Our #16 prospect takes the hill in his big league debut.
As the Mets are in the midst of their second string of 13 games without an off day, the need for the occasional spot starter has led to a few bullpen games with a Triple-A arm getting the bulk of the innings. It is unclear if Sunday’s game will be a traditional start or an opener/bullpen game start, but regardless, the person likely throwing the most pitches that day will be Mets’ prospect Blade Tidwell.
The Mets have not made this official yet, and likely won’t until after Saturday’s game, but the news has been reported by a number of sources, with Daniel Wexler having it first.
Tidwell, the 16th best prospect in the Mets’ system according to our minor league crew, Tidwell has made six starts for the Syracuse Mets thus far in 2025, and has had mixed results: he’s had three starts where he’s surrendered at least four earned runs, and three starts where he’s given up zero, one, and two runs. He has yet to pitch into the sixth inning this season, but his strikeouts have been creeping up as the season has progressed. He’s the current owner of a 5.00 ERA with 37 strikeouts and ten walks in 27.0 innings pitched.
Here is what our Steve Sypa had to say about Tidwell this offseason:
At 6’4”, 205-pounds, Tidwell has solid pitching frame. The right-hander has a little bit of violence in his delivery, throwing from a high-three-quarters arm slot with a quick, whippy arm and long action through the back. He is more of a control-over-command pitcher as a result, missing his spots but staying in the strike zone, which explains why he sometimes gets a bit homer prone and allows more hits than a pitcher with his kind of strikeout stuff generally does.
Tidwell has a large repertoire of pitches; he throws two fastballs, a four-seam variant and a two-seam variant, a harder gyro slider, a softer sweeping slider, a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup. In 2024, while pitching with Syracuse, he used his four-seam fastball 37.4% of the time, his cutter 20.8% of the time, his sweeping slider 14.3% of the time, his gyro slider 11.9% of the time, his two-seam fastball 7.7% of the time, his changeup 6.2% of the time, and his curveball 1.7% of the time.