Canadians Jonah Tong and Owen Caissie impress at Futures Game

ATLANTA – Jonah Tong started playing catch with his father at the age of four and for years Alex would crouch behind the plate while his son worked. But this past off-season, when a warm-up pitch from the fast-rising New York Mets prospect whizzed by his dad’s head and the glove only moved afterwards, he knew the time had come “to stop right there.”

“I didn’t want to have to call my mom and explain why we’re at the hospital,” Tong said with a laugh.

To be fair, the 22-year-old from Markham, Ont., is almost as hard to catch as he is to hit, flashing a fastball up to 97 m.p.h., a fall-off-the-table curveball and a newly refined changeup effective to hitters on both sides of the plate during a clean inning in Saturday’s Futures Game.

Tong still plays catch with Alex – “He’s my best throwing partner. He’s my hero,” said the son – but he also found plenty of backstops willing to squat for him at the Toronto Mets’ facility, fellow program alum Liam Hicks of the Miami Marlins among them.

It was there Tong changed the grip on his changeup – inverting his finger placement around the horseshoe at the suggestion of Eric Jagers, New York’s pitching director – and found a better movement profile for the offering.

The old version didn’t dive quite the way he’d wanted and the first time he tested the new grip in a catch session with his father, “my dad said, ‘Whoa, that one’s a little bit different.’ We got some technology on it and we saw the differences in the shape. It helped lose some vert, which we’re seeing a great return on.”

The changeup has perfectly complemented the rest of his repertoire, which comes out of a Tasmanian-Devil-like pitching motion that amplifies the deception and has earned the six-foot-one, 180-pound Tong comparisons to Tim Lincecum.

When he was in his early teens, Alex showed his son videos of the former San Francisco Giants star and while Tong, who stood only four-foot-eight as he entered high school, immediately spotted “a lot of things different than what I do … being able to see his aggression to the plate, his demeanor on the mound, how he finishes was something I tried to pick up as a kid and eventually it just evolve into who I am.”

Right now, that’s one of the most dominant strikeout pitchers in the minor-leagues, with 125 K’s in 78.2 innings across 15 starts at double-A Binghamton, with a 1.83 ERA and 0.928 WHIP. That earned him the second inning at the Futures Game, where he struck out one in a three-up, three-down inning in the prospect showcase.

Tong planned to return home to Markham for the remainder of the all-star break and “I guarantee you that when I get back, my dad’s going to be like, ‘Hey, want to go throw across the street real quick?’”

“He was my first throwing partner and just seeing the evolution of our journey together, it’s really special,” added Tong. “I wouldn’t be here without him.”

CAISSIE MASHES: Hard-hitting outfielder Owen Caissie of Burlington, Ont., extended his torrid hitting to the Futures Game, working two walks – one after an ABS challenge reversed a called third strike – and lashing an RBI double in four trips to the plate.

Even the one out made by the Chicago Cubs prospect, a groundout, came on an 106 m.p.h. rocket that was the second-hardest hit ball in the showcase. All of it comes amid a red-hot 30-game stretch with triple-A Iowa beginning June 1 during which he’s hit .339/.450/.752 with 12 homers, pulling him from a cold start after off-season core muscle surgery and subsequent groin tightness wiped out his spring training.

“Not going to lie, my body was kind of destroyed at the start,” said Caissie. “It probably took my body about a month to really adjust because I didn’t do spring training, basically. So it was really hard going from nothing to like 100 per cent. And then my hitting started turning around, probably like a month and a half, two months in.”

It very much has and with 19 home runs in 73 games, he’s already matched his total in 127 contests last year, a solid .278/.375/.472 triple-A debut which he nonetheless described as “a failure.”

“I learned a lot from it,” the 22-year-old continued. “I didn’t necessarily have a bad season, but it wasn’t the season I wanted to have. This season, it’s going well. I’m going to continue to do what I want to do, execute my game plan every game, which is really simple, just line drives up the middle.”

With the Cubs scorching in the standings and deep in the outfield, Caissie’s path to the big leagues appears blocked for the time being, which has led to speculation that he could be used to land big-league help ahead of the trade deadline.

The pending free agency of Kyle Tucker along with Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki being up after the 2026 season may eventually create a window for him, leading some to believe the Cubs will hold him, but it’s all noise he keeps firmly tuned out.

“To be honest, I couldn’t really care, I don’t check that stuff at all,” he said. “I’m just really trying to be the best player I can be because, ultimately, I want to make it to Chicago. That’s the goal. I’m not really paying attention to anything like that. Just playing my game every day, showing up to the field wanting to win.”

DRAFT MEMORIES I: Cleveland Guardians reliever Cade Smith didn’t sign when the Minnesota Twins selected him as a high-schooler in the 16^th round of the 2017 draft, opting instead to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

While it’s a decision the native of Abbotsford, B.C., believes set him on the path that’s led to his emergence as an integral part of the Guardians bullpen, the call between college or pro several prep players will face once the draft wraps up this week is one he believes is individual to each person.

“When I got drafted out of high school, I had real confidence that if I were to go to college that I would be able to develop and have that chance again three years later,” Smith said during a recent interview. “One of the biggest benefits that I got from college was learning myself, learning how to learn and that maturity is a huge aspect. Maybe you’re away from home and you have to learn how to create your own support networks and handle adversity. That was a huge, huge valuable thing for me. I can’t say for each kid that in general they should do this or take one option over the other, because circumstances differ. But I found the value in being able to mature and to learn.”

Smith’s second turn through eligibility came in 2020, when the pandemic led to a five-round draft in which he wasn’t picked. But that gave him an opportunity to better find the right fit for his needs.

“I wanted to go into an organization that was renowned for pitching development and that’s the reason I chose Cleveland,” said Smith. “I wanted to see what I could do to maximize the gifts that God’s given me and to put in that work.”

DRAFT MEMORIES II: The Canadian junior national team had a six-hour layover in Miami on its way back from its Dominican Summer League tour in 2015, which turned into a life-changing stop for Josh Naylor in his draft year.

Between flights, the Marlins invited him out for a pre-draft workout and a few weeks later ended up making him the 12^th overall pick.

“That’s just God working in mysterious ways,” he said recently. “I went to Marlins Park, hit BP and took groundballs, got back to the airport, checked back in and met my teammates at the gate. So maybe that was it for them. They saw enough and they wanted to take me at that pick. But that experience was kind of crazy.”

When did he know the Marlins were going to take him? 

“After pick 11,” he replied with a smile.

The draft experience for Naylor, now with the Arizona Diamondbacks, is why his advice for Canadian players waiting to hear their name called is “whatever happens, happens.”

“Don’t put pressure on yourself,” he continued. “Don’t, don’t have any expectations, whether you’re dead-set on getting into pro ball, or you’re 50/50 pro ball/college/JUCO, whatever the case is. Make the best decision for your own individual growth. Everyone’s timetable is different. Obviously, the goal is to get to the big-leagues. There’s no rushing it. … I try to think about things like three or four years down the road, like what am I going to do today to make three or four years down the road better and more successful? That’s probably the best advice I can give.”