3 surprises in MLB Pipeline's top 30 Blue Jays’ prospects for 2025

One of the yearly rites of spring training is to look ahead. While there’s plenty of baseball being played across Arizona and Florida during spring training, those exhibition games lack the juice that comes with regular season matchups. 

And, along with looking ahead at the upcoming season, spring training also provides an opportunity to look ahead at the future of each team through their farm system. 

As a part of that, MLB Pipeline recently revealed its rankings of the top-30 prospects for every MLB team. Here are the three things we found most surprising about Toronto's rankings this year.

Toronto's overall ranking

After opening last season as the No. 24 farm system in baseball, the Blue Jays came in at No. 27 this year, ahead of only the Angels, Astros and Giants. 

Here’s what MLB Pipeline’s Jonathan Mayo, Jim Callis and Sam Dykstra had to say about the Blue Jays’ system: 

Pitching injuries decimated Toronto’s pipeline in 2024, and most notable of all of them was the Ricky Tiedemann elbow issues that led to Tommy John surgery, knocking him out for much of '25 at the least. [Trey] Yesavage -- a 6-foot-4 right-hander with three plus pitches -- gives the group at least a big arm at the top as he begins his career, and he’s joined by fellow first-rounder Nimmala, a shortstop with big power potential but hit-tool questions. With Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette entering their final years before free agency, the Jays don’t have prospects of their quality behind them as potential replacements, at least right now. The good news: the organization is slated to pick eighth in the Draft in July, marking just the second time since 2006 it’s had a first-round selection that high.

As they noted, the Blue Jays will get a top-10 pick this draft which should help boost their farm system ranking. Still, it’s not great that the Blue Jays’ minor league rankings dropped from last year. They have two top 100 prospects in Arjun Nimmala and Yesavage, but don’t have a ton of depth outside of that.  

The “glass half full” takeaway from that is that it’s because they’ve graduated a lot of prospects to MLB over the past couple years, while the “glass half empty” takeaway is that they don’t have the impact talent needed to replace Bichette and/or Guerrero. 

We’ll have to wait and see how it all plays out.

Orelvis Martinez still is held in high regard

What a year it’s been for Martinez. After opening last year as MLB Pipeline’s No. 2 Blue Jays’ prospect, he finally got his MLB callup in June… where he was promptly suspended for 80 games due to PEDs. 

He’s put that in the rearview this spring thanks to a strong start to camp, and seems to be in the mix for a bench spot.

Despite all the uncertainty surrounding his 2024, he only dropped one spot in Toronto’s rankings and is still the No. 10 overall prospect at second base. 

Even if he’s not a complete product, there’s still a way he can make an impact at the major league level this season. Even if he’s still a work in progress on defense, he still has 60-grade power and is only 23. Martinez’s stock was at its lowest last year, but he’s now on the upswing.

You’ll get to see a lot of top prospects at Rogers Centre this year

According to MLB Pipeline’s projections, five of Toronto’s top-10 prospects are ready for MLB, so it seems like we’ll end up seeing a lot of them this year. 

After Martinez, the other top prospects who could help the Blue Jays this year are Alan Roden, Jake Bloss, Josh Kasevich and Will Wagner. Bloss and Wagner have already made their MLB debuts (though Bloss has yet to play for the Blue Jays), while Roden and Kasevich have gotten plenty of action this spring. 

Roden had the biggest jump of any Blue Jays prospect (seven spots), which has helped him move into the Opening Day conversation. It seems like Roden will get a chance to electrify the crowd in Toronto sooner rather than later.