The Blue Jays announced today that right-handers Jordan Romano and Erik Swanson have been activated off the injured list. In corresponding moves, they optioned righty Nate Pearson to Triple-A and designated righty Mitch White for assignment.
Romano and Swanson were key pieces of the Toronto bullpen last year but they haven’t been able to contribute to the club thus far in 2024. During the spring, Romano had some inflammation in his elbow while Swanson had some tightness in his forearm, leading both to start the season on the injured list.
With those two unavailable, the club has turned to Yimi García and Chad Green for most of the high-leverage work, with those two filling in admirably. García has a 1.17 earned run average through seven appearances, with 11 strikeouts to go with just one walk. Green, meanwhile, has a 2.35 ERA in his seven appearances, with seven punchies and two walks.
Despite that strong work from those two, the Jays are surely glad to get Romano and Swanson back. Romano has emerged as the club’s closer over the past three years, which included saving 36 games in each of the past two campaigns while keeping his ERA under 3.00 in each. Swanson had 29 holds and four saves last year while posting a 2.97 ERA on the season. Those two, along with García and Green, give the Jays a strong four-headed bullpen mix to finish out games.
The health of that group has nudged White off the roster. Now 29, White was a second-round pick of the Dodgers back in 2016 and was considered by Baseball America to be the #69 prospect in the league in 2018. The Jays acquired him in a 2022 deadline deal alongside Alex De Jesus, with prospects Nick Frasso and Moises Brito going the other way.
At the time of that deal, White had thrown 105 2/3 big league innings with a 3.58 ERA, 22% strikeout rate and 8.3% walk rate. Unfortunately, the jersey swap corresponded with an immediate downturn in his results. White tossed 43 innings for the Jays in 2022 with a 7.74 ERA and 15.3% strikeout rate. There was a bit of bad luck in there, as his .368 batting average on balls in play and 54.3% strand rate were both on the unfortunate side, which is why his FIP was 3.76 in that time and his SIERA 4.70.
Luck or not, the poor results meant the Jays couldn’t guarantee a rotation spot to White going into 2023. At that time, four rotation spots were taken by Alek Manoah, Kevin Gausman, José Berríos and Chris Bassitt. White went into Spring Training battling Yusei Kikuchi for the final spot but dealt with some shoulder and elbow injuries and had to start the season on the IL. By the time he got back, there was no rotation spot for him and he worked a long relief role in the bullpen.
He didn’t take to that move, posting a 7.11 ERA in 10 outings before being designated for assignment. The 29 other clubs passed on the chance to grab him off waivers and he was sent outright to Triple-A. He got stretched out in Buffalo and finished the season in good form, with a 1.89 ERA over his last 33 1/3 innings, pairing a 31.4% strikeout rate in that time with a 10.2% walk rate.
The Jays added him back to the 40-man in November to prevent him from reaching minor league free agency, which put him in a similar spot to where he was a year prior, coming into spring out of options and battling for a spot. The Jays had to put Manoah on the IL this spring, which opened a rotation spot, but Bowden Francis beat White for that gig. Now that Yariel Rodríguez has also been stretched out and has seemingly bumped Francis from the rotation, White has been moved even further back. He has only made four long relief appearances this year but his uninspiring 5.40 ERA in those surely didn’t help him.
White has now been bumped off the roster yet again and the Jays will have one week to work out a trade or pass him through waivers. Since he cleared waivers last year, doing so again would give him the right to elect free agency. It’s possible he may garner interest based on his past results and strong finish at Triple-A last year. The fact that he’s out of options means that he needs an active roster spot somewhere, but he has less than three years of service time, meaning he can be controlled for three more seasons beyond this one.
A number of teams around the league are dealing with significant pitching injuries and it was less than a week ago that the Jays managed to flip Wes Parsons to the Guardians for international bonus pool space. Parsons is optionable but is more than two years older than White and doesn’t have the same past prospect pedigree.
I guess maybe a team like the A’s or Marlins could put in a claim for white, but I assume he’ll remain in the jays system
Name correlates well to the story about Mitch White.
White is another overrated prospect from LAD, even the A’s should take a pass on him.
I got to hand it to LAD they surely make out when trading these overhyped prospects and getting good return so far Frasso may have higher upside in the end.
Although they have lost out with Busch but they had no where to place him.
Like they did with Yordan Alvarez
White was a lot better with LA than Toronto. I wonder why…
Why the hell would they option Pearson. He’s been nothing short of outstanding. The guy is finally putting it together and they ship him back to AAA
It’s called options. He’ll be back as soon as another injury happens
All other right handers in their pen have looked good, only the two lefties look horrible but they probably don’t want to go with just one lefty in the pen
6.1 innings of awesome after years of not so awesome. Who would you have lost out of the bullpen instead?
Two Jays starters aren’t fully stretched out. They need a long man in the bullpen. Pearson is not it.
Damn the curse of having options for Pearson.
I recommended the Jays release Mitch White in Aug 2022 when he was acquired because with the BlueJays he is not a MLB level pitcher. What a waste of time and money. Let Mitch White go for good.
The Mitch White deal reminds me of trading star in the making Moreno for Varsho, which was also called a bad deal at that time too.
Pearson belongs in the bigs. He’ll be back. If they use him as a one inning guy Pearson can be a very good pitcher. Pearson needs a one inning per use managed and reduced workload to maintain performance excellence.
Atkins is bad, no one denies it.
Get creative and trade excess 2b to AA , for something we need like a good bat for the of
Got clement ikf Biggio Schneider… atl could use a bat at 2b w Albies out for a while
Finally ,another atkins mistake dfa’d . Shakin’ My Head …..
Hasn’t been all bad with Atkins on the pitching side. Brought in guys like Matz Robbie ray stripling Kikuchi etc and got the most out of them. They let em go and they stink or hurt. Good call to go to Gausman instead of ray for the dough .
Got Romano Jimmy Garcia for nothing as afterthoughts
Built good pens last few years.
It’s the offence he’s bad , both drafting and at the mlb level.
And where has that got us ??
@Edp007
They were in on Ray as well. He wanted too much though
Im not a shatkins guy and doo want them both gon but you can deny that have made great decisions alomost with all there signing and every trade but 2. Even the trad for Grichuk for example sure he never lived up to want they hoped but thay nothing for him. Drafting bad or very inconveniently draft good player is this jays groups down fall
@Murphy NFLD
The Grichuks trade wasn’t all that good. The 5 year, 50M deal was nothing short of awful.
This is a premature move. With Gausman not Gausman’ing, Rodriguez having less than 5 IP of pro ball (no innings pitched last year at any league level) and Kikuchi pitching more than 5 innings only 10 times since the start of ’23, the Jays needed someone to give them innings. Even comparing Francis to White, the numbers are similar, but Francis has an option.
To put this in perspective, if the FO options Francis instead, then a week later a starter hits the IL, Francis can come back up to fill the spot. With this decision, Francis fills the spot and who becomes the long man?
Just poor roster management.
Perhaps they felt like it would not be beneficial for Bowden Francis to go down despite his numbers right now. Mitch White hasn’t had a good track record in the majors for quite some time.
I think they should trade Mitch White (if they can) for more international international signing bonus money…
@Fruz
The need is to chuck in a guy to cover Rodriguez, Gausman, and maybe Kikuchi. Francis can come in for one of them for multiple innings. Richards can take one of the remaining 2. After that, you’re looking at leveraged arms coming in non leveraged spots. DFA’ing White was a move that was coming but it shouldn’t have been this early.
In tennis terms, this is an unforced error.
I have a feeling that they’ll be able to nab a similar arm off waivers in short order.
I agree with this. I’m not comfortable about the innings that need covering. I’d have optioned Francis and kept White. Jays fans hate White. But there are a few things he does well enough and a number 6 or 7 starter isn’t really going to perform like a 3 or 4. Does he perform well enough compared to other depth starters? I think there’s reason to think he can. But I also think Rodriguez looks like he can leave the game with the team in good shape and Francis seems to do a lot better in that shorter stint bridge to the leverage arms role than White and they are probably projecting a very tight race for those wild card spots and playing for the games immediately in front of them more than having the luxury of thinking about the longer term and preserving depth. With the benefit of hindsight, I would have just DFA’d White instead of Parsons at the time. Then with this move they could have just optioned Peason and Parsons and the active roster would look the same with a full 40 man roster that still had Parsons available as depth. But they just signed this year’s version of Parsons in Mike Mayers, so maybe they see traits there they think they can tap into.
Too bad about Pearson but this made some sense. Neither LH bullpen arm is going anywhere, they need Bowden to eat innings, and the rest firmly have a place in the bullpen.
They could have gotten creative by sending Francis down and putting White in his spot in the rotation. Would he have been worse? I’d argue that, based on Francis’ early season numbers, White may have been slightly better. But probably not enough to warrant such a move. Also, I don’t know if Francis has options left. If not, the Blue Jays probably value him much more than they do White.
@Baseball77
Francis has one option left.
White is better than nobody. His presence has been unnecessary since the horrendous trade happened.
What specific factors led to Mitch White’s designation for assignment, considering his past prospect pedigree and recent strong finish at Triple-A, and how does this decision align with the Blue Jays’ long-term pitching strategy?
@Old York
I suspect the decision was made by throwing darts at the wall or playing beer pong. Applying logic, reason, or common sense fails.
The long term pitching strategy is the interesting part of the question. I find it surprising that they DFA’d Parsons who still had an option only to turn around and DFA White a couple weeks later. They didn’t need the 40 man spot. Only the active one. Moving on from both Parsons and White when Rodriguez isn’t expected to be a big source of innings and Francis lost his his starting gig for now seems like a move you make when you are confident you have someone claiming a stake to a depth role. I’m not sure who that is. The prospects in AAA are having a rough transition so they aren’t particularly close and the veteran AAA arms are less inspiring than White or Parsons. Manoah is a very big part of the conversation but also a very big mystery. In terms of the long term, they don’t seem to have a lot of guys who fit into the traditional starter mold. What they do have is kind of hybridized guys who can move fast up the system. Most of them will back down to single inning types but I wonder if they might be comfortable with the idea they can be more competitive with bullpen games featuring multi inning types than throwing out lousy depth starters .
Management basically looked at the roster of pitchers and said to themselves ״who’s the worst “ came up with Mitch.
The white flag has been dfa’d
At this point, White is a quadruple-A player. Good enough to be fill in for an injury, but not good enough to stick. Out of options means he’ll be on the dfa carousel and shuttling among the many mlb franchises if he’s lucky. Otherwise, it’s Asia, Mexico, or some other line of work….
“Meanwhile” can’t come in the middle of a sentence, MLBTR. It has to START the sentence.