Best of BP 2025: Sorry We Missed You

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Ryan Johnson was not one of the debuting prospects to get a call-up article for Opening Day.

Now the standard for who gets one can be kind of fuzzy. Obviously the Top 101 prospects—or really anyone in consideration for the list? Absolutely. Prospects a tier below that with a clear medium-term major-league gig? Sure. And Ryan Johnson sort of fits that mold. He wasn’t really in Top 101 consideration—although I liked him as a college arm last spring—but he was in the top 10 of a bad Angels system, and had an easy hook as being one of the rare players to jump right to the big club without playing single minor-league game in one of those Oat Milkers jerseys.

But aye, there’s the rub.

So this is not The Call-Up, but if it was, well, you can’t really write a Ryan Johnson call-up without the context of the Angels aggressive (some might say ham-fisted) approach to draft and development.

Oh, I already did that? Hmm…

I should note that I excised a lot of my gripes with the org from the first draft of that call-up, because it wasn’t fair to the player. And anyway, I had also already penned 3,000 words on those gripes a couple months earlier. Granted, I now have more. But this isn’t really the place for it. Although you’d rather not even have that Magic 8-ball outcome in play as a pitching prospect, but you don’t get to pick your employer out of college, and some may not want to pay the 40-man downside salary while you are on the minor-league IL.

In my first look at Johnson last February, I postulated  that the team that drafted him would do so because they thought he had a better chance to start than the 29 others, and therefore valued him higher. And they would take him with an eye towards developing him as a rotation piece. Perhaps have him work on a four-seam and kick change in High-A for a bit this year—assuming you weren’t already working on that in instructs, as the smart pitching dev teams do. But the Angels valued him more than 29 other teams as a 2025 major-league bullpen piece. So here he is. Silly me, I wrote 3,000 words about this draft strategy only a few months later.

So this is not The Call-Up, but if it was, about now you’d be reading a scouting report, and Johnson’s is pretty straightforward at present, for both good and ill. He’s going to spam a plus slider—that he can manipulate into both sweeper and cutter looks—and get guys to either give up on it or swing over it. I’ve described him as Tall Sergio Romo in the past, and he does throw harder than Romo—his sinker is mid-90s in short bursts—but a relief outcome here would not have been exactly unforeseen.

But here we are already, and Johnson has not been good as a major-league reliever so far—speaking of not exactly unforeseen—and I’m sure some of it is just early-career command wobbles,

and inability to locate the sinker.

But Johnson’s approach has been concerning as well. A lower-slot, primary slider pitcher is going to have to deal with platoon issues, and while the hard cutter here should be more platoon neutral, he’s leaned heavily on the sinker and change versus lefties. A very basic modern pitching development idea is you should throw your best pitch(es) the most. Johnson is throwing his changeup more as a major-league reliever than he did as a college starter. A very basic older-school pitching development idea is you need something that moves arm-side to crossover against opposite-handed hitters. Does it need to be good? Well, you’d think. So while the outcomes for Johnson have been worse than expected, the process probably isn’t helping.

So while this is not The Call-Up—and I expect Johnson will get his 45 days on the major-league roster this season, so this will be the last thing I ever write about him—it does offer up an interesting question. How much should I have cared that the Angels were the team to draft Johnson? I don’t think the organization arrived at a particularly novel take on his ultimate major-league role in the pen. Now they valued that more highly in the draft, and pushed him into it more quickly than just about any other team would have, but the whole point of the short-burst reliever is to hide the flaws that might get exposed with more looks from the batter’s box or on-deck circle. But Johnson isn’t really doing that so far, despite a facially optimized pitch mix. He has yet to throw his sweeper—for my money his best pure swing-and-miss offering—against a southpaw. He’s adding heavier four-seam and changeup use more or less on the fly in the majors. Ultimately, there is a reason players very rarely skip over the minors.

Again, this is not The Call Up, but Ryan Johnson has only pitched 3 ⅔ innings in the majors. He’s functionally still a prospect, and prospect lists are long-term value lists. This is the shortest of short-term analysis of the only professional information we have. Beyond the adjustments you’d hope and expect Johnson to make in the coming weeks and months, the clock never really stops on pitching development in the majors.  You don’t have to squint hard to see a Clay Holmes-like path for Johnson even if he stays in the pen for a bit (I pulled the four-seam and kick change adds above for a reason). But even for the Angels—who haven’t topped 80 wins in a decade—the clock is always ticking on a major-league role. But not as quickly as you might think.

We end the prospect team portion of The Call-Up—which this is not—with the prospect’s immediate major-league future, and Johnson’s short- and medium-term outlook will be on the Angels. Last spring, the Angels outright said they were concerned if they traded Jo Adell or passed him through waivers, another team might fix him. So he spent all of last-season on the major-league roster, and is the everyday center fielder this year. Reid Detmers bounces between Triple-A and the major-league pen, his stuff and command having gone backwards over the last couple seasons. The Angels are certainly not fixing anything. Conversely, Ryan Johnson will get chances.

The Call-Up is meant to be a snapshot of a prospect at present. As I mentioned above I don’t want to use it to grind prospect-writer axes—fortunately this is not The Call-Up—but it is not meant to be valedictory either. But it does represent an end point for Ryan Johnson. The goal tape out on the horizon during all those private pitching lessons, weekend travel tournaments and Conference USA bus rides. And even a below-average major-leaguer is in the 99th percentile of all baseball players. That’s also a kind of patronizing statement, if accurate. But it’s not meant to be valedictory either, a hidden camera video call-up message in print form.

Obviously I have to know about a lot of baseball players. Have to be able to glean the difference between Connor Gillispie and Conor Gillaspie and all the different Luis Garcias. The prospect list cycle that just ended—and included Ryan Johnson—had a consideration set of well over 1,000 baseball players, and there are already new names to add to the incumbent group. I’ve even been to a few Utah high school baseball games already. Johnson passed through awfully quickly, but made an impression. Although you don’t really pick favorites from your 1,239 offseason children, I was curious how he’d develop. Now I just might have to wait six years or so.