TORONTO – Graham Johnson first noticed the two-handed back smack Louis Varland gets on his way out of the bullpen during the Toronto Blue Jays’ visit to Minnesota last June. He’d seen the unusual practice, known as a velo slap, before, but only on pitchers seeking an adrenaline surge while chasing personal bests on the radar gun during off-season training. Seeing a pitcher get one before a big-league outing was a first, which is why it immediately came to mind for him seven weeks later, when the righty who has since emerged as one of the sport’s most dominant relievers was acquired from the Twins at the deadline.

“Wonder if he's going to want that here, is that a him thing, or was that just whatever,” the Blue Jays bullpen coach remembers joking with pitching coach Pete Walker and assistant pitching coach Sam Greene. “Louis didn't do it the very first outing with us. And then the second one, he had talked to Drop (Alex Andreopoulos, then a bullpen catcher) about doing it … and Drop just kind of shoved him.

"I was like, all right, I know what this is. So that game ends, I go to him, ‘Do you need me to do the velo slap?’ He's like, ‘Yes, that was terrible.’ We've done that ever since.”

The two-handed smack to the meaty part of Varland’s upper back – “It gets the hands pretty good – it lights me up so it can't feel great for him,” said Johnson – has become his signature sendoff en route to what are usually the highest leverage outs, be they in the ninth inning or otherwise, of any given game.

In that sense Varland has become the de facto closer for the Blue Jays, but the better way to think of the 28-year-old from St. Paul, Minn., is as the reliever the team wants for what projects to be the most difficult late-game assignment. Often that’s in the ninth inning, as evidenced by his 11 saves, but it very well might be earlier, like on May 27 when he handled the eighth and Tyler Rogers the ninth in a 2-1 win over the Miami Marlins.

“My process when we check our work, it's how often did you have your top choice in the highest leverage spot of the game,” explains Blue Jays manager John Schneider. “It doesn't always work out that way. There are roles to fill through a little bit. But if you're hitting a really good pocket with your best reliever at the highest part of the game, usually the outcome is pretty good.”

Based on leverage index, which measures the pressure of the situation relievers enter into with 1.0 being average,........

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