Toronto Blue Jays Top 5 Prospects - An In Depth Analysis

This is the fifth year we're delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you'll see in the «position» column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.

The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

Bloss was taken 99th overall in the 2023 draft out of Georgetown after spending his first three years of collegiate ball at Lafayette College. The Astros promoted him very aggressively; Bloss began the 2024 season at High-A and made his big league debut in June.

About a month later, he was traded to Toronto as part of the Yusei Kikuchi deal, and he finished the season at Triple-A Buffalo. Bloss' performance dipped down the stretch, he carried a bloated ERA at Buffalo, and his 2025 spring performance has been mixed, but remember that not long ago this guy was facing Patriot League hitters, and now he's staring down Gunnar Henderson. He has mid-rotation ingredients led by a plus slider and riding mid-90s fastball.

Bloss is a high-waisted 6-foot-3 and has incredibly loose, long levers that, along with his big stride down the mound, help him generate nearly seven feet of extension.

His fastball tends to only sit 92-95 mph (though Bloss is throwing harder this spring and has bumped 98), but it has nearly perfect backspinning ride. Off of that Bloss works with two distinct breaking balls: an upper-70s curveball with great depth and shape that mirrors his fastball, and a mid-80s slider/cutter that will bend in as hard as 87-88 mph.

The slider has tight, late movement, and when Bloss is going good, it has nasty two-plane movement. Bloss also has a changeup that, based on the fluidity of his arm action, should mature to at least average with time, though his curveball's depth gives him a weapon against lefties right now.

There are stretches when Bloss' delivery is out of sync, which has been a frequent issue during the spring of 2025, leading to more walks than you want to see from a starter on your 40-man roster. Bloss' fastball shape will allow him to be pretty loose with his in-zone fastball command, but this is the area where he most needs to improve.

The rate at which Bloss has developed and (for the most part) succeeded is exciting, and he should entrench himself toward the back of Toronto's rotation at some point in 2025, and toward the middle of it in the next couple of years.

Nimmala was one of the youngest prospects in the 2023 draft and also one of the most projectable, both because of his big, broad-shouldered frame and because he's new enough to baseball to merit deeper, skill-centric projection. He struggled mightily with breaking ball recognition as an amateur, and at his size, it seemed feasible that he might also need to move off of shortstop.

In 2024, Nimmala had his ass handed to him during the first several weeks of the season. He was hitting .167 in the middle of May and was demoted to the complex, where his swing was re-worked.

It seems to have made a real difference. Nimmala's leg kick and the position of his hands as they load were both altered. When he returned to the Dunedin roster, he hit .265/.331/.564 and stroked 13 bombs in his final 53 games.

This isn't to say Nimmala is suddenly a lock to be an everyday infielder. He still struck out 29.7% of the time during his hot second half of the season, which is a scary rate at Low-A. His overall contact rate (69%) also wasn't great, but there is at least precedent for power-hitting big leaguers to carry a rate that low and still be impact players.

Nimmala already hits the ball very hard. He is a ferocious rotator and is able to generate considerable power because of the strength and quickness of his hitting hands, which are gigantic.

Nimmala is able to create big power in a relatively short distance, and his swing isn't overly noisy or hard to maintain. He's also elevating the baseball at an Andy Pages-esque 21 degrees of launch on average, and he's often on time to pull the baseball thanks to a strong top hand through contact.

Toward the end of the year, Arjun showed glimpses of being able to cover the outer third and drive the ball to the opposite field gap with power.

Nimmala is also a terrific bender for his size and has a shot to remain at shortstop. That said, his feel for throwing isn't great, his body doesn't always sequence well from the ground up, and his mechanics can get out of whack.

He needs to work on more consistently transferring his weight from one foot to the other, which he struggles with badly on backhand plays. The tools to be an impact power-hitting shortstop are here, and Nimmala will be 19 for basically all of 2025. He was always going to be a slower burn, and now he's shown that he can pretty quickly make relevant adjustments.

Roden has posted god-tier surface-level stats dating back to college, and he's done so in pro ball while making several significant mechanical adjustments to his swing. In 2023, he was given Craig Counsell's batting stance and a big leg kick, while his hands were lowered closer to his ear in 2024.

The changes have helped Roden, who turned 25 in December, to access more power without trading off much contact. He slashed .293/.391/.475 split between Double- and Triple-A in 2024, running a 93% in-zone contact rate and an 83% contact rate overall. His measureable power (37% hard-hit rate, 103 mph EV90) was a shade south of the overall big league average, but comfortably below what is typical for a corner outfielder.

The short-levered Roden is best at accessing his power against breaking balls that finish middle-in. It's against these pitches that you can really see how much his swing allows him to use the ground to help generate power. Well-executed backfoot breaking balls can be Kryptonite to Roden's bat path; he often struggles to scoop those, and swings over the top of them.

But this spring, he's dipping deeper into his lower half to go down and reach these pitches. Most importantly, he's adept at flattening his bat path to cover high fastballs to drive them the other way, and these are the pitches he hunts proactively, enough that he sometimes expands the zone against them. Roden's proficiency against high fastballs is very important, as many hitters struggle with that particular pitch and are exposed by big league stuff.

There's a chance Roden's production is front-loaded during his years of control because he's already 25 and has kind of a boxy build that might be vulnerable to early decline, but he's clearly worked really hard to improve his conditioning since college and he's a good, big league-ready hitter with plus contact and plate skills.

Tiedemann had a breakout 2022 pro debut during which he climbed all the way to Double-A and, across just shy of 80 innings, struck out 38.9% of hitters and walked just 9.6%. In 2023, vague arm soreness impacted his workload, and then in 2024, Tiedemann was shelved with a shoulder injury early and blew out his UCL not long after returning from the shoulder issue. He had TJ in late July, putting him on track to miss most or all of 2025.

When he has been healthy, Tiedemann's stuff has been excellent. He relies heavily on a wicked, mid-to-high-90s four-seamer thrown from a deceptively low lefty arm slot that seems to make hitters in either batter's box uncomfortable.

He pairs it with a huge sweeper that has a boatload of horizontal movement, so much in fact that at times it's easy for hitters to lay off of it. Still, it's a great strike-getting weapon because it starts in the lefty batter's box and finishes on the arm-side corner of the plate.

Tiedemann's changeup is also pretty good, though more because his command of it has progressed; on pure stuff, it's only fair. He already has two plus pitches and one that pretty comfortably projects to be above average, and even while dealing with arm discomfort in 2023 and 2024, he was able to strike out well over a third of opposing hitters.

Aspects of Tiedemann's delivery are unique in a way that makes him look reliever-y, and repeated years of arm trouble add to that risk, but even if he ends up in the bullpen, he's going to be such a dominant reliever that he'll still belong about this high on a prospect list.

The 2025 season is Tiedemann's 40-man platform year, and it will be interesting to see whether the Jays deploy him in the AFL or instructs as a means of determining whether or not to roster him, though doing so would expose him to the eyes of rival scouts who might be foaming at the mouth to pop him in the Rule 5 and see what happens.

Yesavage was an eastern Pennsylvania high schooler (Boyertown, James Develin and A.J. Bogucki's alma mater) who matriculated to ECU and carved. He ran a sub-3.00 ERA as a sophomore and junior, and had a top five ERA in college baseball last season. He also struck out 145 batters in 93.1 innings as a junior, a 17-inning increase from his prior season.

It would have been more, but Yesavage dealt with a partially collapsed lung late in May. He was back for the college postseason, and while his fastball velocity was down slightly during his duel with Chase Burns (he averaged 92 mph rather than his usual 94), Yesavage looked fine and then flew to the Combine (which he couldn't have done without a healthy lung). His heater was sitting 96 during Toronto's 2025 Spring Breakout game against the Twins.

Yesavage has a super vertical release point, nearly seven feet high at release, and is somewhat similar to Oliver Drake in that some of his breaking balls have arm-side action. He's able to command a mid-80s slider/cutter that looks and plays like either of those two pitches depending on the vertical location (the higher ones act as cutters, the lower ones sliders); he peppers the glove-side edge of the plate with them.

His downhill mid-90s fastball has plus carry and misses bats in spite of its plane. It's a fastball/slider attack versus righties, with more splitters and slower breakers versus lefties.

Yesavage's splitter command isn't as good as that of his fastball/slider, but the pitch has enough sink and velo separation to sometimes stay out of trouble when it isn't located well, and it was his nastiest pitch in the Breakout game. A quick-moving no. 4 starter type of prospect, if Yesavage can maintain his stuff across 120-plus innings in 2025, he'll move into the back of the Top 100.

Toronto's system has average top-end and overall depth, but at this exact second, it's probably a little below average because so many of the higher upside pitchers are currently injured. Five of the first 15 prospects ranked above are in various stages of recovery.

The org has a ton of depth among part-time hitters who they're still trying to understand and deploy optimally at the big league level, even after the departure of guys like Cavan Biggio and Santiago Espinal. Hitters like Orelvis Martinez, Addison Barger, Leo Jiménez, Davis Schneider, Ernie Clement and others are still vying for part-time roles as the Jays try to patch together a quilt of various specialists around their core five or six everyday hitters.

Even though many of them are in their mid-20s, the way Toronto has slow-played basically all of them through the upper minors means the Jays have them all under team control for another four-plus years. They're going to capture whatever meaningful peaks the group has looming, and right now Alan Roden's peak is looking like the most exciting of that contingent.

The Blue Jays are not afraid to swim in the deeper end of the international player pool, as they often sign individual players for $3 million or more, and are frequently connected to a top-of-the-class prospect several years in advance. There are rumors in the international scouting community that they already have a 2028 player committed for around $4.5 million.

Results have been mixed in this space, with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. an example of an organizational home run hit in this fashion, while Enmanuel Bonilla's early-career results have been painful. There are opportunity costs when you put so much of your pool into one player and he doesn't work out.

The Jays have pumped a ton of draft capital into teenage pitchers throughout the last four drafts. They tend to have a $1 million-ish high schooler somewhere in their draft, be it Irv Carter (who actually got more money than Ricky Tiedemann in the same year), Landon Maroudis, or Johnny King.

We've liked those players, but in most cases these are slow-to-mature prospects, which is perhaps not ideal given the potentially fleeting nature of that aforementioned core. In both amateur scouting spaces, the Jays are much more risk tolerant than they are in pro scouting, where the players Toronto acquires via trade often have more data-driven profiles and less eye-popping physical tools, except for Jake Bloss, who has a bit of both.

Bloss is going to help out this year (probably soon), and if he can command the ball the way he did during his last few spring outings, then he's going to be a great part of the staff right away. He's one of several pitchers who are in position to provide meaningful depth this year, though again, several of them are currently injured.