in the stocking, Bruihl comes in as a very solid left-handed depth add in a bullpen that desperately needed one. Bruihl stands at 6-foot-2 and is a full blown side-arm,
lefty specialist in a time where the three batter minimum seemingly sent them the way of the dinosaur. In his short stint with the Blue Jays in 2025, of the 65 batters he faced, 36 of them were lefties. Though his arsenal is built for this exact role, his inability to create swings and misses got him in trouble and eventually DFA’d earlier this week.
Bruihl is not a hard thrower, but he is incredibly deceptive, again, especially to lefties. His sinker sits in the 90-91 range with a high 70s sweeper and occasional high 80’s cutter.
That’s not to say there isn’t a capable arm here, however. There very much is, and Cleveland now has a southpaw in the bullpen that will fully work east to west. Though Bruihl (30 degrees) and Tim Herrin (31 degrees) have similar arm angles, Herrin, standing at 6-foot-6, does not extend down the mound like Bruihl does, and his release height is slightly lower than Erik Sabrowski’s whose arm angle of 48 degrees towers above theirs. What this creates for Herrin and Sabrowski is a diagonal plane of attack. Sabrowski works his outlier iVB fastball with his two-planed curve while Herrin works his sinker with his two-planed curveball. Bruihl works differently.
Bruihl’s release height of 5.11 feet is nearly a full foot lower than Sabrowski’s (6.02 feet) and half a foot lower than Herrin’s (5.78 feet). He also works from the far left side of the rubber, so it visually appears as if he’s releasing the ball behind a left-handed batter’s body. It leads to some very uncomfortable at-bats for lefty bats. Think back to the NLDS where the Phillies deployed a lefty reliever exactly like this every time Ohtani came up and gave him fits or when the Blue Jays threw a bullpen game against the Yankees and found tremendous success. The different looks of arm angles is proven to work against hitters, and the addition of Bruihl creates something the Guardians bullpen doesn’t have which is that kind of arm slot diversity out of the bullpen.
Bruihl struck out 30.5% of the lefties he faced in 2025, but he was working against himself at times. Bruihl pounds the zone with his sinker, and he’s often able to profile his arsenal against handedness very well. In Triple-A in 2025, Bruihl worked his sweeper to lefties primarily (51.3%) and worked his sinker under their hands as his secondary offering (44.2%). That didn’t change with Toronto, but he saw his 40% whiff rate and xwOBACON of .342 against his sweeper in Triple-A dwindle to a 25% whiff rate and .398 xwOBACON with the Blue Jays. His sinker, ironically enough, saw its whiff rate improve from 16% to 20.5% and into the 90th percentile among all MLB pitchers to throw at least 50 of them in 2025. For reference, Colin Holderman’s sinker sat in the 93rd percentile.
Bruihl’s sweeper is a pretty straight forward visualization. Location is everything.
That thick red area on the left? That’s all in the categorized heart of the plate. On the right side, you’ll see where every single whiff he generated from his sweeper landed. It speaks volumes to the quality of the pitch that Bruihl ran an exceptional 23.5% hard hit rate against the sweeper given where it often wound up. Down and away to lefties, and down and in to righties; that’s the clear goal here. Find consistency. There’s a clear recipe for success with Bruihl, and an already existing but sparingly used cutter could be something the Guardians pitching development staff works to further along as well to let Bruihl exclusively work the sweeper down.
Long story short, what’s already here will work. Bruihl just needs some fine tuning, but how Toronto deployed Bruihl should be a blueprint to follow. There’s something to both Holderman and Bruihl needing their sweepers tinkered with that’s worth keeping an eye on. We’ve seen the Guardians rework a lot of major league arms into developing plus sweepers (Gavin, Bibee), and we’ve also seen them tinker with other breaking offerings into a more two-planed delivery, namely Herrin’s curve in ‘25. This move also helps the bullpen two-fold. With Cade Smith slotting in as the new closer, it has moved Sabrowski into more high leverage innings, which left Tim Herrin as the lone active short inning lefty reliever in the bullpen. Adding Bruihl creates more depth and matchup versatility. While Cantillo is a lefty, he thrives against right-handed bats because of his changeup. Bruihl is a legitimate deployable hitman against lefties. With the Rule-5 addition of RHP Peyton Pallette and a hopeful healthy return from Andrew Walters by the Summer, this is rounding into a very solid bullpen with a great mix of quality stuff and some funk before getting to some absolute dudes at the back end.
