Tiedemann shows ace-like signs but biggest hurdle lies ahead in 2023 – TSN.ca

TORONTO — Heading into the year, the name Ricky Tiedemann wasn’t on the mainstream radar.

As we head into 2023, however, there is only one question in the collective mind of Toronto Blue Jays supporters: When will Tiedemann be ready for the big leagues?

It’s a testament to the 20-year-old left-hander’s hard work that it’s even realistic to ask that question just over a year into his pro career after he was picked – stolen is now a better description – with the 91st overall pick Draft 2021.

A calendar year and three minor league tiers later, Tiedemann has wrapped up his first full pro season in the Double-A, catapulting herself from a projectable 6-foot-4 left-back to a consensus top-50 prospect in the sport.

Over the course of the spring and summer, Tiedemann checked all the boxes the organization had quietly lined up for him and then some, amassing a solid 78.2 innings baseline but also dazzling with the tune of 2.17 ERA and 13.4 strikeouts per nine innings.

That was enough for the Blue Jays to shut him down early and send him back to the club complex in Dunedin to relax in his off-season.

Amazingly, it could be his last winter as a minor league.

“I think it’s pretty surreal and I feel pretty blessed to have made it this far in my freshman year,” said Tiedemann, who will now focus on training and light throwing before following next month California returns. “I know a lot of guys spend a lot of years in the same place and I can’t really complain about my situation at the moment as I’m in a good position age wise and feel good physically. I’m happy with where I am right now, but I definitely want to be at the highest level, no matter what.”

In addition to the physical break, it allows Tiedemann to sit down and mentally process it all after finishing on a high note with four short stint starts at the Double-A New Hampshire.

Maybe he can even catch his breath.

“I think that was also one of the reasons the Blue Jays sent me back to Florida to do some sort of unloading,” Tiedemann said. “It’s been a pretty hectic first pro season. A lot has happened.”

HOW IT HAPPENED

To find out how Tiedemann blew through the lower undertones this year, you have to go back to last summer’s post-draft.

One of the first stories told about the Huntington Beach product was that it was a ball of talented clay just waiting for a pro team to take the molding.

The left-hander hovered around 90mph as a draft prospect, one whose training regimen consisted of a routine in his home garage.

“The free weights we’re talking about were literally just four dumbbells,” laughs Tiedemann.

“Lifting wasn’t something I really did before I got drafted. I wasn’t deeply into a routine on that aspect of everything. I think when I got drafted they saw that, they knew that and they slowly did it to me. I started exercising and eating right and I got a lot stronger physically and it showed on the hill.

After Tiedemann was drafted last summer, he didn’t pick up a ball for three weeks, just concentrating on his diet and fitness.

When he finally jumped back up a hill in a Dunedin backfield for the first time in a Blue Jays uniform, the stuff had jumped. Exponentially.

“I realized that it was the best thing I’ve ever felt,” said Tiedemann. “Someone saw me throwing and realized it was a little bit harder, so we got some numbers on it and it ended up being a lot harder than I used to throw. After that, I was excited to see what I could achieve in my first year.”

From sitting 89-92 in the summer of 2021 to pumping in the mid-90s and touching as high as 98, Tiedemann was a different pitcher.

“The Blue Jays were the perfect team,” said Tiedemann.

Behind the scenes, the Jays tried to dampen internal expectations, but that all went out the window when Tiedemann started carving low-level hitters when games started this spring.

Single-A Dunedin presented no challenge. He finished with a 1.80 ERA in six starts.

At High-A Vancouver, he pushed through eight more starts with a 2.39 ERA.

By this time, Tiedemann had pitched 67.2 innings and allowed just 34 hits, hitting 103 batters.

Tiedemann’s name was now firmly on the mainstream radar.

THE DOUBLE ARRIVAL

His first half earned him a trip to the Futures Game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and that’s where his trip ended in the low-minors.

The Jays planned to promote him to Double-A for his next start, and a certain Alek Manoah, who had just punctuated his own meteoric rise through the Minors with an All-Star Game appearance, wanted to let the young left know.

The picture-perfect phone call didn’t quite go according to plan.

“Right after the Futures game, I drove with my family to a lake in the middle of the desert, so it was quite difficult to reach me,” Tiedemann recalls with a smile. “I was in the pool and not on my phone and he called me and FaceTimed me about five times and I was like, ‘What? What was that?’ He ended up texting me and telling me to answer, but I wasn’t on my phone for a while. Finally the next day a coach told me what was going to happen that he would call me to say I was getting promoted. It was supposed to be a cool moment, but I wasn’t on my phone.”

When he got to Double-A, it was obvious that Tiedemann’s season was ending as the Jays limited him to no more than three innings per start.

He mostly drove through those short stints and only allowed five hits in 11 innings.

Tiedemann’s season could not have gone better and now there is a strong basis to take the next step.

“It’s about as ideal as you can imagine,” said Joe Sclafani, Blue Jays’ director of player development.

WHERE THE NEXT GOES

The next step in Tiedemann’s evolution, and perhaps the most difficult to navigate, is to delve deeper into the games and continue to show front-line starter fabrics and authority.

He wasn’t allowed to complete more than five frames this year, and his pitch count was 84.

The talented left-hander was kind of on a leash, and he knew it.

“I felt really good in my five-inning stints and I definitely feel like I can last longer without a doubt,” Tiedemann said. “That’s the most I’ve ever thrown in a baseball season, and the Blue Jays knew that, and we kind of had a plan and we stuck to it and ended up getting a good amount of innings, but I know that.” they’re going to ask more of me in the future, so I just have to be prepared and make sure I can pull through this.”

As the Jays monitored the data and Tiedemann’s release point all summer — a drop in release point is a surefire indicator that a pitcher is tiring over the course of the season — he was still in a great place, even if he wasn’t 98 mph reached as it was earlier this year.

Tiedemann had essentially doubled his innings total the previous season, and the tremendous Velo uptick mostly held up.

“I was very happy with that because I knew I would get the bike so quickly. I didn’t want to be one of those guys where I just fall off halfway through the season and come back and throw 90,” said Tiedemann.

Realistically, Tiedemann could get to 120-130 innings in 2023, which is a pretty heavy workload these days but also a total yet to cover as he gets deeper into the games.

The cautionary tale is former top prospect Nate Pearsonwho cruised through the lower levels, but when he took off the kid gloves in 2019 and delved deeper into the games, both command issues and health issues came into play and he was sadly unable to get the ship back to order and up getting back on track there period.

“It’s one of the last steps and extremely challenging,” Sclafani said of what Tiedemann faces next year in his campaign at the age of 20. “Successful in short bursts is hard enough, but it gets harder the deeper you go. Hitters also get paid. When they see you once or twice they usually have a good sense of how you are trying to attack them, how you look and they can pick things up. It’s the difference between an effective pitcher and a frontline starter. Manoah shows it daily and some of it isn’t even stuff. It’s just a competitive factor and guts that will get you there. That’s what separates a lot of these guys.”

With a lively fastball, a solid changeup and a developing slider, Tiedemann’s repertoire and performance look like that of a top league starter.

If you want to nitpick his season, he may have ran a few batters too many and needs to find more consistency with his slider in his higher speed band, but none of this is new to Tiedemann.

“I’ve always had a pretty good transition in my own eyes because I’m just a left, unconventional pitcher and haven’t always pitched the hardest,” he noted. “The slider, that’s what I was dying to get rid of, but just increasing speed in my fastball also got my off-speed down and sharpened my slider and it was more just about throwing shots with them.”

Back to the question asked at the beginning: When is Ricky Tiedemann ready for the Oberliga?

That question will be asked several times to the Jays’ front office at next spring training.

You say Tiedemann will answer that himself.

“You are 100 percent right, all eyes will be on him next year,” Sclafani said. “Ricky will be the one to determine when he’s ready. We go through the same process as we do every year and we have the benchmarks we’re looking for. When he hits those, you’ve seen us guys push pretty quickly when we think they’re ready. Our top league team is now poised to win. So if we think they’re ready and can help us in the top leagues, they’ll see that with their performance.”