Athletics To Promote Gunnar Hoglund

The A’s are set to promote pitching prospect Gunnar Hoglund for his major league debut, reports ESPN’s Jeff Passan. He’s already on the 40-man roster, so they’ll only need to open a spot on the active roster.

Hoglund, 25, was the 19th overall pick by the Blue Jays out of Ole Miss back in 2021. He landed with the Athletics as the headline prospect in the trade that sent Matt Chapman to Toronto. Hoglund’s path to the big leagues has been slowed by Tommy John surgery, but he pitched a full minor league season in 2024 and has been terrific through six Triple-A starts so far in 2025.

The elbow injury, plus some dip in velocity and diminished rate stats, prompted Hoglund’s stock to decline a bit in recent seasons. He still ranked 14th among A’s prospects at MLB.com heading into the season and 16th at Baseball America, but the general outlook had been that he profiled more as a back-of-the-rotation arm at this point.

That outlook has improved rapidly in 2025, however. After sitting 91.7 mph with his heater last year, Hoglund has seen his average fastball jump to 93.6 mph in 2025, per Statcast. His swinging-strike rate hasn’t made any substantial gains, but his overall strikeout rate is up from 22.7% last year to 26.1% this season. ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel wrote today that while Hoglund didn’t rank among his top-10 A’s prospects prior to the season, the early jump in his stuff has propelled him back to the No. 2 spot on his ranking of the A’s system, trailing only first baseman Nick Kurtz.

The improved stuff has led to improved results, at least in the earlygoing. Hoglund posted a 3.44 ERA, 22.7% strikeout rate, 7% walk rate and 39.1% grounder rate in 130 2/3 innings last year — with most of those innings coming in a pitcher-friendly Double-A setting. Despite pitching in an extremely hitter-friendly Triple-A Pacific Coast League this year — the same league in which he posted a 5.88 in five starts down the stretch in ’24 — Hoglund has delivered a 2.43 ERA, 26.1% strikeout rate, 6.1% walk rate and 44% ground-ball rate.

Adding a couple ticks to his fastball isn’t likely to put Hoglund on an ace trajectory, but there’s a notable gap between projecting as a mid-rotation arm and a more fungible fifth starter. With the arrow pointing up, the A’s will hope that he can now profile as more of the former. Beyond the velo jump, Hoglund has also begun to incorporate a sinker into his repertoire and has largely scrapped his slider in favor of more curveballs and changeups. He’s always had plus command, and the revamped and revitalized arsenal is reason for some optimism. McDaniel noted in his update on the A’s system that Hoglund now looks “the way he did at his best at Ole Miss.”

The A’s have effectively been working with four starters for the past couple weeks. Joey Estes has already been optioned to Triple-A after a pair of nightmarish starts to begin his season. Fellow righty J.T. Ginn hit the injured list with elbow inflammation a bit more than a week ago. Lefty Jacob Lopez got the nod in Tuesday’s game against the Rangers but was optioned to Triple-A after Texas tagged him for three runs in a 2 2/3-inning start during which he issued three walks.

Hoglund will step into the rotation alongside Luis Severino, Jeffrey Springs, JP Sears and Osvaldo Bido. Each of Severino, Sears and Bido has produced solid or better results. Springs had a decent start but has been torched for nine earned runs in his past 8 1/3 innings, ballooning his earned run average to 6.04.

On the whole, A’s starters rank 26th in the majors with a collective 4.66 ERA. Plugging Hoglund into the mix could be a nice boon. Getting a consistent fifth starter into the mix would ostensibly benefit the bullpen, which has the eighth-highest ERA in MLB (4.51), a reprieve as well.

In terms of service time, enough has elapsed in 2025 that Hoglund won’t accrue a full year even if he’s in the majors to stay. In that scenario, he’d finish the year with 151 days of service, putting him on track to be arbitration-eligible four times, rather than the standard three, as a Super Two player. The first of those trips through the arb process would come in the 2027-28 offseason, and he’d be under club control through 2031. Of course, being optioned to the minors at any point in the future could change either of those timelines, but the club’s hope will be that Hoglund’s minor league days are behind him. The A’s stockpiled a massive number of arms in their prior rebuild, but Sears is the only one who’s proven himself in the majors so far.