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Blue Jays make puzzling Rule 5 selection, lose two pitchers
LAS VEGAS — It was expected that the Toronto Blue Jays would do something in the Rule 5 Draft on Thursday. What they did do was a little bit confusing.
With their first pick (10th overall) the club selected right-handed pitcher Elvis Luciano from the Kansas City Royals organization.
Seeing as the Blue Jays lack arms, taking a pitcher was not a surprise, but Luciano is a true head-scratcher because of an extreme lack of experience. He’s just 18 and has never pitched above short-season season ball with just 133.2 innings of pro ball to his name.
He posted a 3.90 ERA across 67 innings of Rookie ball with a solid 9.4 K/9, but that level is so far removed from the majors those numbers mean little. Here’s what Baseball America’s Rule 5 preview said about Luciano:
Luciano is in no way ready for a big-league job and the lost development time would hurt him. But he is one of the more promising prospects available because a re-negotiated made him eligible as an 18-year-old.
It doesn’t seem like there’s much chance of Luciano making a big-league roster, which is odd because the whole point of the Rule 5 draft is to acquire players that stick on your 25-man roster.
It’s possible the Blue Jays want to bring him to Spring Training and get a closer look at him to see if they want to trade for him. Perhaps they’d be willing to carry him and not use him so they could send him to the minors next year if they thought he was an unbelievable must-have prospect. That’s pretty far fetched though, and would hamper their 2019 product significantly. At this point, it’s just not clear.
On the other side of the coin, the Blue Jays lost two arms. The first is Canadian right-hander Jordan Romano who posted a 4.11 ERA across 142.2 innings in Double-A and Triple-A last year. The 25-year-old could has potential as a fastball-slider bullpen piece whose velocity could play up in relief.
The other pitcher to go was southpaw Travis Bergen. Bergen is coming off a stellar 2018 where he put up a 0.95 ERA across 56.2 innings of Double-A and Triple-A ball with a handy 11.8 K/9. The 24-year-old throws in the low nineties and could be seen as a matchup reliever.
