Bowden Francis came to spring training looking like a guy about to get his fourth taste of Triple-A, but his prognosis has shifted significantly in recent days.
Part of that is due to the 27-year-old’s strong work that has included eight innings of Grapefruit League ball with two runs allowed and 10 strikeouts, some solid readings on the radar gun, and the addition of a splitter to his repertoire.
A bigger development for Francis has been the shoulder issues encountered by both Kevin Gausman and Alek Manoah — as well as the measured pace Yariel Rodriguez is building up at.
All of the sudden, Francis looks more like a pitcher likely to start the season in the Toronto Blue Jays’ rotation than a depth arm with a little role versatility.
Considering his age, the fact he’s been in Toronto’s organization since 2021, and a minor-league career that spans 614.1 innings, the right-hander has many qualities that might make him seem like a known quantity. While the 36.1 frames Francis gave the Blue Jays last year out of the bullpen hint at what he can do as an MLB reliever, he’s an unknown as a starter.
The righty has started 50 games at the Triple-A level, but that number overstates his experience level. All of those outings resulted in just 201.2 innings as Francis hasn’t functioned as a traditional starter much lately. In 2022 and 2023 his 30 Triple-A starts resulted in 28 outings that went less than five innings. The last time he completed the fifth at that level was May 10, 2022.
Toronto wouldn’t be expecting Francis to regularly get deep into games at the major-league level this year, but he’s been living in the two-to-four inning range recently — a far easier assignment than starting. In his 36.1 innings in the majors last season, 87.8 per cent of the hitters who faced Francis were doing so for the first time.
What the right-hander has done in the last couple of seasons doesn’t tell us much about his potential as a starter, but his stuff is a little more instructive.
Francis doesn’t have overwhelming velocity, but he’s sat at a solid 94.5 mph in his three Grapefruit League appearances. That number doesn’t tell the whole story of that pitch, though.
Last season its vertical movement was 12 per cent better than league average, and Francis did a good job keeping it up in the zone to utilize that movement to its greatest possible effect. Of the 362 pitchers who had 50-plus plate appearances resolved by a four-seamer last year, his heater ranked 11th in run value per 100 pitches (+2.2).
Francis is likely to lose a little bit of that juice the longer his outings are, but he’s working from a solid baseline.
The other foundational pitch in his arsenal is a slow curveball that’s sat at 73.8 mph in the spring. What makes the pitch special is that it has 52 per cent more horizontal movement than the average curve. It runs away from right-handers, who had a whiff rate of 53.7 per cent against it in the majors last year — and it’s continued to look dangerous in the spring.
Those two pitches made up 85.6 per cent of the pitches Francis threw with the Blue Jays last year, and they suggest a reliever profile. While the righty had fairly neutral right-left splits in a small MLB sample, his two secondary pitchers — the curve, and a less-used slider — are both made to make right-handed batters uncomfortable.
His new splitter could serve a different purpose. That pitch is his only offering with arm-side fade, and it has the potential to be his best weapon against lefties.
That idea is entirely theoretical considering it’s a brand-new offering Francis has thrown all of 12 times in the spring — a sample small enough that it’s too early to get a precise read of the quality of the pitch’s movement and its potential effectiveness.
In most cases, when a team turns to a 27-year-old who’s spent far more time in Triple-A than the majors for three years in their rotation, it’s a pure desperation roll of the dice on a Quad-A type. While the Blue Jays are undoubtedly unhappy about the health of their starters, that isn’t the situation here.
Francis is a guy who was in the top half of their FanGraphs prospect list at this time last year with some legitimately interesting stuff that may be enhanced by a splitter that could help mitigate his repertoire’s greatest weakness.
None of that guarantees his success.
Even near-average production in a five-and-dive role would be an excellent outcome for the Blue Jays, but there’s a little bit of upside here. That’s not normally the case when you go far down the depth chart for a guy who’s barely started in two years — and has never done it in the majors.
