The calendar has turned from April to May, and with that, the statlines of minor league baseball players have begun to accumulate enough of a sample size for clear trends to emerge. As the statistical haze begins to clear, we naturally look to the tops and bottoms of leaderboards for surprising names, hoping that those at the top are legitimate and those at the bottom are fluky.
A name that has certainly shot to the top of most pitching leaderboards in the A’s system has been that of lefthander Will Johnston, and that is undoubtedly a surprise. The former Texas A&M southpaw was just a 13th-round selection last year and was almost exclusively a college reliever, turning in ERAs near 6 in both his senior season and his full college career. The notion of Johnston moving to a starting role as a professional and immediately carrying the fourth-highest swinging strike rate in all of minor league baseball into mid-May seemed unthinkable six weeks ago, yet here we are. Johnston’s season began with nine consecutive innings (across three outings) before he allowed a hit, and he was overall untouchable in four tandem* appearances in Low-A Stockton, striking out 26 of the 54 batters he faced while allowing only three runs on five hits in fourteen frames. Moved up to High-A Lansing, he’s thrown eight scoreless innings with two hits and a walk allowed while striking out fourteen, including eight in three hitless frames against a loaded Great Lakes lineup on Wednesday. It’s hard to imagine a player of this background making more of an emphatic statement to open his first full professional season.
*The A’s are running a tandem system in Lansing and Stockton in which there are ten “starting” pitchers who pitch in a five-day tandeming rotation. The first starter gets a 75-pitch limit; the second comes in to open the sixth inning and gets a 45-pitch limit. Then the next time that duo pitches, the second guy goes first and vice versa, so basically everyone in the 10-man rotation throws 120 pitches across a six-day span, and the five or six true relievers bridge in the 4th-5th innings or close out after the second “starter.”
Naturally, people take notice of dominance, and so the questions begin: Where did this guy come from? How’s he doing it? Can he keep this up? I’ve watched and charted all of Johnston’s outings to date this year except one–296 pitches in total–so I’d like to think I’ve got as good a sense as anyone of the answers to those questions, though there is obviously much left to find out.
The Context
Before diving into what Johnston is actually like as a pitcher, I want to take a bit to discuss what he’s like as an abstraction. As I said in the opening, this sort of thing happens every year. Last year, Jake Garland–a 17th-round pick–was excellent in Stockton in the early going, serving as a true ace at the Low-A level. The year before, it was 19th-rounder Blake Beers (closely followed by 17th-rounder Kyle Virbitsky) who got out of the gate in dominant form. The year before that, it was 22nd-rounder Jack Cushing and 38th-rounder David Leal. And so on. The A’s system routinely gets tremendous performances in Low-A from relatively unheralded college pitchers, with many translating that performance to High-A with some degree of success within their first full season.
Of course, sometimes this early-career dominance portends the player bursting onto the prospect scene and ascending to big league success, but other times it tapers off relatively quickly and proves to be something of a blip in an otherwise unexceptional minor league career. But how often does it go each of those ways?
I actually didn’t have a great estimate off the top of my head, so I took a look at the A’s minor league history. FanGraphs has minor league data stretching back to 2006, so I downloaded a spreadsheet of every A’s minor league season dating back through then and isolated seasons where a young (<25 years old) starting* pitcher struck out at least a quarter of opposing batters** at one or both A-ball levels. I then removed top-5 round draft picks and any other obvious high-level prospects (like, you wouldn’t count Luis Morales) to focus on these more “unheralded” pitchers.
*Starting at least a reasonable portion of the time.
**There are a lot of other statistical markers of dominance beyond this, but since this is ultimately kind of a tangential direction to take this piece to begin with, I didn’t want to get in the weeds of investigating all of them.
There are 55 such seasons in that timespan, accomplished by 48 individual pitchers. Some of them, like Garland, Beers, Virbitsky, Cushing, and Leal, are still working their way through the minors, so one can’t render final verdicts on them, though their performance at higher levels does give some indications of their futures. Going back further, though, one can find some clear MLB success stories. Andrew Bailey is the biggest one, but A.J. Griffin made 85 fairly solid MLB starts and Henry Rodriguez made 150 respectable MLB relief appearances.* James Naile, Brandon Bailey, and Gus Varland have all pitched in the big leagues too (albeit briefly), and at least some of the group of Brady Basso, Pedro Santos, Beers, Virbitsky, Seth Shuman, Jorge Juan, etc., are likely to break through and further exemplify the positive direction this early dominance can portend–all have certainly become legitimate prospects at some junctures along the way, at least (the same can be said for some of the players who ultimately didn’t make the bigs a decade ago, like Drew Granier and Seth Streich).
*Not part of this dataset, but worth throwing in since he’s known as an Athletic and exemplifies the top end of what can happen with pitchers like this: Chris Bassitt was a 16th-round pick who began his pro career as a reliever and had a slow, unheralded rise that even I–there firsthand for half a dozen of his starts in High-A across two seasons–did not at all see coming.
There are a lot of ways to be a successful pitcher in Low-A, fewer ways to be a successful pitcher in Double-A, and still fewer in the majors, and that winnowing is really reflected in this sort of sample. Some pitchers can dominate A-ball in a way that really doesn’t translate to higher levels, at least in terms of impactful bat-missing. Others can dominate A-ball in a way that is backed by enough real tools to get them on prospect lists and make them effective Double-A pitchers, but the margin for error gets so thin that many of them can’t finally close the deal–Brian Howard and Parker Dunshee were a prime example of this half a decade ago.*
*In fairness, having Las Vegas as your Triple-A affiliate really obliterates a fair appraisal of the margin for error for pitchers like Dunshee and Howard.
But a few do, and as hope springs eternal, here’s Johnston, next in line to give it a go. And it’s worth noting that–with the qualifier that his season is obviously still ongoing–nobody in the dataset had a season like this. Johnston has struck out 40 of the 81 batters he’s faced, or 49.38%. No other A’s system starter who wasn’t a top-5-round pick has ever eclipsed 40, with the only two above even 35 being Gus Varland (2018) and Jorge Juan (2021). Even within the context of unexpected exceptionalism, Johnston is unexpectedly exceptional. Most of the pitchers with the best career/prospect status outcomes tended toward the higher side of the dataset, so that’s neat.
There’s a sort of continuum of legitimacy, we might call it, that’s got to emerge here. On the bottom end, we have pitchers whose approaches to pitching can lead to initial dominance, but the nature of the approach and skillset mean that success is likely illusory when it comes to predicting the pitcher’s advancement. In the middle, we have pitchers whose success is backed up by enough scouting positives to be intriguing, but who are still likely to be navigating far-diminished margins for error as they progress. On the top,* there are pitchers whose success looks likely to translate all the way up the chain.
*As was the case with somebody like Chris Bassitt, it can also be true that a player who initially slots toward the lower part of this continuum ultimately improves and gets to the highest outcome of anyone, so placing a pitcher at a place along this continuum now does not mean he stays there forever.
So as I’m watching a pitcher like Johnston and gathering more data on him, I’m constantly weighing where on the continuum he exists. I’ve talked extensively before about my approach to projecting how players will fare as they advance across levels–here in writing and here in audio form–so I’ll leave the specifics of the process itself to that. But in brief, we’ve gotta hone in on what’s driving the success and whether it feels like there’s any aspect of the player’s profile that feels like it’s already walking a bit of a tightrope. We also have to think about what avenues for improvement the player has. Chances are, most of his opponents are likely to be able to improve, so if the reason for his success is that he’s a fully-optimized version of himself, that may not bode well relative to a player who still has rough edges.
But enough about context. Let’s actually get to talking about Will Johnston as a pitcher, not an abstraction.
Most of the time, when we’re looking at breakout candidates like this, we naturally go to questions about stuff–how hard does the pitcher throw? Does he have an out pitch? Can he tunnel? I’ll get to all of that, but I actually find Johnston’s stuff to be somewhat secondary in considerations of his prospectdom.
What I instead want to devote a ton of space to up front is his delivery. Let’s take a look at it.
The Motion
The moment I saw Johnston throw a pitch, the first thing that jumped out to me is just how high his release point is. He’s 6’4” and throwing from an arm slot just inches from Josh Collmenter territory, almost perfectly vertical. On Wednesday’s radio call of Johnston’s outing against Great Lakes, Lugnuts broadcaster Jesse Goldberg-Strassler noted that Trackman data puts the lefty’s release at about 6’9” off the ground. There are few rivals for that release height in the A’s organization.
When we’re talking about a 13th-round college senior who’s exceeded expectations, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say he doesn’t throw 100 mph or employ one of the most wipeout breaking pitches you’ve ever seen. If we’re looking for reasons to believe that his dominance is transferable to higher levels of competition, though, we want to see some sort of element(s) that give the player a more unique, specific identity. Right away, this arm slot stands out as a real possibility. All you need to see is that one pitch to have a sense that Johnston might be uncomfortable to face.
Often, though, elements that make a pitcher uncomfortable to face can be a double-edged sword, and it can seem uncomfortable to be that pitcher. I don’t think Johnston is entirely exempt from that tendency. Let’s walk through some screenshots of his motion with this idea of discomfort to execute/discomfort to face on the mind.
We’re not even close to anything to do with the arm slot yet, and right away, we have a distinctive feature. This is a pretty high leg lift at balance point, and Johnston’s posture is certainly hiding the baseball very well here. Such a high leg kick can create repetition challenges, but the motion to get to this point is pretty simple, all told. Cool. Deceptive. Let’s see where we head from here.
This is about where the arm action extends out to. You can see that there’s a bit of a wrist wrap here in the back, but all told, it’s not too nonstandard an arm action. He gets to this position in a fairly normal way and leaves it in a fairly normal way* (at least considering where he’s going to head at release). Overall, Johnston’s delivery is pretty smooth in this section, but he’s still hiding the ball well. So to this point, we’re looking at a pretty deceptive delivery that doesn’t require a ton of extra athletic ability to repeat. Thus far, Johnston is primed to make hitters uncomfortable while remaining comfortable himself.
*A side note that’s worth mentioning here: The other side of the questions that come up in cases of sudden pro dominance like this is…why didn’t the player dominate in college? I couldn’t find any college video of Johnston, but there’s a bunch of high school video of him on YouTube, and his arm action was a bit longer and stiffer back then. So somewhere along the line–maybe at Texas A&M, maybe with the A’s–he’s gotten it to this smoother state. It kind of reminds me of the change Jack Perkins made last year that really improved his command. So that’s something.
But now he’s got to get to that release point, and this is where I think we start to get more of a two-way street going.
When you think about unusual mechanical features that add deception, an obvious question is “Well, why don’t more pitchers do that?” And the answer typically is that such a feature creates other challenges. In the case of a high arm slot like this…how are we going to get there? If you want to throw almost straight overhand, you have to get your upper body out of the way of that vertical arm path.
There are a couple of ways pitchers usually solve that problem. One is they might rotate beyond a straight axis to the plate and land beyond that (for a righthander, toward 1B, for a lefty, toward 3B), thereby opening space for the arm to travel more vertically. Micah Dallas is a good example in the A’s system:
The second way is spine tilt: tilting the torso that direction even if the landing spot itself is still straight to the plate. Jake Walkinshaw is a pretty good A’s example:
Each of these answers to the question of how to get a vertical arm slot has its pluses and minuses, but what I find interesting about Johnston is that his approach–though it eventually settles on some version of spine tilt–does everything it can to pretend there isn’t a question to be answered at all.
Here he is, just about to land–on a straight line to the plate–and though Johnston’s arms are clearly headed skyward, his trunk is still quite vertical. He’s done very little to prepare his body to clear space for the arm. And that’s really something, because he’s going to end up releasing the ball from a higher arm slot than Walkinshaw or Dallas, overhand though their releases are.
Finally, the front shoulder does lead Johnston’s body to clear out for the arm to come over the top, but it comes very late and still with his waist pretty vertically-oriented.
The word that comes to mind for how that all happens is sudden, and sudden movements are both difficult to handle as an opponent and difficult to execute in a consistently precise mechanical fashion.
That was a lot of moment-by-moment description, so let’s make some sense of it overall. What we’re looking at here is one of the most deceptive deliveries in the A’s system, both before and after the landing, and it’s only after the landing that it poses real repeatability problems for the pitcher. All things considered, that’s pretty savvy mechanical design, though it’s the sort of funky look we would more typically associate with relievers than starters, for a myriad of reasons.
To what extent I think Johnston has a chance to be mechanically consistent with this look, I’ll get to later on, but first, let’s talk about what stuff this delivery produces, which ends up being its own engineering challenge.
The Stuff
As a 6’4” guy with such an extreme release point, Johnston can get exceptional downward plane to the plate, which can certainly be desirable. But this positive can often get canceled out by the fact that overhand fastballs tend to be carrying four-seamers, which are optimized when they enter the hitting zone on a flat or upward plane. Johnston can’t throw anything remotely close to the strike zone on such a plane, so the angle of approach and backspin on the pitch don’t play well together. One interesting thing about Dallas and Walkinshaw is that, because they’re tilting over in a more extreme fashion, though their release points themselves are high, the arm angle relative to the upper body is closer to three-quarters, making it easier to get into a hand position* to throw a sinker instead of a carrying four-seamer, which they both do, taking advantage of the release point to create an extreme downward angle on everything they throw.** Johnston doesn’t really have that option, or if he does, he certainly hasn’t availed himself of it.
*I’m admittedly not any sort of expert on pitch design, so my understanding of the specific way this works is pretty rough–regardless, the descriptions of the primary fastballs these pitchers use are unambiguous.
**Except for the occasional four-seamer, which they both throw to change eye levels and keep hitters honest, but it’s the fourth pitch for both guys.
Okay, so Johnston’s got the carrying fastball. The carry is still going to have some level of utility, and the pitch gets on hitters quickly because of Johnston’s solid extension and all the deception. The velocity isn’t great, but it’s not nothing, as he sits in the 90-92 mph range and has topped out at 94 this year. But the question is, if you’ve got to pick between leaning into the downward plane of the motion or the carry on the fastball, which do you go with? Do you try to still backspin the ball by hitters at the letters and then let the offspeeds sink off that trajectory to knee height, or do you try to pound the bottom of the zone? Or just change eye levels with the fastball and do some of both?
Having watched and charted 156 Johnston fastballs between Stockton and Lansing, I can say that his favorite thing to do with the heater clearly seems to be this.
Here’s a chart of Johnston’s fastball locations, just to give a sense of how that approach plays out. The strike zone is in blue, and this is from the pitcher’s perspective.
You can see that he’s really favoring that down-and-gloveside quadrant overall. There are some pluses and minuses to this approach, I think. On the positive side, first, pounding righties inside fits with the mentality of being an uncomfortable pitcher to face (sure, he’s working lefties away, too, but they’re going to be uncomfortable to begin with against him). The focus on throwing down in the zone also gives Johnston a chance at a solid groundball rate despite the carry on the fastball: he’s allowed too few balls in play to really say much about that statistic at the moment, but he has yet to allow a pro home run, at least. Finally, this approach–at least for now–is setting up some clear tunneling patterns Johnston is executing well at the moment, as we’ll see in a bit. On the other hand, here’s where he’s gotten his swings and misses with the fastball:
So in order to miss bats with this pitch, Johnston still has to elevate it. It’s hard to quibble with what he’s doing or advocate for any changes when he’s had the success he’s had, but this is an interesting pattern. Perhaps it’s one of those areas where Johnston could feasibly improve at higher levels–an exciting notion–though it’s also possible a high-fastball approach would trade the increased fastball whiffs for a variety of other drawbacks.
Regardless, Johnston’s fastball has been effective. He’s gotten strikes with it a bit over 65% of the time, with almost 20% called strikes and about 13.5% swinging strikes–called and swinging add up to exactly a third of his fastballs, in fact. Another thing I’m struck by, especially given the questions about repeating the delivery, is that I’ve coded the fastball as being in the strike zone 57.7% of the time. Among A’s A-ball pitchers, that’s behind only Jake Garland and the since-promoted Garrett Irvin in Lansing and Nathan Dettmer, Tzu-Chen Sha, and Chen Zhong-Ao Zhuang in Stockton, and Johnston is the only one of those six for whom middle-middle has not been demonstrably his most common in-zone fastball location.*
*If you think that’s alarming about those other pitchers, check some Statcast zone maps of MLB guys; you might be astonished what a plurality of middle-middle pitches happen).
Johnston throws the fastball a bit over half the time, leaving the other 47.3% to his offspeed pitches, a slider and changeup that both come in around 82 mph. Now, this is where the release point can be more of an unquestioned strength stuff-wise, because both of these pitches are supposed to drop in the first place, and they certainly travel a long way down from Johnston’s 6’9” release to the knee levels of hitters or below.
The side effect of the release point when it comes to these pitches is that because the release is so vertical, so is the movement, and that can actually make the slider and changeup difficult to tell apart.* I’ve coded 110 of his pitches as sliders and 30 as changeups, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it was 100/40 or even 90/50, because the slider has a 1-to-7 trajectory and sometimes backs up to almost vertical, while the changeup has a split-like tumble without much fade. Therefore, sometimes you really have to rely on perceiving the spin to guess at which it is.**
*On most minor league camera angles, anyway. I’m using the Modesto broadcast for these clips because it’s the most unambiguous.
**Just as a quick sidebar, two things about this: first, it’s worth noting that this sort of thing happens all the time–I’ve been to so many minor league games where a scout asks for a second opinion on whether the pitch they just saw was a slider or changeup. It’s always slider vs. change, because those are the two pitches that are often in the same velocity band–no other pitch types are typically conflated other than four-seam vs. two-seam fastballs. Second, this is most likely to occur when the pitch isn’t executed well, which in this case usually means the slider backed up or the pitch slipped out and got spiked in the dirt or sailed high or something.
Here’s what the slider looks like:
And here’s the changeup:
Though the slider has been the pitch Johnston’s turned to more frequently–it’s definitely the one he has more feel for, so it’s understandable–it’s the changeup that looks like the higher-upside offering here, really parachuting down from the mountaintop. The slider has some sharpness and bite, and every now and again he’ll find a bigger rainbow one that starts to have more of a curve shape because of how vertical the action is,* but beyond the release-point-induced depth, there aren’t a ton of distinctive features to the breaker. It doesn’t have massive sweep, and at 82 mph, it’s a little on the soft side to quite convince as a divebombing out pitch–at least without factoring in the deception.
*Not that this is necessarily better, though it does differentiate it from the changeup a lot more clearly.
When you look at the distribution of Johnston’s slider locations, you can really see what he’s going for with his approach to pitching overall:
So the fastball explodes late on everyone, gets in on righties, stays down in the zone, and sets up the slider as a chase pitch away from lefties and back-footed to righties. It’s a straightforward plan–one that’s going to need more nuance* as Johnston advances–but it’s clearly enough for now, and he’s executing it.
*It looked to me like he was getting there a bit against Great Lakes, which was a good test. More active changing of eye levels in that outing.
Johnston doesn’t throw the slider in the strike zone nearly as often as the fastball–just a shade over 40% of the time–but the pitch goes for strikes about as often as the fastball because hitters swing at it more. They miss on about half their swings–and unlike the fastball, the location pattern of the whiffs generally follows Johnston’s favored locations–and have had a much harder time squaring the pitch up than the fastball on the occasions they do manage to put anything into play.
The changeup is the one pitch that Johnston tends to throw more frequently toward the glove side of the plate, which generally makes sense. He does a good job keeping it down in the zone, too. I don’t really have enough data to make it worthwhile to show and dissect a bunch of charts and stats about it, but as I noted earlier, while he’s looked to have less consistent feel for it than the fastball and slider, it looks to have the most upside as a swing-and-miss offering when he locates it. That’s borne out in the data I have so far: 11 of the 30 changeups I’ve charted have elicited swinging strikes (on 16 swings). The implementation and growth of this particular pitch is going to be very important to watch as Johnston continues to develop as a starter.
The Path Forward
So, to summarize, Will Johnston has been so successful because he has one of the most deceptive deliveries in the A’s system and comes right after hitters with a motion, arsenal, and approach that make them very uncomfortable. Though there is some concern about his ability to repeat that motion, he’s done an admirable job hitting the zone with the fastball while keeping it out of the heart of the plate. The stuff he throws isn’t overwhelming by itself and needs the deception to really make it pop, but it’s also not so light as to render a pure smoke-and-mirrors label appropriate.
So, to return to the continuum-of-legitimacy idea, I think we can eliminate the bottom end of it from consideration for where Johnston slots in. I doubt he’s going to turn into a pumpkin when he gets to Midland and never solve the Texas League. The stuff isn’t nothing, the deception is real, and at the very least, one can imagine Johnston moving back to his old bullpen role, maybe throwing a bit harder, and presenting a very tough look for an inning at a time. Plus, he’s been so dominant–now including High-A, albeit in a small sample there–that his margin for error could shrink a lot and he could still be effective.
I also don’t think he fits at the top of the continuum, though, at least not at this early stage of his pro career. There are still a lot of questions Johnston has to answer if he’s going to profile as any sort of major league starting pitcher.
For one thing, the tandem system the A’s are using in A-ball doesn’t really give all that much of a window into Johnston’s viability as a starter. There are a lot of good elements about the system–would Johnston even have had a chance to start without it?–but he has yet to face a single batter three times in a game, so there hasn’t been any stress-testing of his ability to pattern in multiple ways or still get batters out once they’ve gotten somewhat used to his unusual look. We also don’t know how well he’ll hold his velocity over 90-100 pitch outings, and averaging 90.5 mph as opposed to his current 91.5 could be a very meaningful difference.
Promising as some of the signs about Johnston’s command are, I’m also not at the point where I can say I’m confident that he’ll be able to throw consistent strikes as an upper-minors starting pitcher. He had a couple of outings with Stockton this season where the challenges of repeating the delivery became apparent and he spiked a lot of pitches below the zone. The two Lansing outings have gone very well command-wise and he’s looked very in sync there, but Johnston had elevated walk rates in college and one month of pro strike-throwing doesn’t render that extended history irrelevant. He’s got a harder-than-average delivery to repeat, he’s trying to find the zone at an unusual, steep angle, and there’s definitely a fair bit of effort in the motion. Now, to his credit, the motion is more deceptive than it is complex, and Johnston is a fairly athletic pitcher with some welcome looseness to his movements that gives him a shot at making it work. But he’s also been so dominant that right now it’s easy for him to just come right after everyone with the fastball. When the margin for error shrinks in Midland and he’s going deeper into games, that’s going to place more demands on him to locate precisely. Given how strong he’s been in Lansing in the early going, I’ve got more optimism that there’s a real chance he can meet that challenge than I did a couple of weeks ago, but it remains very much an open question right now.
In the recently-released FanGraphs Top A’s Prospects List,* Eric Longenhagen puts Johnston as the 32nd-best prospect in the system and opines that while it makes sense for him to continue starting–and that there is some chance that can work out–Johnston may well profile in the bullpen. Though I don’t quite concur with all the specifics in Longenhagen’s Johnston writeup–the changeup is graded too low, perhaps due to the confusion about the slider and change I mentioned earlier–I think that’s the right place to arrive at the moment in considering Johnston’s possible future role. Imagining him as basically a lefthanded Zach Jackson–owner of a career 2.86 big league ERA!–feels realistic. You can imagine Johnston maybe sitting more consistently in Jackson’s typical 92-93 mph range out of the bullpen, and their pitches have very similar shapes.
*Worth reading if you haven’t. I’ll say I’ve obviously watched a lot more A’s organization baseball than Eric has–after all, it’s just about 2% of his focus–but though there are some details that I think are inaccurate and I have some strong differences of opinion about several players, there are also a lot of on-point analyses and interesting insights. As much as I’m familiar with these guys, I myself learned a few things reading it.
There is, of course, a very real chance Johnston never gets there–Jackson himself has had trouble maintaining that form, even as he’s sometimes looked the part of a legitimate big-league setup man. The command and the velocity are going to be tightropes to walk. And that’s to say nothing of the notion of starting, too. Consider Freddy Tarnok, whose motion has that same kind of abruptness to its high release point. Tarnok was a 3rd-rounder, he throws a few ticks harder than Johnston, he was a dominant upper-minors pitcher by the time he was Johnston’s age, he has a no-doubt plus changeup and sharper breaking ball movement than Johnston does, and still he’s facing a ton of questions about whether he can start.*
*Some of which result from his recent injury history, but that’s not the only reason.
Having anything like Zach Jackson’s career would be a huge win already for everyone involved–player, scouting, player development–when one considers this sort of player's low-profile entry into pro ball, though the unfortunate part for fans is that the road to MLB success for such players is often disjointed enough that it doesn’t result in much of a payoff for the original organization–consider that Jackson’s MLB success came after he was a minor league phase Rule 5 selection, for instance. Often, guys of that sort of relief caliber–walking a velocity and/or command tightrope–float around on the waiver wire for a couple of years after their initial MLB appearance before finding success on organization # 4 or what not.
The more positive news, though, is that while that sort of career is the most likely forecast right now, there’s still quite a bit of uncertainty here. Will Johnston isn’t just new to pro ball, he’s pretty new to the role of starting pitcher at a high level. He hasn’t had to make any adjustments or respond to any pro adversity yet, which often can stimulate an extra gear in some aspect. He’s still figuring out patterning–maybe more high fastballs will help at higher levels, for instance. Longenhagen notes in the FanGraphs writeup that Johnston could add a second breaking ball–always something to keep in mind with guys who only have three pitches–and maybe that could unlock more possibilities multiple times through the order. Even becoming a true three-pitch guy might be new to Johnston–he seemed to be hesitant to use his changeup much early in the season and is starting to turn to it more.* Given the success it’s had in the small sample I’ve seen, that alone could unlock more success from Johnston at higher levels.
*I suppose it’s also possible I’m just getting better at differentiating it from the slider since I’ve seen them both enough now, though. We’ll see where the changeup usage stabilizes as the season continues.
So the excitement here from a projection standpoint comes not only from Johnston’s dominance thus far, but also from the fact that there is some potential meat on the bone here developmentally. I don’t necessarily have much to offer right now as to what the specifics of adjustments Johnston can/should make will be, but the point is that possibilities exist for him to make either proactive or reactive changes as he advances. Further, the fact that he’s got a rare amount of deception and an outlier release point mean that there might be some outlier right-tail outcomes possible here that we wouldn’t normally expect for a pitcher with this stuff. If Johnston proves he can withstand the rigors of a full season as a starter from a velocity and command standpoint, some interesting possibilities may emerge, to say nothing of what would happen if his velocity ticked up a touch or other big developmental adjustments unlocked new skills. Could he have Logan Allen’s 2023 season, say? It’s not out of the question.
Johnston still has a lot to prove, but though he’s already 23, he’s got a lot of time to prove it. The question for 2024 is now going to be the pacing of that proving process. I expected Lansing would be a sturdier test for the lefty than it has been thus far, though it’s obviously fair to still be reserving some judgment about him eight innings in, dominant as those frames have been. If he proves untouchable there into June, though, Johnston has to be in serious consideration to spend the second half of the season in Midland, at which point his performance will clarify where he stands in the A’s pitching prospect hierarchy more clearly. For now, the fact that you could legitimately claim that Johnston has been the most impressive selection from the A’s 2023 draft class, when there’s a certain somebody else who hit .455 in Double-A and is already in Las Vegas, is a heck of a start to what will no doubt continue to be a fascinating professional journey.
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