Blue Jays: Top prospect Ricky Tiedemann deals with adversity in third start of 2023

This past Tuesday, Toronto Blue Jays’ pitching prospect Ricky Tiedemann ran into some adversity in his third start with the New Hampshire Fisher Cats (Jays’ Double-A affiliate). In just 2.1 innings, he gave up three hits, four walks, four earned runs, with five strikeouts to the Hartford Yard Goats (Colorado Rockies’ Double-A affiliate) before his night was done. This was his worst professional career start since his four runs, four hits, four walks in 4.2 innings performance back in July of 2022 when he was still with the Vancouver Canadians (Jays’ High-A affiliate). In doing so, his season ERA ballooned to 5.00 and his WHIP increased to 1.33, to go along with six walks and 20 strikeouts over nine innings of work.

Tiedemann was originally drafted by the Blue Jays in the third round of the 2021 MLB Draft and had quickly moved up their minor league system to Double-A in just one year’s time. He is currently the top prospect in the Jays’ system and ranked in the top 30 prospects in all of Major League Baseball for 2023. He is expected to continue his success and improve even more this year, potentially moving up to Triple-A and perhaps maybe even to the big leagues by the end of the season.

Poor outings such as the one witnessed on Tuesday night for Tiedemann have been a rarity since he began his professional pitching career in the Jays’ minor league system in 2022, as the majority of his outings were usually defined with stable control, dominance, and overpowering hitters. His career numbers of 2.77 ERA, 0.913 WHIP, with 137 strikeouts over 87.2 innings in the minors further show that he hasn’t encountered many bumps in the road thus far and that everything had been smooth sailing for him. 

As a result, having Tiedemann finally experience some adversity like this along the way will definitely help with his growth and development as a player, and strengthen his focus and mentality when battling opponents each time out. This will no doubt make him even better and stronger as he matures into a bonafide, big league pitcher in the near future. The main focus now will be to see how well he can bounce back in his next start to see how well he has learned from it. That will be what should separate him from the rest to become one of the best in the business in the foreseeable future.