It hasn’t taken New Balance Baseball Future Stars Series alum Ricky Tiedemann long to make an impact in the Arizona Fall League.
The 21-year-old left-handed starter was named the AFL’s Pitcher of the Week after a strong debut for the Surprise Saguaros, striking out a league-high seven batters while allowing only one run on three hits and three walks over five innings in his October 3 debut.
Ranked as the No. 24 prospect in all of baseball in FSS Plus analyst Joe Doyle’s most recent Top 100 list, Tiedemann has taken something of a circuitous route to get to that point, one that took him through multiple Future Stars Series events.
An alum of both the loaded 2019 International Week event at Fenway Park, as well as the 2021 Pre-Draft Combine after going unselected in the COVID-shortened 2020 Draft, Tiedemann was taken with the No. 91 overall pick by the Toronto Blue Jays not long after his strong showing in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
His 2022 professional debut saw him reach Double-A at just 19 years old, before he was shut down after a handful of starts with the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, who just hosted the most recent Underclass Elite event this past weekend. This year, Tiedemann was on track to make his big-league debut before an injury cost him ten weeks of his season, but he still finished the year having debuted in Triple-A, spinning four scoreless innings for the Buffalo Bisons in his last outing of the season before heading to the AFL, where he leads the way with 13 strikeouts thus far.
Tiedemann is joined by multiple other FSS alums on the prestigious fall circuit, including Toronto teammate Dasan Brown, Cooper Hjerpe, Drew Romo, Dominic Pipkin and Max Muncy.
Muncy currently ranks among the league’s top 20 with an .824 OPS through his first five games, while Hjerpe has thrown two scoreless, hitless outings after missing over three months of the the regular season with an injury.
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