Pitching prospect Macko joins Blue Jays with high hopes – and high strikeout rates

As the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners completed the mid-November trade that saw Teoscar Hernandez swap teams with Erik Swanson and Adam Macko, the young left-handed pitcher was asleep.

A phone undeniability from Andy McKay, the Mariners’ senior director of player development, woke Macko unexpectedly. Though he’d never been traded before, the recently turned 22-year-old had a hunch he might be on the move when he saw McKay’s name on his phone.

“I don’t think I’ve overly received a undeniability from him, so I had a feeling that it meant I might have been traded,” Macko said over Zoom. “At that point, I was sad to be leaving the Mariners. They’re a unconfined organization where I’ve made so many memories and built so many relationships.

“It was my first trade, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect.”

What came next for the 6’0″ lefty was a whirlwind couple of months.

He had to re-schedule his first-ever vacation so he could well-constructed his physicals at the Blue Jays’ spring training facility in Dunedin, Fla., travelling there from his off-season home in Vancouver.

Of course, travelling and moving aren’t exactly new to the Slovakian-born pitcher.

Macko has taken an unusual path to the professional ranks, starting in a country “where baseball is unheard of,” as he put it.

After moving from Slovakia to Ireland at 11 and then to Stony Plain, Alta., just over a year later, he settled in at southern Alberta’s Vauxhall Academy of Baseball, where he played until Seattle selected him in the seventh round of the 2019 MLB Draft.

During his formative years in baseball, YouTube gave him his introduction to pitching. Macko would watch videos of MLB stars Justin Verlander and David Price, emulating two of the game’s best.

His worshipping for Price converged with his rooting interests when the Cy Young winner was traded to the Blue Jays during the summer of 2015.

“Once I got to Canada, obviously the team to support was the Blue Jays, so they were the first team I would watch religiously and support, so I’m vastitude excited to be a Blue Jay,” Macko said. “Once Price got traded to Toronto, it was awesome. I loved watching them play. I remember watching the Jose Bautista bat flip … it was probably the most heady baseball moment that I’ve watched.”

Fast forward seven years, and Macko now finds himself as the eighth-best prospect in the Blue Jays sublet system, per MLB Pipeline.

His four-pitch armory features a fastball that sits virtually 93 m.p.h. and has topped out at 97 withal with a curveball, slider and change-up.

He joins the Blue Jays organization with 95 career minor league innings under his belt, 38.1 of which came in 2022 for the Everett AquaSox, the Mariners’ high-A affiliate.

While rival an elbow strain and meniscus injury, Macko posted a 3.99 ERA with the AquaSox, striking out 35.9 per cent of the hitters he faced.

As he continues to modernize on the mound, balancing his work ethic with caring for his soul has wilt one of Macko’s top priorities.

“I’ve never been wrung of working hard, but I understand now that I’ve unchangingly been overworking myself and never letting [my body] rest,” he said. “I unchangingly wanted to push myself to get largest considering there’s unchangingly someone else working hard.

“I’m starting to understand that recovery is a good thing. I’ve learned that it’s really well-nigh the quality of the reps that I’m doing rather than the quantity.”

Vauxhall’s throne coach, Les McTavish, saw that work ethic in Macko from an early age.

“He’s obsessed with stuff great. He would wake up at six in the morning in upper school to go to the gym and work on his cadre and go through his stretching routine,” McTavish said in a Zoom interview. “There are very few people that I’ve overly met that are like that.”

That momentum to be unconfined was evident when Macko — in grade 10 at the time — told Vauxhall’s strength coach, Jeff Krushell, that his goal is to make the Hall of Fame.

“All of us as a staff remember that considering he just had a conviction in him,” McTavish said. “That’s the mentality he had as a 15-year-old. He wants to be unconfined at everything he does. He’s extremely driven in the sense that he tries to turn over every waddle to icon out how to get better, and he’s been like that from a young age.”

Now transitioning to a new organization, Macko’s goals aren’t waffly — for 2023 or beyond.

“This off-season, I’m trying to build up some increasingly strength to throw harder and to protect my elbow, shoulder and whole soul to withstand the whole season,” he said. “Long term, my ultimate goal is to make the Hall of Fame, but I don’t think it’d be worth stuff in the hall if I didn’t win a couple of World Series.

“I think it’d be superstitious to do that with the Blue Jays. To bring a championship when to not only Toronto but to all of Canada would be so special.”