Dennis Lee-Imagn Images

At 2:26 a.m. ET on Tuesday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that the Athletics intended to call up their top pitching prospect, Gage Jump. First of all: Sweet Jesus, Jeff, go to sleep. If you keep burning the candle at both ends like this, you’re not going to be presentable for TV come October.

The A’s didn’t make the move official until Tuesday evening; Jump wasn’t on the 40-man roster, so they had to clear a roster spot by putting Aaron Civale on the IL with shoulder tendinitis and sliding Denzel Clarke over to the 60-day IL. The debut itself was a little rocky, as Jump allowed four runs and nine hits in five innings, but it’s exciting to see him in the majors all the same. And not just because of what it means for writers who traffic in song-lyric headlines.

Jump is a really good pitching prospect. He was the 73rd overall pick out of LSU in 2024 — bad timing for Jump, this was the only one of the past three drafts that didn’t have an LSU pitcher taken in the top three. I get it; Kade Anderson looks like the starting pitcher archetype, and Paul Skenes looks like a kaiju who ascended from the depths of the sea to defeat the starting pitcher archetype in honorable single combat.

Listed at 6-foot, 200 pounds, Jump is stocky and muscular, with a thick lower half that looks even thicker when he wears his socks high.

As you can see here, his delivery is a little twitchy. But the way he rocks backwards while holding the ball with a bent throwing arm allows him to hide the baseball from hitters. That makes 93-96 mph with little extension feel a couple ticks harder, and because he’s a short guy with a non-vertical arm angle, that fastball also has quite a bit of uphill rise on it.

When I was on my left-handed Guardians pitchers kick a couple weeks ago, I wrote about Erik Sabrowski’s fastball, which is unusual in that it gets huge movement on both planes. A pitcher with an extremely over-the-top arm angle — like Alex Vesia or Trey Yesavage — can backspin a four-seamer and get big rise on it, but that usually comes at the expense of arm-side run. Sabrowski gets both rise and run on his four-seamer; it’s unusual for a pitcher to achieve as much of both as he does.

There’s a little bit of this with Jump. I’m going to give you an impressive-sounding fun fact here and then immediately undermine it. Jump has pitched only five innings in the majors, but Baseball Savant has most of the same pitch tracking data for Triple-A, so we know the average velocity and movement of each of his pitches.

Only two big league lefties, Brock Burke and Payton Tolle, have a four-seamer that matches or beats Jump’s in induced vertical break, horizontal break, and velocity. Here’s the bucket of cold water: I’ve obviously sliced the parameters on my search quite thin in order to narrow it to two pitchers. Jump’s fastball isn’t some completely unprecedented monster pitch, but it does have an extremely encouraging combination of movement and velocity.

When our prospect guys put together the Athletics’ top prospects list, they gave a potential future grade of 50 or better to each of Jump’s four pitches, and 60s for both his fastball and slider.

Since then, Jump is now throwing three breaking balls: a gyro slider, a sweeper, and a slow curve. Plus a show-me changeup that he isn’t using much at the moment, but has potential. I love a low-spin offspeed pitch, though Jump still needs to learn to command it better.

Here’s the whole toolkit.

You’ll notice that all five of Jump’s pitches have generated a whiff rate of 30% or better in the minors. Obviously, this is a small sample and weak competition, but again, it shows that he’s got lots of weapons in his bandoleer.

But how did those weapons do in their first taste of big league competition?

It was a mixed bag. Jump started out great, navigating a perfect first inning (including two strikeouts) on just 10 pitches (including four whiffs).

In his debut, it was very clear how big league success is going to come for him: Changing speeds from his fastball to his breaking balls and climbing the ladder on hitters to get them to swing at eye-level fastballs. When he was on the offensive, the Mariners had a very hard time keeping up with him.

Unfortunately, Jump spent most of his debut on the back foot. We saw the effects of command-over-control in a 33-pitch second inning. He got ahead 0-1 on Josh Naylor, who poked a groundball single the other way. His 0-2 slider to the next batter, Rob Refsnyder, ended up over the heart of the plate, resulting in another groundball single. After that, Jump delivered the final 28 pitches of the inning with a runner in scoring position. Without room to maneuver, he failed to hit his spot on a few key pitches. He either got too much of the zone or missed it by a couple inches. And with runners on base, even a pair of sedate fly balls plated runs.

On one hand, Jump has a right to feel aggrieved by his messy line. The Mariners didn’t bludgeon him; his nine hits came out to seven singles and two doubles, and especially in the second inning, the contact he gave up was relatively soft. On the other hand, Jump allowed 11 baserunners in a three-inning span and was lucky only four of those runners scored. He might’ve been getting nickel-and-dimed, but he’s lucky the Mariners didn’t cash a couple of those pitches in for a dollar. That second-inning single by Refsnyder stands out; last year’s Refsnyder puts that in the seats.

Still, Jump got that first start out of the way, and while it wasn’t always pretty, he was competitive throughout it. We live and learn.

Jump is not the Athletics’ top prospect. That’d be Leo De Vries. I could tell you that he was one of just 11 prospects this past cycle to get a future value grade of 60 or higher, or that he was the no. 6 global prospect on our list. I think it’d be more evocative to point out that the A’s traded Mason Miller, who’s been the most unhittable pitcher in history, in order to get him. And De Vries is so good I think the A’s are going to win the trade in the long run.

It seems like every team has a college-aged shortstop prospect for whom the Hall of Fame is a reasonable best-case scenario; if you’re not sitting on the next Derek Jeter, you’re starting from a disadvantage.

Apart from De Vries, Jump is the Athletics’ best prospect, with a 50 FV. (Which means that my man Jamie Arnold isn’t even the best short college lefty with a weird delivery in his own organization. What a gut punch that is.)

Again, I don’t want to overstate Jump’s potential; he’s good, and I’m looking forward to seeing him pitch, but he’s not the next Skenes or anything. This promotion is interesting because of where it comes in the life cycle of the Athletics’ franchise.

The A’s won the AL West in 2020 and finished a competitive 86-76 the next year. Since then, they’ve been awful. Since 2022, they’re 282-421, which is the third-worst record in the big leagues over that time. Only the Rockies and White Sox won fewer games. And while they were in the midst of back-to-back 100-loss seasons, their ownership disgraced itself and insulted the city of Oakland at the start of a multi-year, multi-step move to Las Vegas. Even Moses is looking down on these guys and thinking, “Man, you’re taking forever to cross the desert.”

The vibes have not been good.

And the performance this year, to be honest, has not been great either. Brent Rooker and Tyler Soderstrom have been bad; Lawrence Butler has been beyond bad. But Nick Kurtz looks like left-handed Frank Thomas in a wig. On Tuesday, Kurtz snapped a 48-game on-base streak. Shea Langeliers is fourth in the AL in position player WAR, and Carlos Cortes has come out of nowhere at age 28 to hit like a switch-throwing José Ramírez. The pitching’s been subpar (the A’s are 22nd in team ERA and 26th in K-BB%), but mostly not disastrous. Tuesday night’s loss dropped the A’s to a game under .500, but that’s still good enough for first place in the AL West.

It happens sometimes. The path to victory has never been more open: This might be the first legitimately bad Astros team since, like, 2013. The Rangers seem to be on Year Three of their World Series hangover. I don’t know how much of the Mariners’ problems can be explained by Cal Raleigh’s struggles and/or injury. And the Angels would probably be better off if I didn’t say anything about them at all.

At this moment in time, the A’s are in the driver’s seat. Despite their own problems with pitching and injuries and down years from key players, they’re leading the division.

And after five years of rebuilding, they’re finally reloading. Jump isn’t their first big call-up of the year (Henry Bolte’s already up), and he won’t be the last. Of the 10 top prospects in the organization, eight are at Double-A or higher. If the future is not now, it’s soon.