SAN FRANCISCO – In the midst of the winter meetings frenzy last December, the Toronto Blue Jays’ baseball operations department gathered in a team suite to consider their pro scouting group’s annual Rule 5 draft presentation.
Coming off a World Series appearance and determined to make another run, the notion that they would select and carry a pick all season long seemed far-fetched. The club had plenty on the go, too, between signing Dylan Cease and Cody Ponce, working through health concerns for Shane Bieber and Jose Berrios, and the pursuits of Tyler Rogers and Kazuma Okamoto, while also monitoring the Kyle Tucker and Bo Bichette markets.
Still, their scouts were so intrigued by Spencer Miles during the Arizona Fall League that they pushed for his implausible selection. Despite just 10 games and 14.2 innings since the San Francisco Giants made him a fourth-round pick in 2022, they argued that he was ready to get outs in the majors.
“It’s the job of scouting and baseball operations to present opportunities, no matter what’s going on with the roster. Miles was that,” said Ryan Mittleman, the club’s vice-president, pro scouting. “The raw stuff was impressive to us. … We had multiple looks, multiple scouts to say, ‘Hey, the raw data is good, but also, he’s carrying it out into a pretty good league.’ We didn’t let the lack of innings be an impediment. We believed in the stuff. And it carried him to the top of our list.”
Manager John Schneider was in the room for the presentation and remembers “looking at his numbers and I was like, ‘He has how many innings? And what are we doing? And huh?’ They were like his sinker can do this, we think he can develop a slider. I think I said, ‘This guy better be pretty (expletive) good.”
The Blue Jays made Miles the 10th pick of the Rule 5 draft on Dec. 10 and it turns out that he is indeed pretty, ahem, good, emerging into a pitcher that, in Mittleman’s words, “has been huge for us.”
Originally envisioned as an occasional mop-up man at the very end of the bullpen, the 25-year-old has steadily earned more trust in a variety of roles, including eight starts/bulk outings, a needed solution in what’s been a season filled with problems.
His next outing comes Tuesday, when he’ll be the featured arm, possibly the starter, for the Blue Jays in San Francisco, facing the Giants team that helped him through the back and shoulder surgeries that sidelined him for nearly all of the last three years. Some staffers who were close to him are trying to make it out to watch.
“It’s super exciting, but it’s not any different than any other outing,” said Miles laughing when asked if he hears from Giants people wondering how he got away. “Frequently, but that’s OK. Here we are and this org is awesome. So it’s worked out.”
Far more than the Blue Jays imagined, prompting them to again consider building him up with the rotation in continued flux as Max Scherzer continues to rehab from a back issue and Patrick Corbin works out of the bullpen, leaving them short a starter.
How much work Miles can reasonably handle given his lack of volume in recent years – his career high for innings is 77 in 2022 between Missouri and rookie ball – is the Blue Jays’ constant conundrum. There’s no real baseline for the player and no case studies on similar pitchers to draw from, leaving them to feel their way through in the dark.
Given that he’s already at 54 innings in 24 games and has become someone the club feels grow into a viable option for the 2027 rotation, when they project to have several openings with Kevin Gausman, Bieber and Scherzer all pending free agents, the stakes are suddenly higher given what he may become.
Miles, however, shows no signs of slowing down.
Physically, he said he’s holding up and during his last outing, he set a personal best hitting 99.4 m.p.h. against the New York Mets. He threw a season-high 73 pitches June 6 against Baltimore and has pitched 4.1 innings three times. Where he goes from here isn’t uncertain but even with Scherzer on track to be an option after the all-star break, the Blue Jays want to keep Miles going.
Without an objective measure of what is too much, part of the approach is avoiding too much, too fast, both in innings and in velocity.
“I got up to 73 pitches and then kind of deloaded, so I think that, in a way, gave me a new floor. I don’t think we really know what the ceiling is, but we’re just going to keep pushing it and find out,” said Miles. “My volume has reached a certain point now where my body is starting to accept the force. In years past, 98ish has been my peak. But with a new floor, your body adapts.
“So now your brain and your body are like, ‘OK, I can settle in here. I know what that feels like, I can accept the force.’ Then your body’s saying like, ‘Alright, maybe we can go one step above that and break a chain off that prior peak in exertion of force.’ I don’t really know what the limit is. I think there’s still another one or two ticks in a volume floor that we can get to. So, maybe there’s more in there.”
That any of this is in play at all underlines how significant a Rule 5 pick Miles has turned out to be, against the odds.
“Whenever you’re coming off a World Series, you’re usually not taking a Rule 5 pick. You’re usually pretty set. But with the uncertainty of (Yimi) Garcia, some of our starters, it was like, OK, let’s take a chance, bring him into camp and see,” said Schneider. “It’s an amazing job of scouting and trying to predict upside. A lot of that comes into the person, too, not just the stuff. Can this dude handle this? The way it’s worked out has been remarkable, really.”
In setting up 40-man rosters ahead of the Rule 5 draft, teams try to measure the likelihood of other clubs being willing to select and carry a player for a full season in order to lock in their rights.
The Blue Jays in recent years have taken off-the-board swings in the Rule 5 draft, selecting Elvis Luciano out of rookie ball in the Kansas City Royals system in 2018 and carrying him all season, and a post-Tommy-John Angel Bastardo from the Boston Red Sox in 2024. Luciano is now pitching with Yomiuri in Japan, while the Blue Jays returned Bastardo to the Red Sox in April, after Miles beat him out for a roster spot in spring training.
No pick required as much imagination as Miles, given where the Blue Jays had come from and all the other markets they were involved in. But Mittleman credited GM Ross Atkins for being willing to consider all avenues, when “it can be tougher to make a Rule 5 pick when there’s not as much open road for opportunity.”
“He, obviously, hadn’t pitched a ton and was pitching well in Arizona Fall League,” Mittleman continued. “So it was really just a case of our entire group of scouting, R-and-D putting the pieces together and in the end, it was really Ross trusting the process that moved Miles to the top of the list. …
“Really happy the way it’s turned out so far.”
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