What Kyle Harrison Can Teach Us About Ricky Tiedemann

There’s a week at the end of every season when Triple-A welcomes some of baseball’s top prospects for a brief stint at the minor leagues’ highest level before they hang up their cleats for the year (or in many cases, head to the Arizona Fall League). Expanded rosters at the big league level leave a slew of freshly vacated Triple-A roster spots. Meanwhile, the Low-, High-, and Double-A seasons end when there’s still a week left on the Triple-A schedule, creating a sizable pool of lower-level up-and-comers. These prospects, especially the younger ones, are looking to prove themselves capable of standing up to competition beyond what their developmental schedule might otherwise deem appropriate. It’s also a big reason why so many of the following year’s prospect list write-ups include some version of the phrase “He notched a few innings at Triple-A at the end of last season.”

One such prospect this year is Ricky Tiedemann, the young lefty hurler who sits atop the Blue Jays prospect list and currently ranks 18th on our overall Top 100. If that résumé sounds oddly familiar, you may be picking up echos of recent big league debutant Kyle Harrison, who tops the Giants list and is stacked just spot above Tiedemann on our Top 100. The similarities don’t end there, though. Both Harrison and Tiedemann were drafted as teenagers, and both boast a tremendous punchout ability that belies their years, posting strikeout rates above 40% at various points in their young pro careers.

Before I continue, a caveat: Due to a combination of mid-season arm soreness and a short leash when it came to his pitch count, Tiedemann only threw 44 innings in 2023. That’s important to keep in mind, especially considering that Harrison’s lowest innings total in a pro season is more than double that. Tiedemann still has to demonstrate that he’s capable of maintaining his prowess over the type of innings load that Harrison has endured. With that established, let’s dig into how the two young southpaws resemble one another, and more importantly, what sets Tiedemann apart, at least for now.

Watching them pitch, it’s easy to clock the surface-level similarities between Harrison and Tiedemann, and draw some conclusions about how they are succeeding. They both throw from low arm slots that enable their respective fastballs to play up; the odd angle from which those pitches approach the plate makes it hard for hitters to discern their shape:

In his piece detailing Harrison’s big league debut, my colleague Michael Baumann described how Harrison’s deceptive delivery helps his fastball play up despite it maxing out in the low-to-mid-90s. The same is true for Tiedemann. But while they each boast a deceptive delivery, largely aided by their low-three-quarters arm slot, each of them does something different to build upon that foundation. Harrison enhances his fastball’s playability with a tremendous lunge forward that leaves him extremely low to the ground, with a deep knee bend by the time he releases the ball. Tiedemann doesn’t get into his legs quite so much, but he sets up closer to the first base side of the mound and uses his couple inches of extra length to further exaggerate the horizontal angle from which he’s releasing the ball.

Here’s a look at the same side-by-side from above, but with freeze frames to show the differences in where they’re each starting on the rubber, as well as the differences they create in their release point despite similar arm slots:

Perhaps the most important distinction between their respective heaters is the extra velocity and spin that Tiedemann has demonstrated. Tiedemann’s fastball sits in the 95-96 mph range with above-average spin. (Here I’ll note that this might be where the fatigue of a larger workload could come into play if their inning counts were more similar.) Indeed, Tiedemann’s ability to spin the ball carries across his arsenal and further separates his offerings from those of Harrison. Most notable in this regard is the shape of his breaking ball, as well as his command of and confidence in his changeup.

While Harrison’s slider has been widely dubbed a slurve due to its downward break, Tiedemann slings a sweeper across his body with much less vertical movement, which further enhances the deception of his first base-side release point. He also throws it a bit slower than Harrison does, creating a wider gap between the velocity of his breaking ball and four-seamer, and helping to keep hitters off balance.

Tiedemann also throws his changeup nearly twice as often (again, keep the small sample in mind), and is able to consistently locate it in the zone for whiffs. The cambio features induced vertical break (IVB) separation from his fastball of 12.6 inches, compared to Harrison’s 9.3 inches, which frequently inspires hitters to swing over Tiedemann’s changeup, with bat paths that may have connected with Harrison’s.

As Baumann noted, Harrison threw only two changeups in his big league debut and gave up too much hard contact to emerge unscathed by big league hitters. Aside from a lights-out second appearance, his big league results have paled in comparison to his tenure as a dominant minor leaguer. He’s continued to give up hard contact, and has allowed long balls at a career-high rate of 2.43 HR/9. Tiedemann’s changeup combats that by opening up more of the strike zone, in particular the lower half of it, which has resulted in more groundballs and has significantly stifled opposing hitters’ ability to square him up. Between his 11 starts at Double-A and his one at Triple-A, batters are slugging a measly .275 against him, with just four of the 30 hits he’s allowed going for extra bases. He’s only allowed one home run this season and just four total in his 122.2 professional innings of work. Furthermore, the contact he does allow is mostly quite soft, with singles eked out of seeing-eye grounders, weak bloops to the shallow outfield, and some less-than-stellar defense to back him up (his Double-A BABIP clocked in at a staggering .415, while his FIP was just 2.12).

Here are all three of Tiedemann’s pitches:

His changeup usage has opened up the bottom half of the arm side of his strike zone, which has most notably resulted in Tiedemann’s impressive ability to miss bats throughout the zone. His in-zone swinging strike rate at Double-A this season was 18%, which is higher than his overall swinging strike rate. As I mentioned in my recent piece about swinging strike rates, minor leaguers with high in-zone swinging strike rates may have an edge in terms of translating their dominance to higher levels as they advance.

As you might expect, he mostly uses his changeup against righties in order to play its movement off of his fastball and get flails on the outside part of the plate. Here’s an at-bat where he first gets Yankees prospect Brandon Lockridge to chase a tailing changeup that he can’t reach, then makes him contend with gas near his hands:

Tiedemann has also displayed a willingness to fill the zone with his entire arsenal. So in addition to his pitches looking similar and then drastically diverting from their shared trajectory (as illustrated by the overlay of his full arsenal), and him messing with hitters’ timing and expectations (as shown in the at-bat against Lockridge), he’ll toy with batters by throwing his slider to the same spots as his fastball, so that the mind-fudgery is based not on a ball looking hittable until it dives out of a batter’s reach, but rather it looking unhittable until it sweeps into a guy’s reach.

Here’s an example of two pitches he offered up in the same plate appearance to Phillies prospect Carlos De La Cruz – a mid-90s fastball and a low-80s slider. Both pitches end up in virtually the same place, but their wildly different paths and velocities prevent De La Cruz from offering at either of them, despite them being well within the zone:

Still, there’s a fine line between this and a hanging breaking ball, and Tiedemann will need to refine his command to continue getting away with this as he advances. Harrison’s slurve may not have missed bats in the zone to the degree that Tiedemann’s did, but he was far from timid about using it throughout the zone. But when Harrison tried something similar against Bryce Harper in his debut, he missed his spot just enough to be quickly punished as the ball was crushed into the right field stands.

In his debut with Triple-A Buffalo, the 21-year-old Tiedemann wasn’t tasked with facing the likes of Harper, but he did encounter a particularly fearsome cohort of Orioles youngsters, including their top two prospects, Jackson Holliday and Coby Mayo (who rank first and 21st on our overall Top 100). Neither of them managed to reach base, and Tiedemann notched a strikeout against each of them before the game was over.

His strikeout against Mayo came in the top of the first inning. He started the at-bat with a fastball and a sweeper, both of which stayed far enough out of the zone not to tempt Mayo. He battled back with three consecutive four-seamers: one that was far enough out of the zone not to pull Mayo’s bat off of his shoulder, and two that Mayo struggled to catch up to. Tiedemann then rung him up with a back-foot slider, inducing a far-too-early hack from Mayo:

Holliday made weak groundball contact in the first inning on a 98 mph offering from Tiedemann, then faced him again in the third and was sent down swinging after patiently working the count full. Once again, Tiedemann relied on his heater/sweeper combo (he did throw 13% changeups in this outing, though they did not factor into these two at-bats):

It would be an unfair exaggeration to deem Harrison a cautionary tale – he’s not yet old enough to rent a car, and already has an 11-strikeout big league outing under his belt. But given their similarities, there is much to be gleaned from Harrison’s early missteps in terms of how Tiedemann might avoid stumbling on the same obstacles. In his Triple-A cameo, Tiedemann displayed much of what makes him so enticing, lasting four innings and striking out six, with two walks, two hits, and one unearned run, ending his first full season on a high note. If he can continue building on his gains during his stint in the Fall League and carry his successes into a fully healthy 2024 season, he shows promise as a rising star and future front-of-the-rotation starter.