Talk to Vancouver Canadians flame-throwing left-hander Johnny King for 10 minutes and you find yourself pondering how low his resting heart rate might be. He comes off as calm, composed, and confident. The top pitching prospect in the Toronto Blue Jays’ organization, King is 19 years old but presents older.
That makeup is bound to be an asset as he goes through the Blue Jays system, working in lockstep with a fastball that tops out at 97 miles per hour and a curveball ranked by Baseball America as the best among the Toronto farmhands.
King is the youngest player in the high-A Northwest League. The average age for pitchers in the six-team circuit, according to baseball-reference.com, is 23. He’s dominated his fair share of hitters to date, though, striking out 39 and allowing 18 hits in 27 and two-third innings through nine starts.
Going into a projected Saturday start at Nat Bailey Stadium against the visiting Eugene Emeralds, King’s earned run average is 2.60. He was knocked around in his last game, giving up five earned and getting a single out before getting pulled Sunday on the road against the Spokane Indians. Prior to that, his ERA was a barely visible 0.99.
King's Maturity and Mentality
“Being mature is a big part of this game. You have to deal with a lot of different things,” said King, a 6-foot-3, 210 pounder from Naples, Fla., whose arsenal on the mound also includes a change-up. “And I work with a lot of older guys. I’m learning a lot from all of them, both on the field and off. A lot of them went to college and I’m learning about the things that I might have missed out on.”
“The mental part is something I work on. Being a redheaded Italian … I know I can have a fierce fire in me,” King added.
The Blue Jays picked King in the third round of the 2024 Major League Baseball amateur draft out of the Naples High School program, and he received a $1.24 million signing bonus, which was the third-highest total for that round that year.
Rising Through the Ranks
He split last season between the Florida Complex League and the single-A Dunedin Blue Jays and struck out 105 hitters in just 61 and two-thirds innings over the two levels. Going into Saturday, he’s struck out 144 hitters in 89 and a third innings for his pro career, or a gaudy 14.5 batters per nine innings.
MLB Pipeline’s scouting report on King at the start of the season pegged him as having “all the talent he needs to skyrocket onto the Top 100 list” of prospects across all of minor league baseball, and called him a “a must-watch prospect for Blue Jays fans on his start nights this summer.”
Pipeline and Baseball America both had him as Toronto’s No. 4 prospect to begin the campaign, behind right-hander Trey Yesavage and shortstops Arjun Nimmala and JoJo Parker. With Yesavage solidified as a full-time big leaguer, the Toronto rankings will change when they’re updated in the coming weeks and King will rise.
Learning from the Best
King grew up a fan of longtime Los Angeles Dodgers ace lefty Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw, 38, who retired at the end of last year with 223 wins over 18 seasons, also relied heavily on a big bending curveball.
And King works out in the winters with another noted southpaw in Chris Sale, 37, a nine-time MLB all-star and former Cy Young Award winner with the Atlanta Braves. Sale was 7-3 with a 1.89 ERA going into Atlanta’s game with the Boston Red Sox on Thursday. He started the day with 152 wins over his 16-year career in the bigs.
Sale, who’s originally from Lakeland, Fla., and King share the same agent and they live in the same area in the off-season.
“I really like training with him. I’m learning a lot,” King said. “He’s pitched very successfully in the big leagues for a very long time. He’s a mentor. He shows me what it takes.”
“I talk to him here and there during the season. I try not to bother him too much. He’s pitching every fifth day at that level so he’s awfully busy,” King added.
Yesavage, 22, made four appearances with the C’s last summer as part of playing at all four full-season minor league stops in the Blue Jays system before getting called up to Toronto for the late season. He was the Blue Jays’ first-round pick (No. 20 overall) in that same 2024 draft as King, and he was a junior at East Carolina University at the time.
Vancouver’s six-game set with the Emeralds — who are a San Francisco Giants farm team — runs through Sunday afternoon. Tickets are available on the team website.
