Alek Manoah has been optioned to Dunedin's pitching lab
On Tuesday afternoon the Blue Jays announced what would have been an absolutely gobsmacking move even just a few weeks ago...
On Tuesday afternoon the Blue Jays announced what would have been an absolutely gobsmacking move even just a few weeks ago, but one that with each successive start began to feel more and more inevitable. Alek Manoah has lost his spot in the club’s starting rotation and has been optioned — not to Triple-A Buffalo, but to the Florida Complex League.
A Roy Halladay situation this is not — he’ll certainly be doing most of his work at the club’s player development complex in Dunedin, but I doubt it will involve rebuilding his delivery and arsenal from scratch — but it is, indeed, very major. A last resort to keep an increasingly fragile-seeming young man away from the very bright big league spotlight he created for himself with his incredible work over the previous two seasons, while not leaving him completely untethered on a bus somewhere out in the Triple-A wilderness.
Bowden Francis seems the likely candidate to take he place in the meantime, though the club maintains they’ll keep their options open.
Manoah’s struggles this season have been really difficult to watch for the vast majority of Blue Jays fans. I mean, evidently not for the cruel freaks who were booing him on Monday night, as though he were somehow unaware that he wasn’t pitching well, but for those of us who can see human beings on a baseball field and aren’t narcissistic babies who believe players are there to perform solely for them,1 it hasn’t been easy.
So how did it come to this?
The current situation has been made tougher, I think, by the pandemic, the quirks of his development path, the Blue Jays’ inability to develop quality starting pitching over the years and, especially, his own success.
On the starting pitching front, the 2020 Jays were all about the sublime Hyun Jin Ryu. He was healthy for the entirety of the shortened season, carrying (at first) a group of starters that included a "floor-raiser" who bottomed out (Tanner Roark), a castoff who proved why (Chase Anderson), a guy who just could never stay healthy but was great when he pitched (Matt Shoemaker), while the club also got big league innings — both from the rotation and in relief — from a collection of internal options in various stages of proving that they weren't ever going to be viable starters (Trent Thornton, Nate Pearson, Ryan Borucki, Thomas Hatch, Sam Gaviglio, T.J. Zeuch, Jacob Waguespack, Anthony Kay, Sean Reid-Foley, Patrick Murphy; Thomas Pannone didn't appear for the club, but was around until he was designated for assignment in August).
Failure is part of the development process — an important concept that we'll return to — but that feels like a lot of it! Especially considering that the 2019/20 offseason was the fifth for the Blue Jays since the Shapiro-Atkins project began in late 2015.
With a spot in the expanded playoffs a realistic possibility, the Jays acquired two rental starters and a swingman that summer: Taijuan Walker, Robbie Ray, and Ross Stripling. Astute pick-ups! Guys who helped in the near-term and had even better days ahead. The pitching side of the development pipeline may have been sputtering, but the front office had pulled a rabbit out of their hat and fans would soon be referring to Pete Walker as capable of even more magic than that.
However, the club would continue to pay for the issue all of these moves were papering over. Roark, Anderson, Shoemaker, Ray, Walker, and then, in 2021, Steven Matz, were stopgaps. And the big one here is Roark. Not just because his signing in the first place was dubious, though it was, but because the club watched him pitch to a 6.80 ERA over 11 starts in 2020 and then kept him around on as short a leash as possible and crossed their fingers.
Rather than eating the $12 million owed to him for the final year of his contract during the winter and moving proactively to better fill his rotation spot, they watched him get shelled in spring training (8.44 ERA in four starts), then gave him one regular season start before demoting him to the bullpen when Ray, who had opened the season on the IL, was ready to return.
The rotation was a mess at that point. Stripling hit the IL with forearm tightness after just two starts, and Ryu strained his glute and missed time, forcing the club to get creative with openers and bullpen days. After Ryu, Matz, and Ray, the Jays' innings pitched leaders that April were Zeuch, Thornton, Tommy Milone, Joel Payamps, Rafael Dolis, and Borucki.
Stripling and Ryu returned for most of May, but the fifth spot remained unsettled. Kay got a chance and struggled in Oakland on May 4. Pearson had his disaster in Houston on the 9th — a game that also saw Kay pitch, giving up three runs in 2 1/3 innigs. Kay started again on the 15th and 21st, but then was optioned (though he would quickly be reinstated and instead moved to the IL with a blister). Thomas Hatch, probably the most promising of the non-Pearson group of Triple-A depth coming out of 2020, had been placed on the 60-IL with elbow inflammation in late April. The Jays needed a starter for their May 26th game at Yankee Stadium (which mother nature would push to game one of a doubleheader the next day)...
Alek Manoah was the 11th overall pick in the 2019 draft, and according to Baseball Reference has been the most valuable player from that class so far — though Adley Rutschman (1), Corbin Carroll (16), and George Kirby (20) are quickly gaining on him.
Manoah had a tough go, by his standards, as a sophomore at West Virginia, allowing 36 runs (24 earned) over 54 innings pitched mostly out of the bullpen that season, but heading into 2023 had barely tasted failure since. He turned heads in the Cape Cod League in the summer of 2018. He shoved in his draft year for the Mountaineers (2.08 ERA, 144 Ks in 108 1/3 innings). Then he breezed through the minor leagues, such as he even experienced them.
Manoah turned pro not long after being drafted by the Jays and ended up going to Vancouver for six starts, adding 17 innings to his total on the season (125 2/3). The following spring the pandemic hit. Baseball was shut down until July, the minor league season was cancelled, and Manoah — according to a December 2020 profile from Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet — was forced to pitch in his front yard with his brother, until he was able to join some of the Jays' top minor leaguers and taxi squad members at the club's "alternate site" in Rochester, NY.
(Clip via @Alek_Manoah6)
Manoah was throwing, at least. Once at the alt-site he was facing live hitters. But he, like everyone else, was in uncharted territory in terms of what this all was doing — or not doing — for his development.
Nevertheless, the team was very impressed.
"He’s really been impressive. I think he’s just continued to evolve and grow as a professional. It’s unfortunate he missed the season and didn’t have that opportunity, but all of the attributes that we acquired we’ve seen and we’ve seen them improve," explained GM Ross Atkins to Ben, in just about the most Atkins-y way possible.
Following an incredibly loud performance in spring training, Manoah was sent straight to Triple-A to begin the 2021 season.
Now, different people, different bodies, different needs, different results, etc., but contrast that with the path the Mariners took with Kirby. The 20th overall pick in that 2019 draft was also selected as a college junior, had also had an incredible run in the Cape Cod League in 2018, and had also pitched in the Northwest League in 2019. Less than a month younger than Manoah, Kirby pitched to a 2.35 ERA with 25 Ks in 23 innings for Everett that summer. Manoah's Vancouver numbers were a 2.65 ERA with 27 Ks in 17 innings.
Kirby went to High-A coming out of the pandemic season in 2021. He didn't make it to Double-A until that August, despite having a 2.53 ERA across both levels and 80 Ks in 67 2/3 innings. That total is so low because he wasn't going especially deep into starts, and because he missed a couple weeks starting in mid-May, then a month starting in mid-July because of what the team called shoulder fatigue. The number of innings he ended up logging seems low for those have been deliberate “phantom” IL trip, seeing as in his draft year he'd pitched 111 1/3 between college and the pros, but because he was in the minor leagues, the Mariners were certainly able to be more careful with him. His workload jumped to 156 2/3 innings last year, while Manoah — who quickly established himself as a must-start option for the Jays — reached 196 2/3.
And Manoah — though his season had long seemed to be careening toward a cliff before he absolutely fell apart on Monday after beginning the game by giving up a single, a bunt single, then watching a potential double play fail to materialize — continued to be a must-start option for the pitching-bereft Blue Jays this year. At least until it became abundantly clear to them that this could not go on.
It would be unfair to suggest that Manoah might have reached the majors with stronger resolve had he been allowed to pitch more in the minor leagues, or if the pandemic hadn't wiped out the MiLB season in 2020. A crisis between the ears can strike even the strongest person, for one, and rarely are the answers to such things quite so simple. Plus, the way he was pitching against big leaguers in 2021 does not suggest he would have had many bumps along the road to work his way through. He might have reached the majors just about as quickly regardless.
But even if we do our best to avoid the trap of armchair psychoanalysis that it's so easy to fall into here, we know it's not completely a physical issue he’s suffering or he'd be on the IL and drawing a big league paycheque. Yet the mind does wonder about the fact that right now his body is seemingly unable to do what he wants it to, the potential effects being pushed so hard so quickly, and the absence of those levers that mostly cease to exist once a player becomes a necessary part of a big league roster.
And, I suppose, about whether fans should maybe trust teams more, and should shout "call him up!" a little less when a prospect gives even the faintest knock at the door to big league stardom. (Of course, we wouldn't have had that problem in this case if the club had recognized what everyone else in the world had about Tanner Roark, would we????)
Fittingly, given all this, manager John Schneider told reporters in the lead-up to Tuesday's game that the decision to send Manoah to the complex league came down to putting him in a "more controlled environment" with access to resources, like the pitching lab, that can keep everything he's doing pointed in the right direction.
There is no timetable for his return.
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Look, I can’t tell anyone whether to boo or not, but I can certainly tell them when doing so makes me think they’re an asshole.
Beginning to think professional sports are really hard! Last night was really tough to watch and was clear one way or another we were at the end of the line. You just couldn't send him out there again on Saturday, not just for the team's on-field chances, but for Alek himself. He didn't deserve to be put through that again. A-ball does seem like the best spot for him to get some time to himself. Being in Buffalo probably doesn't address what needs to be addressed. I know "depth" is overstated - at least in the sense there's not many teams with MLB-ready starters behind a 'break in case of emergency' glass, but not having a long man in the bullpen or at least some sort of stop gap who can come up and give you 4 or 5 innings has been an issue.
Andrew, if you get the time go you think you can run a compare-and-contrast pitching development for mlb teams? I would like to know if our lack of success in this area is a) typical, most teams are exactly like this and not like the Tampa Bay Rays who really do seem to always have another pitcher they can pull out of storage when somebody is injured or not performing or b) worse than average, due to the fact that we do a poorer than average job of drafting pitchers or c) worse than average, due to the fact that we do a bad job of developing our pitchers, who would be much better off if a better-developing team had drafted them or d) we are actually better than average (you'll have to bring lots of data to get me to believe this one).
If the front office, aware than it is bad at pitcher development who has decided that this means that trading for those developed other places is the only way to improve, well that's a defensible strategy. And drafting more infield prospects whom you _can_ develop well, and trade for pitching may be the way to go. But part of me keeps wondering if we just drafted more pitchers and fewer catchers and shortstops if we might be in a better position 5 years down the road ....