Canadian RHP Micah Bucknam 'excited' to continue development with Blue Jays

TORONTO — Already selected once by the Toronto Blue Jays, Micah Bucknam wasn’t sure where he stood with the club before his second turn through the draft until they met at the MLB combine last month.

Those discussions turned out to be pretty thorough, giving the 21-year-old right-hander from Abbotsford, B.C., the impression he was a real possibility for the club. Still, as part of the COVID-impacted cohort of 2021, he knew better than to take anything for granted until he was picked in the fourth round, No. 112 overall, this week.

“It was pretty crazy,” he says over the phone from Langley, B.C., where he was visiting with his wife’s family. “I remember sitting there, agent calls me and was like, ‘Hey, it's going to be the Blue Jays,’ and I was just like, Wow, this is wild. The day before, I was sitting here and I looked to my right and I saw a blue jay and my father-in-law informed me that apparently they're not blue jays on the West Coast, but they're sterling jays. I had not seen anything that looks remotely close to a blue jay since I got here and that’s just the way it happens, right? Insane. Everything happens for a reason, so pretty cool.”

Unlike when the Blue Jays took him in the 16^th round in 2021 as a contingency in the event other planned signings didn’t pan out, the sides this time already have an agreement believed to be for the pick’s slot at $680,800, according to an industry source.

A raw but intriguing talent out of high school, he’s far more advanced now having spent two years at LSU, where as a freshman in 2022 he watched and picked up training techniques from teammate Paul Skenes before the ace went first overall to the Pirates, plus a pivotal junior year at Dallas Baptist University, where he logged 62.1 innings over 13 starts.

Along the way he also built himself up after his final prep years were disrupted by the pandemic, working exclusively as a starter this season.

“There are some elements, obviously, that I can grow in but from spin pitches and feel for spin, I pretty much feel like I'm up there with a lot of big-leaguers at this point, so it's refining those pitches from a strength standpoint,” said Bucknam. “Things to work on a little bit more — continuing to throw fastballs for strikes, establishing that early, as well as being able to throw the changeup more and competing with four real pitches. But definitely feel like from a delivery standpoint, from a what I know about pitching standpoint, understanding analytics and how to get the most out of myself, it's a completely different mindset, as well as a completely different physical player.”

Bucknam is keen to take advantage of the Blue Jays’ pitching lab and other tools at the Player Development Complex having “been thrown into the deep end” with advanced training techniques once he arrived at LSU. He hadn’t worked with force-plate mounds, Trackman data or Edgertronic cameras before, so he did a lot of learning during his two seasons spent as a reliever there.

But it was once he got to DBU and started working with pitching coach Cale Johnson — who established pro standards based on his experiences in the St. Louis, Atlanta and Pittsburgh systems — that Bucknam learned how to use tech and data to refine his game.

With Johnson’s help, they split a slurve that had been his main secondary pitch and split into two distinct offerings — one a hard, biting slider, the other a slower curveball — that both helped him get lots of swing and miss. Combined with a fastball that sits in the mid-90s and a changeup that also has the chance to be a competitive pitch, it’s a repertoire that gives Bucknam the chance to stick as a starter.

“You have to have a hybrid between the two,” he said of balancing tech/data and feel. “The way that our game is moving is very, very analytically focused. There are some really big pieces of technology that help get pitch shapes and understand things.

“My slider wouldn't be what it is today without Trackman and Edgertroic and being able to see the way the ball comes off my hand and pair that with the feeling of it. Obviously I look at an organization like the Blue Jays as we're moving into this and I'm really excited about the plan going forward, being able to develop pitches and that sort of thing. It's exciting.”

Bucknam’s best outing came March 21 against Middle Tennessee State University, when he struck out 14 batters while allowing only three hits and one walk over seven shutout innings. Later in the season, as his workload more than doubled his innings count last year, he had rougher outings at Louisiana Tech and LSU, performances which he examines through similar lenses.

“You play for the results and if your process isn't giving you the results you want, then there's probably something wrong with your process,” said Bucknam. “When I look at stuff, it's how much of this was baseball, as it's such an unpredictable game, and then how much of this is my process and things that I can control.”

Central to that for him is the following question: How many were executed properly? 

“Typically, you throw 100 pitches in a day, so you're trying to get something around 70-plus,” said Bucknam. “If you do that, you're probably going to have a great day. That's the biggest one that I look at. … When you're rolling, it's a hard feeling to match. It's one of the most enjoyable feelings, punching tickets. I look forward to doing that more as a Blue Jay.”