Alek Manoah just hit massive spring stumbling block in attempt to move past Blue Jays

It's not looking good for former Toronto Blue Jay Alek Manoah. His latest outing during Spring Training action further jeopardized his bid to make the LA Angels starting rotation. In 2.1 innings of work, Manoah was tagged by the West Sacramento Athletics for five earned runs on three hits and five walks.

And it's not just the peripheral numbers that are getting in his way. The underlying metrics don't pain a pretty picture.

Manoah's spring is not improving

After Manoah's first outing, his fastball velocity was where a pitcher wants it to be. Throwing high 90s, it looked like Manoah was on a good path. However, the ball was fast but extremely flat and that hasn't improved as Spring Training has moved on. Manoah continually misses the zone and has virtually no command of any of his pitches as noted by Thomas Nestico of TJStats.

His overall stats show a spring ERA of 6.14 in 7.1 innings of work with a 2.05 WHIP and four strikeouts. The Angels, who signed Manoah to a one-year, $1.95 million deal in the offseason, basically have their first four spots in the rotation accounted for. Yusei Kikuchi, José Soriano, Reid Detmers and Eduardo Rodriguez all look like locks, while Manoah hasn't been able to lock in anything.

Most of the time, it's hard to put any stock into Spring Training stats, but in Manoah's case there are certain things we can evaluate and figure out whether or not he is improving. The short answer is, he is not. The evaluations on his stuff and his command are not where they should be. Even for a pitcher who is coming off a Tommy John surgery, the issues prior to his surgery are still persistent.

In 2023 Manoah pitched to a 5.87 ERA in 19 starts with the Blue Jays. That year he struggled out of the gate and was sent all the way down to Single-A to refine some things. His walk rate that season was 6.1 and his H/9 sat at 9.6. In 2024, he returned to the big leagues and things were moving in the right direction for the most part. His walk and hit rate were down to 3.0 and 6.3 respectively. Opponents were also only hitting .189/.282/.378 against him and the hard hit rate was down from 44.8% to 35.4%.

However, this was a five game sample size before he hit the injured list and under went Tommy John surgery which has kept him away from a big league mound ever since. The Blue Jays cut ties with Manoah right around the 2025 deadline in order to make room on the 40-man roster for a returning Anthony Santander, which abruptly ended Manoah's tenure with Toronto.

The 28-year-old right hander was a first round draft pick of the Blue Jays and burst onto the scene in 2021 and was looked at as a staple of the Blue Jays rotation for the foreseeable future. But that didn't quite come to fruition and had to watch the Blue Jays run to the World Series in 2025 from the sidelines.