Why there won't be an argument to hold Alek Manoah back for much longer
None of the current top prospect lists out there have Alek Manoah as the Blue Jays’ number one. Some even have him as low as their number three pitching prospect. But the show he put on in his Triple-A debut on Thursday night — a continuation of the dominance he displayed when we last saw him, back in spring training — suggests those lists may already be out of date, and that his time is very much coming. So let’s talk about it.
But first, please indulge me while I attempt to make a living. Because if you’ve been sent here by a friend, or are an existing subscriber who would like to move to a paid membership so you can comment, ask questions the next time I open up the ol’ mail bag, or just plain old support what I do, click below to upgrade or become a subscriber. I will be eternally grateful if you do!
Alek Manoah is going to be pitching in the major leagues soon. Here’s why.
Not easy to keep track of when the loop restarts, is it? Well, those are only eight of the twelve strikeouts Manoah produced against the Worcester Red Sox in his Triple-A debut on Thursday night.
Here’s another reason why.
Manoah hit three batters in the outing. It took him 80 pitches to get through six innings, only 50 of which were strikes. So it wasn’t perfect. But it was damn close.
Here’s what Jays GM Ross Atkins had to say when asked about Manoah in a Zoom session on Thursday afternoon, a few hours before his number two pitching prospect started mowing down members of the Woo Sox.
It's interesting, we've been trying to think about how to value the innings that he has had with us (this year), and who he's been facing — and the competition he's had has been advanced — and how to place a value on that relative to the missed opportunities of development because of COVID and the pandemic and not having a minor league season. I think it's really two things: the performance will be the easiest part of it, but then it's projecting out what that performance will mean from a health standpoint, and his ability to continue to develop in the major leagues. I do feel that every situation is different, but starting pitching is an area where we tend to be patient and want to make sure that we're giving guys every opportunity to have really long, sustainable, healthy careers. But man, he's exciting. And he's going to speed up the timeline, I'm sure.
Atkins is smart to be pumping the brakes a little bit here, for sure.
Thing is, that’s not all he’s doing. Ross has been consistently more willing to say that Manoah could can “speed up the timeline” than even a lot of fans and media, and he’s doing it again here. With Manoah having started his season in Triple-A — another sign of how close the Jays believe him to be — there’s already not a lot of timeline left to be sped up.
I’m certainly not saying that Manoah is going to be here tomorrow, but let’s think about this a little bit.
Let’s think, for example, about the way that Akins is careful to choose his words when he talks about prospects coming for big leaguers’ jobs. In Thursday’s Zoom session, Atkins also discussed Nate Pearson, the club’s top pitching prospect, who is coming off of an impressive season debut of his own this week.
“He's definitely a candidate. It's more just trying to — this is the balance that we're always walking: is putting guys in the best possible positions, short-term and long-term. And thinking about what's best for Nate's career, his limited time he's had in the minor leagues, and just how valuable we see that being. And the ability to really hone his craft. So, he is a candidate, but we need to balance with that ability for him to maximize the time in the minor leagues, create some consistency for him, and we'll take that one step at a time.”
Despite being a part of the big league rotation last year, and pencilled into the rotation again this spring before being shut down by an adductor strain, it’s clearly not a guarantee that Pearson will be back in the majors on Sunday — his next scheduled turn to pitch, which falls on a day when the less-than-impressive Anthony Kay would otherwise seem the most logical guy to get the ball. But we know that sometimes Akins’ insistence that a player could use more development time is more about not saying something else than it is an absolute truth the Jays are going to stick to. Saying “I just don’t see him as a major league player” about Vlad Jr. in the spring of 2019 comes to mind.
The Jays, understandably, don’t want to hand their young players anything. We saw that in 2016, when Aaron Sanchez began spring training lined up to compete with the likes of Drew Hutchison, Jesse Chavez, and Gavin Floyd for the club’s final rotation spot behind J.A. Happ, Marco Estrada, R.A. Dickey, and Marcus Stroman. We saw it again last spring, before the COVID shut-down, when Pearson appeared to be behind Hyun Jin Ryu, Tanner Roark, Matt Shoemaker, Chase Anderson, and Trent Thornton when the Jays' opening day roster was being projected.
So there’s one reason to take some of the brake-pumping with a grain of salt.
Another reason can be seen in something Atkins said on Thursday that wasn’t about Pearson or Manoah at all. Here’s what he said, as I noted in yesterday’s piece, when asked if he had any regrets about the way George Springer’s recent injury has been handled. (Emphasis mine.)
I think there's the obvious one where you can just say, should we have taken more time? And what I would tell you is that, as we are trying to compete and trying to win, if we have objective reasons to take the next step and put him in a position to make our team better, then we're always going to do that. Having said that, we're going to continue to revisit that process with George, with our medical staff, with our coaching staff, and learn how we can improve upon it. And if there's a way to be better we want to be that.
The Jays may not yet be full-on in win-now mode when it comes to free agency — they definitely came out of the winter with some areas of the roster that still needed improvement, and plenty flexibility to be big players again next winter — but on the field they’re out there trying to win every game and every series. They have a real chance to be a playoff team again this year, and what Atkins seems to be saying about Springer here is that they have removed a layer of caution they might have otherwise operated with in seasons when the stakes weren’t quite so high.
And then there’s this quote, from back in March, when Atkins was asked about the incredible pre-season success Manoah had been having against big leaguers.
“His stuff would play, obviously, he just punched out seven in three innings against a pretty good team. It's more how do we put him in a position to go out there for six to eight innings, for 20 to 30 starts, year in and year out, and make sure that we're not having to take a sideways step or, worse case scenario, a backwards step. But he can, based on his effectiveness, and based on how his minor league development goes, a lot of that progress and workload development can be in the major leagues — as we've started that process with Nate Pearson — so yes, he can speed up that timeline. He can absolutely do that.”
Now let’s take all of this stuff and return to the quote from a farm director in the tweet from Eno Sarris above.
"If my pitcher has major league pitch grades, why should I waste him in the minor leagues?"
For the Jays and Manoah it’s not going to be quite that simple, I don’t think. Some of Manoah’s secondary stuff is still a work in progress. He’s even just recently added a sinker to his arsenal. So yes, he’s still very green. But if development in the big leagues can very much be a thing with him, and he’s not being challenged in Triple-A, and he can get big leaguers out, and the Jays have an opportunity to use him as a starter? The question then isn’t so much “why waste him down there?” as it is “why would we believe a team that was win-now enough to push it with Springer wouldn’t also push it in this regard?”
Don’t get me wrong, we’re not there yet. One massively impressive start doesn’t prove he’s not being challenged by Triple-A any more than a few massively impressive spring innings proved he was ready for the the big leagues. The Jays will need to see more from him, for sure. But the idea that he’s necessarily going to follow the typical path and arrive late in the season to help the bullpen is definitely missing a lot. Circumstances are coming together beautifully for the Jays to be able to offer him enough major league innings to ensure he keeps progressing in terms of workload and for him to be ready for the challenge of pitching at the highest level.
Pearson needed just 18 Triple-A innings before the Blue Jays gave him his big league debut at age 23. The 23-year-old Manoah now has six Triple-A innings under his belt (and a 125 1/3 inning season between college and pro ball back in 2019, in case anyone is still concerned about how high they can push his workload). Their situations are quite different beyond that, but the ability of both to dominate minor league hitters is not. If Manoah can keep doing that consistently there’s not going to be any argument to hold him back.
Top image via the Toronto Blue Jays
And there's no argument to be made about service time. He's almost certainly coming up at some point this year. Now that they've passed the date on which rookies can accrue a year of service, there's no real benefit to waiting. Buckle up, folks. He's coming fast!