In something of a surprise move, the Blue Jays summoned top prospect Anthony Alford to the big leagues on Friday. The move is a surprise not because Alford lacks talent, but because he’s played a mere 33 games above A-ball, all of which came this season with the Jays’ Double-A affiliate. Alford has performed exceptionally well this season, slashing .325/.411/.455. But he was overmatched by low-minors pitching as recently as last season, when he struck out 29% of the time and could only muster a .236/.344/.378 batting line at High-A.

Alford cut his strikeout rate by over 12 percentage points (from 29% to 17%) this year while maintaining his robust walk totals and modest power. The result has been substantially better offensive numbers. This is an encouraging development, especially since Alford’s so much more than his offense. He’s a 70 runner per Eric Longenhagen, which makes him a no-doubt center fielder and a threat on the bases.

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The Toronto Blue Jays have reportedly called up 22-year-old outfielder Anthony Alford from Double-A. It’s an aggressive promotion, albeit likely a temporary one. The organization’s No. 2-rated prospect would be filling a void created by Kevin Pillar’s suspension and an injury to Darrell Ceciliani.

Regardless of the duration of his stay, Alford has a bright future with Canada’s team. The former Ole Miss football player augments his athleticism with outstanding baseball instincts. In 141 plate appearances for the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, Alford was slashing .325/.411/.455, with three home runs and nine stolen bases in 10 attempts.

Gil Kim, Toronto’s director of player development, gave a snapshot rundown on the newest Blue Jay.

“Alford has made huge strides,” Kim told me earlier today.” He was a two-sport athlete, and I believe 2015 is the first year he fully committed to baseball. When you combine his character, makeup, and natural ability, and factor in the inexperience, I’m comfortable saying he’ll make quicker advances than most. He’s coming into his own, just focusing on baseball. He had a 2016 season that saw him progressively improve. He carried that into the AFL, and he’s obviously doing a very good job now in Double-A.”

Kim proceeded to double down on his opinion of Alford’s character.

“I can’t speak more highly of character and makeup in our organization than Anthony Alford. He’s an impressive human being. He’s going to be a very successful major-league baseball player, and he’s already a successful human being. If you talk to our field coordinator, Eric Wedge, or Angus Mugford, our high-performance director, Ben Cherington, Ross Atkins, Mark Shapiro — as we strive to create the culture, and environment, of what a Toronto Blue Jays player is, Anthony Alford is off the charts. He’s impressive, man.”

On Wednesday, Aaron Loup threw this up-and-in fastball.

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Jake Thomas is flying under the radar with a sky-high OBP. Playing on a Lansing Lugnuts team that features some of the top prospects in the Toronto Blue Jays system, the 23-year-old outfielder has logged 17 hits, and drawn 27 walks, in 84 plate appearances. His slash line is an eye-popping .315/.536/.407.

On-base percentage was his MO in college — Thomas slashed .322/.453/.470 at SUNY Binghamton — but MLB clubs weren’t exactly clamoring to procure his services. He went undrafted in 2014, and when he joined the Blue Jays organization a year later, it was as a 27th-round senior sign. When he reported to rookie ball, he did so with a degree in finance and the odds against him.

The uphill battle continued last summer. Despite having put up a .393 OBP in the Gulf Coast League, Thomas began his first full professional season in extended spring training. He was subsequently promoted to Low-A Lansing, in June, but his first go-round with the Lugnuts was pedestrian at best. As Courtney Barnett sang on Saturday Night Live, the left-handed hitter “made a mess of what should be a small success.” He slashed just .244/.326/.315.

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Seemingly ever since humans gained sentience, we’ve been obsessed with the concept of flight. How powerful birds must have seemed to ancient man, able to free themselves from the constraints of the ground. Joyous was the starling, dancing and warbling through the air. Terrifying was the hawk, diving for a kill. To fly is to move in ways unimaginable for those trapped on the surface. We stared at the sky, the last frontier to be conquered, and dreamed. We told stories of magical heroes and gods who could fly. We sought any way possible to experience it, from the Dark Ages to Da Vinci and on.

By the time we came up with hot-air balloons and gliders and airplanes and helicopters so that we could join the birds in the sky, perhaps we lost a little bit of that wonder. Generations have now grown up with intercontinental flight as a simple fact of life. We still dream of joining the birds in the skies, of flying like Superman. But we no longer wonder if it’s possible. We know that we can fly with mechanical aid. But we’ll never truly join the birds. At least not for more than a few seconds.

It’s a small stroke of genius that the gods put Chris Coghlan on a team named after a bird. And indeed, last night’s Blue Jays came in St. Louis against the Cardinals, who are also named for birds. Teams named for birds play each other all the time, of course. The Jays play in the same division as the Orioles. Almost none of those games, if none at all, have featured a moment like this.

We can’t earnestly call what Coghlan accomplishes here flight. If anything, it’s falling with style. It’s a leap and a near-perfect handspring. It’s something out of a gymnastics exhibition, except Coghlan is wearing cleats and a helmet instead of a unitard. It’s the closest anyone’s come to real, honest-to-goodness flight on a baseball field since Ben Revere achieved liftoff in 2013.

Coghlan didn’t plan on springing over the head of Yadier Molina. Like the most satisfying superhero origin stories, he didn’t know he had the power inside of him. He jumped because instinct told him to, because years upon years of baseball conditioning told him to score that run. Humans are capable of great physical feats when fueled by adrenaline and instinct. They can lift cars, run faster than they ever have before. For a few precious seconds, they can fly. If they’re lucky, they can even stick the landing, like Coghlan did.

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To start, we might as well revisit the difference between command and control, or at least the accepted version of that difference: control is the ability to throw the ball into the strike zone, while command is the ability to throw the ball to a particular location. While we can easily measure the first by looking at strike-zone percentage, it’s also immediately apparent that the second skill is more interesting. A pitcher often wants to throw the ball outside of the zone, after all.

We’ve tried to put a number on command many different ways. I’m not sure we’ve succeeded, despite significant and interesting advances.

You could consider strikeout minus walk rate (K-BB%) an attempt, but it also captures way too much “stuff” to be a reliable command metric — a dominant pitch, thrown into the strike zone with no command, could still earn a lot of strikeouts and limit walks.

COMMANDf/x represented a valiant attempt towards solving this problem by tracking how far the catcher’s glove moved from the original target to the actual location at which it acquired the ball. But there were problems with that method of analysis. For one, the stat was never made public. Even if it were, however, catchers don’t all show the target the same way. Chris Iannetta, for example, told me once that his relaxation moment, between showing a target and then trying to frame the ball, was something he had to monitor to become a better framer. Watch him receive this low pitch: does it seem like we could reliably affix the word “target” to one of these moments, and then judge the pitch by how far the glove traveled after that moment?

How about all those times when the catcher is basically just indicating inside vs. outside, and it’s up to the pitcher to determine degree? What happens when the catcher pats the ground to tell him to throw it low, or exaggerates his high target? There are more than a few questions about an approach affixed to a piece of equipment, sometimes haphazardly used.

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It’s early. Like, early early. The Cincinnati Reds and Arizona Diamondbacks are tied for the best record in the National League. The Angels’ best hitter has been Yunel Escobar, not Mike Trout. Mike Leake has been among the most dominant starting pitchers in baseball. Because most teams have played eight or nine games, the standings and the leaderboards look weird. They’ll look more normal in the not-too-distant future.

But for all the wisdom that’s contained within calls not to overreact to early-season performance, the reality is that games in April count, too, and if a team digs a deep enough hole, it stops being early pretty quickly. The Blue Jays, who lost again last night to fall to 1-7, aren’t quite there yet, but they’ve certainly cleared a path towards a potentially very difficult set of decisions this summer.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Toronto Blue Jays farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB)

55 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .270/.360/.450 as 17-year-old in Appy League.

Scouting Report
The Blue Jays traded for international-bonus slots and were able to avoid completely blowing out their bonus pool to sign Guerrero in 2015, instead spending in a range that only benched them from big international spending for one year instead of two. While most 17-year-old international signees spend their first pro season in the Dominican, Guerrero was advanced enough to come stateside. Not only that, but after spending time in extended spring training (and often hanging around and attentively watching Jays’ Florida State League games at night in April and May), Guerrero skipped the GCL and was sent to the Appalachian League, where he was dominant.

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Paul Sporer and I were responsible for providing the starting-rotation installments of last week’s positional power rankings, posts which you can access here and here. One of the interesting things I took from the exercise was the absence of the Toronto Blue Jays from the top 15 of those rankings.

Blue Jays starters led the American League in ERA (3.64) last season. If you prefer more advanced measures, the Blue Jays’ rotation led the AL with 15.3 WAR and finished second in FIP (4.07) to Cleveland. This season, all of Toronto’s starting pitchers of significance return save for R.A. Dickey.

But despite finishing as the AL’s most productive rotation last season and despite losing arguably its weakest link in Dickey, the Jays’ rotation appeared in last week’s positional rankings as just the eighth-best staff in the AL and the 16th-best such group in the game. FanGraphs projections have the Blue Jays staff ranked behind the Red Sox and the Yankees in the AL East, and if that holds, it could be damaging to Toronto’s postseason aspirations.

Our 2017 forecasts for the Blue Jays’ likely starting pitchers…

16. Blue Jays

Name	IP	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	BABIP	LOB%	ERA	FIP	WAR
Aaron Sanchez	205.0	7.9	3.2	0.9	.302	73.7 %	3.69	3.86	3.4
J.A. Happ	181.0	7.8	2.8	1.2	.303	72.5 %	4.11	4.15	2.6
Marcus Stroman	169.0	7.5	2.4	0.9	.313	71.3 %	3.85	3.64	3.2
Marco Estrada	167.0	7.0	2.9	1.4	.277	71.6 %	4.31	4.62	1.9
Francisco Liriano	149.0	9.6	4.1	1.2	.310	74.3 %	4.11	4.22	1.8
Casey Lawrence	37.0	5.1	2.4	1.5	.312	67.9 %	5.20	5.04	0.2
Mat Latos	38.0	6.6	3.0	1.3	.309	70.2 %	4.77	4.69	0.3
Mike Bolsinger	9.0	8.5	3.5	1.3	.317	71.7 %	4.51	4.36	0.1
Conner Greene	9.0	5.8	4.6	1.4	.311	67.6 %	5.77	5.63	0.0
Ryan Borucki	9.0	5.8	3.8	1.6	.310	68.3 %	5.59	5.54	0.0
Total	973.0	7.7	3.0	1.1	.302	72.3 %	4.11	4.18	13.4

So what’s going on here?

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Episode 726
Managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses Toronto’s Steve Pearce, matters relating to Steve Pearce, and also matters that possess no relevance to Steve Pearce at all.

A reminder: FanGraphs’ Ad Free Membership exists. Click here to learn more about it and share some of your disposable income with FanGraphs.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 38 min play time.)

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