This rising hurler aims to keep heating up in AFL

This story was excerpted from Keegan Matheson's Blue Jays Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

TORONTO -- It’s almost time for another Arizona Fall League season, where some of baseball’s best prospects will come together beginning Oct. 7.

Consider the AFL a finishing school of sorts, where organizations typically send prospects who are either working to round out their development or are making up for missed time after injuries the season prior. The AFL has produced more than 3,000 Major League players, including Hall of Famers Roy Halladay, Todd Helton, Derek Jeter and Mike Piazza and current stars including Mookie Betts, Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge and Francisco Lindor.

The AFL’s preliminary rosters, which were announced Wednesday, feature 14 prospects ranked on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 list.

This season, the Blue Jays are sending eight prospects to play for the Scottsdale Scorpions, where they’ll team up with prospects from the Giants, Mets, Pirates and Tigers organizations.

Position players: INF Eddinson Paulino, 1B Peyton Williams, UTIL Adrian Pinto

Pitchers: LHP Kendry Rojas (No. 11 prospect), RHP T.J. Brock, RHP Lazaro Estrada, RHP Ryan Jennings, RHP Johnathan Lavallee

Rojas is the lone Blue Jays representative ranked on their Top 30 list and has long looked like an obvious AFL candidate. Rojas missed much of the first half of the season before he eventually returned to High-A Vancouver on July 9 and finished the year with 62 2/3 total innings, so this assignment will help the 21-year-old lefty to build his workload heading into an important 2025 season.

Fresh off putting up a 2.43 ERA in 55 2/3 innings at High-A, Rojas was one of the rare success stories among pitching prospects in the Blue Jays system. Rojas’ name came up often in Spring Training as he added velocity, and many predicted he’d “make the jump” in 2024. While the delayed start to his season got in the way of that happening, Rojas delivered on the hype when he was back in game action and is one of the most exciting arms in the system going into this offseason. More important than anything, he’s healthy.

The Blue Jays lost Ricky Tiedemann, who entered the season as their No. 1 prospect but has since fallen to No. 4, to Tommy John surgery in late July. The left-hander is incredibly gifted as a pitching prospect but has struggled to stay healthy. Given the timeline of recovery, if Tiedemann can pitch any meaningful innings in 2025, that’s a success.

The news doesn’t get much better as you scroll down the list. Landen Maroudis (No. 14) was overflowing with upside when the Blue Jays gathered for camp in February, but he also lost his season to elbow surgery. The same goes for Brandon Barriera, their first-round pick in 2022, who has fallen to the No. 16 spot. There’s been far more bad news than good news.

This is why a prospect like Rojas is so important to the organization. There’s a level of scarcity at play here. The Blue Jays have struggled to develop starting pitching, and while that’s been covered up well by some excellent trades and free-agent signings to bring in José Berríos, Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt, that won’t last forever.

Bowden Francis has proven he belongs in a big league rotation and Yariel Rodríguez has the potential to be a back-end starter with upside next season, but that brings the count to five starters. Toronto is going to need more than five. One of these years, it’s going to need 10, which is a number this organization hasn’t been prepared for.

We’re starting to see the payoff of the Blue Jays’ new player development complex in players like Rojas, who has taken a physical jump while his stuff has gotten noticeably stronger. The benefits too often have been offset by injuries to young pitchers, something the organization is working to identify and improve upon, but that shiny new complex should be a pitching factory. It’s just going to take some time for all of those teenagers to grow up and help the big league roster.

If Rojas can get a handful of starts and go into the offseason with 80-plus innings under his belt, that’s a great start. The beauty of the Arizona Fall League is that it fits any purpose a club needs. The Blue Jays have already seen enough growth from Rojas as a pitcher this season, but he simply needs more innings, and this setting will give him exactly that, with the added bonus of facing some high-end competition.