The 12 Days of Prospects

  A slight but athletic righthander, Juenger mixes three pitches that all play up with unique characteristics. His drop-and-drive delivery and three-quarters arm slot create an unusually low release height, giving his pitches an unfamiliar trajectory for hitters, which creates uncomfortable at-bats.

Baseball America

When the Blue Jays promoted 2021 6th rounder Hayden Juenger to AA to start the season after all of 20 High A innings, a few eyebrows were raised. When he tossed three scoreless innings, fanning 7 of the 10 hitters he faced in his Eastern League debut, one could quickly understand why the Blue Jays were so aggressive with his assignment.

Juenger pitched in an Opener role for the first half of the season, partly to see if he could hold his stuff over longer stretches than he was used to (Juenger pitched in relief for his whole college career), and to build his arm up in an accelerated development path. Juenger fanned more than a batter per inning before being moved up to AAA, where he was placed into a more traditional bullpen role - and he didn’t miss a beat.

Juenger mixes a mid 90s fastball than can touch 98 with a pair of average secondaries - an effective, downward-moving change, and a sweepy slider. While he relies on that fastball about 60% of the time, he can throw those secondaries for strikes consistently, helping his fastball play up, especially at the top of the strike zone. Because of his arm slot, his fastball has plenty of movement on it as well. Everything he throws has movement, in fact, which makes his very effective against LHH, although he is a bit prone to the longball from that side.

While at 6’/180, Juenger may not have the build of a prototypical back of the bullpen guy, he misses bats on a fairly regular basis. The Blue Jays feel he can succeed in a bulk role, getting once through the order before handing things over to the guys at the back of the ‘pen. His career development may not be quite complete, given his relative lack of pro experience, but it’s entirely reasonable to expect Juenger will be pitching for Toronto at some point this season. While the Blue Jays have been rightly criticized for not building sufficient bullpen depth from the big league roster on down, Juenger is the leading edge of a wave that may soon silence those critics.