At 2:26 am ET on Tuesday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that the Athletics intend to call up their top prospect, Gage Jump. First: Sweet Jesus, Jeff, go to sleep. If you keep burning the candle at both ends like this, you won’t be on TV in October.
OA did not make this move official until Tuesday evening; Jump was not on the 40-man roster, so they had to clear a roster spot by placing Aaron Civale on the IL with shoulder tendinitis and moving Denzel Clarke to the 60-day IL. The debut itself was rough, as Jump allowed four runs and nine hits in five innings, but it’s nice to see him in the majors all the same. And not just because of what it means for writers trading in song headlines.
Jump is a really good prospect to throw. He was 73rd at LSU in 2024 – a bad time for Jump, this was the only one of the last three drafts that didn’t have an LSU pitcher taken in the top three. I get it; Kade Anderson looks like the first archetype of a pitcher, and Paul Skenes looks like a kaiju that rose from the depths of the ocean to defeat the first archetype of a pitcher in a noble battle.
Listed at 6 feet, 200 pounds, Jump is strong and muscular, with a thick bottom half that looks even bigger with his socks on.
As you can see here, his delivery melts a little. But the way he throws back while holding the ball with his bent throwing arm allows him to hide the baseball from hitters. That makes 93-96 mph with a little extension felt that ticks a couple of tough, and because he’s a short guy with a non-straight arm angle, that fastball also has a steep rise to it.
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When I was in my Guardian left-handed pull sections a few weeks ago, I wrote about Erik Sabrowski’s fastball, which is unusual because it gets a lot of movement in both planes. A pitcher with a very high arm angle — like Alex Vesia or Trey Yesavage — can reverse the four-seamer and get high on it, but that usually comes at the expense of running on the arm side. Sabrowski gets up and runs with his four-seamer; it’s rare for a pitcher to achieve as much of both as he does.
There is a bit of this with Jump. I’m going to give you a sweet and impressive sounding fact here and quickly debunk it. Jump only pitched five innings in the majors, but Baseball Savant has a lot of data tracking the same Triple-A pitch, so we know the average velocity and movement of each of his pitches.
Only two major leaguers, Brock Burke and Payton Tolle, have a four-seamer that matches or beats Jump’s in vertical break, horizontal break, and speed. Here’s a bucket of cold water: I’ve obviously cut my search parameters too thin to reduce them to two buckets. Jump’s fastball isn’t an unprecedented pitch, but it has a very encouraging combination of movement and speed.
When our prospect guys put together a list of the Athletics’ top prospects, they gave the prospect a grade of 50 or better in each of the four jump areas, as well as 60s for both his fastball and slider.
From there, Jump now throws three breaking balls: a gyro slider, a sweeper, and a slow curveball. And the show-me change that I don’t use much yet, but it’s powerful. I like the low-spin offspeed pitch, although Jump still needs to learn to command it better.
Here is the entire toolkit.
Gage Jump’s Arsenal
| Voice | Usage vs. LHB | Usage vs. RHB | Velo | Horiz. A break | IV | Spin Rate | Opp. WOB | Whiff% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Four-Seamer | 56.3 | 56.3 | 95.8 | -8.8 | 14.8 | 2,292 | .358 | 31.0 |
| Slide | 23.3 | 16.6 | 86.1 | 5.1 | 1.6 | 2,239 | .473 | 31.7 |
| Curveball | 5.7 | 15.5 | 81.5 | 8.7 | -11.0 | 2,566 | .251 | 31.4 |
| He swept him away | 13.6 | 4.7 | 83.6 | 13.1 | 1.3 | 2,464 | .058 | 36.4 |
| Change | 1.1 | 6.9 | 87.0 | -8.7 | 9.7 | 1,456 | .436 | 30.0 |
Source: Baseball Savant
You’ll notice that all five Jump spaces created a 30% or better blowout rate for the kids. Obviously, this is a small sample and weak competition, but again, it shows that he has many weapons in his bandoleer.
But how did those arms do in their big league debut?
It was a mixed bag. Jump got off to a good start, cruising through a decent first inning (including two strikeouts) on just 10 pitches (including four whiffs).
In his prime, it was pretty clear that big league success would follow him: Changing speeds from his fastball to his breaking balls and climbing the ladder on hitters to find them swinging at eye-level fastballs. On offense, the Mariners had a very difficult time keeping up with him.
Unfortunately, Jump spent most of his debut on the back foot. We saw the results of commando-over-control in the 33-pitch second inning. He went 0-1 to Josh Naylor, who hit a groundball the other way. His 0-2 slider to the next batter, Rob Refsnyder, ended up over the heart of the plate, leading to another ground ball. After that, Jump threw out the final 28 pitches of the inning with a runner in scoring position. Outside of the driving range, he failed to hit his stride in several key areas. You got too much space or you missed it by a few inches. And with runners on base, even a pair of cool fly balls loaded with runs.
On the other hand, Jump has every right to feel aggrieved by his dirty streak. The sailors did not destroy him; His nine hits came on seven singles and two doubles, and especially in the second inning, the contact he gave up was soft. On the other hand, Jump allowed 11 baserunners in three innings and only four of those runners scored. He may have been getting nickel-and-dimed, but he’s lucky the Mariners didn’t shell out a few of those spots for a dollar. That second-inning single by Refsnyder stands out; Last year’s Refsnyder puts that in the seats.
Anyway, Jump got off to a great start, and even though it wasn’t always good, he was competitive through it all. We live and learn.
Jump is not a high prospect for Athletics. That would be Leo De Vries. I can tell you that he was one of 11 prospects this past cycle to get a future value grade of 60 or higher, or that he was no. 6 world prospects on our list. I think it would be exciting to point out that the A’s traded Mason Miller, the most unstoppable pitcher in history, to get him. And De Vries is so good I think the A’s will win the trade in the long run.
It seems like every team has a shortstop for a college shortstop where the Hall of Fame is the best case scenario; if you’re not sitting on the next Derek Jeter, you’re off to a bad start.
Besides De Vries, Jump is the Athletics’ best prospect, with a 50 FV. (Which is to say that my man Jamie Arnold isn’t even the best college shortstop left with the weirdest delivery in his organization. What a gut punch that is.)
Also, I don’t want to overstate Jump’s power; he’s great, and I’m looking forward to seeing him pitch, but he’s not the next Skenes or anything. This promotion is interesting because of where it comes in the life cycle of the Athletics franchise.
The A’s won the AL West in 2020 and finished 86-76 the following year. Since then, they have been bad. Since 2022, they are 282-421, the third-worst record in the major leagues over that span. Only the Rockies and White Sox won fewer games. And while they were in the middle of 100-back-to-back losing seasons, their ownership embarrassed themselves and insulted the city of Oakland at the beginning of the move to Las Vegas for many years, many steps. Even Moses looks down on these guys and thinks, “Men, you are walking through the desert forever.”
The vibes were not good.
And the performance this year, to be honest, was not good either. Brent Rooker and Tyler Soderstrom were bad; Lawrence Butler has been more than bad. But Nick Kurtz looks like Frank Thomas on the left in a wig. On Tuesday, Kurtz hit a 48-game hitting streak. Shea Langeliers is fourth in the AL in WAR, and Carlos Cortes came out of the unknown at 28 to hit the switch-throwing José Ramírez. The pitching has been subpar (the A’s are 22nd in team ERA and 26th in K-BB%), but they are generally not disastrous. Tuesday night’s loss dropped the A’s to a game below .500, but that’s still in line for first place in the AL West.
It happens sometimes. The road to success has never been more open: This could be the Astros’ first legitimately bad team since 2013. The Rangers appear to be in Year Three of their World Series. I don’t know how much of the Mariners’ problems can be explained by Cal Raleigh’s struggles and/or injuries. And the Angels would probably be better if I didn’t say anything about them at all.
At this point, the A’s are in the driver’s seat. Despite their problems with playing and injuries and the low age of key players, they are leading the division.
And after five years of rebuilding, they are finally reloading. Jump isn’t their first big call-up of the year (Henry Bolte is already at the top), and it won’t be their last. Of the top 10 prospects in the organization, eight are in Double-A or higher. If the future is not now, it is near.
