This one surprises me a bit:
Jays get:
- Right-handed pitcher Louis Varland.
- First baseman Ty France.
And they ship to the Twins:
- Alan Roden.
- Kendry Rojas.
Varland is 27. He has a 2.02 ERA in 51 games, 49 innings. He has 47 strikeouts. Batters are hitting .230/.289/.337 against him. Last year he had a 7.61 ERA in 16 games, 7 starts. He throws hard, averaging 98.1 mph on his four-seam fastball. Also throws a knuckle curve, sinker, slider and changeup. I have a feeling the Jays will cut him down to two or three of those.
France is 31 a right-handed hitter who plays mostly first base and some second. He’s hitting .251/.320/.357 in 101 games this year. I don’t see the point in having him on the team. Maybe he is part of the cost of getting Varland.
I like Roden a lot, but he wasn’t getting much of a chance with the team.
But I really like Rojas, I thought he had a shot at joining our rotation in the next couple of years. He’s had some injury issues, but he gets a lot of strikeouts. He was 28th on our prospect list last year. Tom_M wrote
The 6’2”, 190lb Rojas pitches with a high arm slot that creates a lot of backspin on his fastball, giving it big vertical ride that misses bats and allows it to play better than its pure velocity (88-90, touching 93) would suggest. Based on his athleticism and the room left on his frame for muscle, evaluators expect that he’ll eventually throw harder. He also has the makings of a solid average breaking ball, although the public evaluators differ on whether it’s a slider or a curve. The development of a third pitch and the refinement of his command will determine whether he has a chance to start in the upper levels.
Rojas’ debuted at the complex in 2021. He appeared just once a week and totaled only 8 games, mostly in 3-4 inning stints, for a total of 23.2 innings pitched. That was enough time to make a serious statistical impression, though, as he struck out 39 of the 87 batters he faced (45%) while walking just 5.
Right now, Rojas is a bit of a mystery box. There’s no public video of him working that I can find. Mostly what we have to go on are some vague but encouraging scouting reports and a small but very loud statistical signal. He’ll most likely spend the summer in Dunedin again, this time on the low A team where we’ll get a lot more of a look at him. Continued strong performance and the demonstration of a third pitch could push him much higher on future iterations of this list.