Blue Jays announce their club player pool for this season

On Sunday the Blue Jays announced their 60-man player pool for the 2020 season, leaving a couple spots open, and including a few notable names.

It sure is nice to be talking about baseball in terms of how and when things are going to start up again, even if we still don’t know all the answers for the Blue Jays.

On Sunday, we did get an answer to one of the questions we’ve been wondering about, namely who could be included on the Blue Jays’ roster this year. Because of the new rules around a shortened season and the lack or a minor league season, the league is implementing a 60-man club player pool, allowing teams an expanded group to work with.

That group is fairly significant for a number of reasons, and they aren’t just who could be on the big league roster. Teams will only be allowed to trade from players on their 60-man rosters, which could lead some clubs to adding players that they know they won’t add to the big league group, but could foresee including in a trade sometime later this summer. On another note, several teams have included some of their top prospects in order to keep them active, even if they’re not necessarily planning on using them in the big leagues in 2020. It would appear the Blue Jays are one of the teams that have done just that.

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Among the names you’d expect to see like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, Hyun-Jin Ryu, and many more, are a few premium prospects that I doubt we’ll see in a Blue Jays uniform this year. That would include Jordan Groshans, Alek Manoah, Simeon Woods Richardson, and Alejandro Kirk. Manoah would be arguably the closest to major league ready, but even when I spoke to him a few months ago, he wasn’t talking about reaching the big leagues in 2020 as a goal.

The Blue Jays also left two spots available, and we can likely assume that one of them is being reserved for Austin Martin. The Blue Jay can’t officially add him yet because they haven’t actually signed him, something they’re going to need to get done sooner than later.

There’s also the possibility that they could look to make a trade before the season gets underway, or perhaps they just want to leave their options open for now.

It’ll be a situation worth keeping an eye on as we approach the beginning of training camp, assuming the Blue Jays are able to name an official home for their camp, and as we get closer to the July 23 or 24th start date. It might not be games yet, but we’re talking about actual roster decisions, and that has me all kinds of excited.