A's Select Pitcher From New York Yankees in Rule 5 Draft
With the first pick in the Rule 5 Draft, the Oakland A's selected right-hander Mitch Spence from the New York Yankees. The 25-year-old spent all of the 2023 season in Triple-A and complied a 4.47 ERA across 29 starts and 163 innings. He also held a 1.32 WHIP and struck out 21.8% of the batters he faced while walking 7.5%.
Spence checks a lot of the boxes for attributes that the A's are after. He's been durable, his stats have been steady at every level, and he has good command of the baseball. For a team that was struggling to find arms effective last season, limiting walks became a big focus for the club.
As for his arsenal, in his final start of '23, Spence alternated between his slider and his cutter, throwing them 36% and 33% of the time. The slider sat 80-84 while the cutter was 87-92 and averaged 90. His hardest offering is his sinker, which averaged 93 but touched 95. He threw that pitch 20% of the time.
The rest of his arsenal was a 79 mile per hour curveball that he threw six times in 98 pitches, and an 88 mph changeup he threw five times.
Spence is now ranked as the A's #23 prospect on MLB Pipeline, who say of the new addition, "Without a true out pitch, his ceiling might be a bit limited, but he could eat up a good amount of innings in the back end of a big league rotation."
A's GM David Forst told MLB.com that Spence will come into Spring Training with a good opportunity to make the starting rotation, and that he also has a chance for a bullpen role if he pitches well enough but they decide to fill the rotation with other arms.
The way the Rule 5 Draft works is that if a player is selected, then the team that drafted him has to keep him on their 26-man roster for the entire season. If a player doesn't make the team or they want to demote him during the season, then he must be offered back to the original club first. The A's have had some success with Rule 5 picks in recent years, landing Mark Canha, Vimael Machín, and Ryan Noda.
The last pitcher the A's took in the Rule 5 Draft was Dany Jiménez in 2020, whom Oakland returned to the Blue Jays in March. The A's later signed Jiménez to a minor-league deal in 2021. In that same draft, the A's selected Zach Jackson in the minor league portion, and he has been with the A's ever since, turning into a solid back-end reliever for the team.
With Mason Miller headed to the bullpen in 2024 and Ken Waldichuk's status for Spring Training up in the air, there will be a spot or two in the rotation up for grabs. It'll be up to Spence to take hold of one of those spots this spring.