Better know your Blue Jays 40-man: Julian Merryweather

We all know the story....Julian Merryweather came to us in a rather hastily arranged trade at the deadline in 2018 for Josh Donaldson. The front office seemed to be very anxious to get rid of Donaldson. I don’t know if they didn’t like something about his personality and didn’t want it to rub off on the young players coming up to the team or if they didn’t want to pay the guy anymore.

Merryweather seemed more myth than man until he finally made 8 appearances for us in 2020. He was pretty impressive, averaging 96.7 MPH on his fastball and striking out 27.4% of batters.

Last year he only made it into 13 games. His fastball was up a tick at 97.5 MPH, but an oblique strain kept him off the mound for a large part of the season.

So, coming into his age 30 season, he has all of 26 innings of MLB experience. As Matt noted, the Jays still have an option year left on Julian (which doesn’t seem fair that a guy can still have options after the age of 30, but I’m sure the Jays are happy. One of the things that OOTP Baseball has taught me is that relievers with options are worth their weight in gold.

One of these years, he will get through without missing most of it with injuries. Sometimes pitchers who have injury troubles in their 20s do well in their 30s. The lack of wear and tear on their arms can help. Sometimes.

This spring, he’s had a couple of terrific outings and one very, very poor outing. Let’s hope the bad one was just bad luck.

The odds are that he will make the opening day roster since there will be a couple of extra roster spots. And he’ll have to show well in that month, or the Jays could option him out. With ten relief pitchers (likely), and 23 games in the month, he will have to be good right out of the chute to guarantee enough work to show well.

PECOTA figures Julian to pitch in 44 games, 38.2 innings (I would think he would average at least an inning per appearance), a 4.86 ERA and 41 strikeouts. If his ERA is that high, I don’t know that he’ll get to 44 appearances.

Julian is high on my list of guys I’d love to have it all turn out well for.