The Blue Jays of Toronto have completed a transaction. Naturally, that implies that we will investigate the most recent prospect they have added in-depth.
The Blue Jays acquired right-hander Chris McElvain, 23, for Santiago Espinal on Wednesday afternoon.
Here’s a little update regarding Espinal: The Jays acquired a relatively significant talent in Steve Pearce, who performed admirably in 2021 and 2022 as a third baseman and second baseman. Although Espinal had a difficult 2023 and faced a lot of unjustified criticism, he accomplished a lot of things well; Ernie Clement just outperformed him at Spring Training.
Nevertheless, the subject of this article is McElvain, who was chosen by the Cincinnati Reds in the eighth round of the 2022 draft—five picks ahead of Toronto’s Dylan Rock—after being taken in the draft. During his three seasons as a pitcher at Vanderbilt University, McElvain recorded a 4.33 ERA in 141.1 innings pitched, a 26.9 strikeout percentage, and a 12.2 walk rate.
In 2023, McElvain made his major league debut with the Daytona Tortugas, where he pitched 50.1 innings and recorded a 3.04 ERA and 3.61 FIP. Throughout his 12 appearances, he started eight of them and finished with a 25.2 K% and a 9 BB%.
Baseball Savant’s Statcast is available (except for Tortugas home games, very dumb), thus there’s more information available now that the Tortugas are in the FSL. He used a changeup, curveball, slider, two-seam fastball, and four-seam fastball last season. The heater had a 24.4 whiff% and averaged 92.7 mph.
Although he threw little changeups, his slider had a 32.5% whiff percentage and was his second most frequently utilized pitch.
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