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| Just call him Cy |
Imagine this if you can, Blue Jays fans. Your team has the incredible good fortune of possessing a flame-throwing, 23-year-old right-hander, considered among the best pitching prospects in the game. The pitcher has excelled at every level, ncluding the upper minors, and checks every box.
Yes, there are some concerns about how much of a workload he can handle over the coming season, as he’s never thrown more than 102 innings as a pro, and he lost the entire season before last to injury.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that he could more than hold his own in the major leagues, right now.
The team, however, is coming off a season in which they won 67 games. Despite a productive off-season, featuring one particularly notable high-profile signing, they’re most likely a little too far away from being legitimate contenders to need to worry about placing their top prospect on their opening day roster for purely competitive reasons. Yet at the end of camp, in a wholly unexpected move, the team chooses to do right by the player and their talented young roster. The team rejects their instinct to hold him down to be conservative with his development and to manipulate his service time. They instead place him in their big-league rotation to begin the 2020 season.
Now, if this sounds like nothing more than a pipe-dream for Pearson and Blue Jays fans, it’s worth re-visiting what happened last year with Chris Paddack and the San Diego Padres.
First, let’s talk pedigree.
Pearson 6-foot-6 and listed at 245 pounds. Paddack is considerably less thick at 6-foot-4 and 195 pounds. Paddack’s breaking ball is a curve in the mid-70s, velocity wise. Pearson’s is a hard slider that can get into the low 90s. Paddack has an incredible, star-making changeup, which this reporter Eno Sarris gushed about in a piece last year. Pearson’s change remains a bit of a work in progress. Paddack’s 1.98 BB/9 last year in the majors was his highest ever, and he issued only eight walks over 90 innings between High-A and Double-A in 2018. Pearson walked 3.02 batters per nine in Double-A last season, though that was the highest rate of any stint in his career.
In the report on Pearson from his latest top 100 prospects, Keith Law writes that “it’s control over command right now, but there’s no mechanical reason he can’t get to above-average command in time.” Paddack is already a command artist.
Keith Law ranked Pearson No. 11 on this year’s list, behind only one other right-handed pitcher (Dustin May of the Dodgers). Entering last season,he had Paddack ranked No. 44 in the game, with 14 right-handers ahead of him.
There are similarities between them, too.
Earlier this week, Pearson’s father Dave spoke about him with Kaitlyn McGrath. “This is his passion,” the proud papa explained. “His dream is to be a major leaguer and his goal is to be a Hall of Famer.”
By all accounts, including his parents’, Pearson is an incredibly determined young man. Dave Pearson says that losing his junior year in high school to injury, and dealing with a broken arm from a freak comebacker in his first start of 2018 has made him even more so.
The mythology building around Paddack’s makeup is strikingly similar. The Athletic’s Dennis Lin wrote last March about his bulldog mentality and “the look” that Padres people say he’s got. “The best look in the eye in the organization,” says one.
According to Paddack’s brother Michael, he too was made more determined in his career after being faced with injury. He also takes notes.
“Every single day, he writes down what happened today. Did I get better today? Did I slack off today? What can I do to improve for tomorrow?” Michael Paddack told Lin. “That was how he kind of broke it up and kept his sanity (during rehab), more or less. And I think that contributes to his success. Everything that he does is detailed and focused.”
None of this means that Pearson would transition as seamlessly to the big leagues as Paddack did last season, where he produced a 3.33 ERA over 140 2/3 innings with 153 strikeouts and just 31 walks. But the Blue Jays are in a similar situation with a pitcher who similarly projects as a front-line starter.
And as long as Pearson continues to dominate the way he did during his Grapefruit League debut on Tuesday, they ought to consider making a similar decision.
But at the moment, it appears the Blue Jays aren’t leaning in that direction.
“He’s still got to develop more, but man, I’m really happy from what I saw,” said manager Charlie Montoyo on Tuesday.
Montoyo isn’t necessarily wrong, he’s just technically correct in the same way that Ross Atkins was techically correct a year ago when he was suggesting Vladimir Guerrero still had development ahead of him too.
At the time, everyone and their mother knew that the Jays were aiming to hold the most exciting prospect in baseball down in the minor leagues just long enough to prevent him from being able to accrue a full year’s worth of service time, thereby ensuring that the earliest he could reach free agency was after the 2025 season instead of after 2024.
Now as then, it’s clear that it’s only a matter of time before Pearson is in the big leagues. Yet there are significant differences between Pearson and Guerrero, as far as making a case to manipulate their service time goes. Teams shouldn’t do it as a matter of principle, of course, but in the baseball world of 2020 business comes first — well, unless you’re the Padres. If one were to consider it, though, it makes much less sense to do it with a pitcher, considering their high rate of attrition in comparison to position players. It also makes less sense to worry about the future free agency of a pitcher who will turn 24 during the season, than a player who at this time a year ago was still just 19.
As the Padres showed last spring, there’s no need to overly complicate things.
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| Paddack |
In June of last year, Paddack was briefly demoted to give him a breather, but ensuring he wasn’t down long enough to affect his service time. He jumped from 90 innings in 2018 to 140 last year, while making 26 starts. On only four occasions did he pitch more than six innings, yet he was still available and pitching like an ace for almost the whole season (his final start was Sept. 17).
Granted, San Diego employed an unorthodox pattern of usage for their starting rotation in 2019.
For example, Paddack didn’t throw a single pitch on four days of rest or less. He pitched on five days of rest 16 times, and on more than five days of rest the other 10.
Whoa, this is getting tobe a long blog, I need caffeine, now. Talk amongst yourselves for 15 minutes.
( que up the theme from Jeopardy..............)
As starting pitchers are creatures of habit, and highly paid free agents likely have more sway over such things than the extremely young pitchers the Padres rolled with in 2019 (no one who made more than 10 starts for San Diego last year was over the age of 27), that’s possibly less of an option for the Blue Jays. But there’s no reason why the Blue Jays can’t get creative to accommodate Pearson from the jump, as opposed to wasting some of his bullets in the minors for a month or two.
And besides, the Jays don’t sound too set on a hard innings limit.
“We have the framework for it,” general manager Ross Atkins told McGrath earlier this week in the piece I quoted above, regarding how they’ll approach Pearson’s usage. “We’ve communicated to him, philosophically, what it looks like. The details of it won’t be that complicated to hammer out. But the workload component of it, the innings are just a component of the workload. Using a monitoring process over the course of the season to monitor fatigue, changes in delivery, whether it’s spin-rate, velocity, effectiveness. We’re using all of those as pieces to the equation to give him the best chance to be successful.”
Would it not be best to monitor those things up close, in Toronto, from the very start? There’s certainly a case for it. There’s also a case for having Pearson in the big leagues, with access to the best the organization has to offer in terms of strength and conditioning coaches, physical therapists, mental performance coaches, dietitians, and food. And, more than anything, there’s a case for letting ability and performance this spring dictate who makes the opening day roster and who doesn’t.
By rostering Danny Jansen from Day 1 last season the Jays showed that service time isn’t necessarily their top concern on every top 100 calibre prospect in their system.
(They also, to be clear, did nothing untoward with Guerrero, as the oblique injury he suffered late in spring training last season rendered the service time issue moot.) Pearson ought to at least be afforded the same opportunity.
Now back to my coffee.
