NEW YORK — Jonah Tong grew tired of the walks.
“It kind of drove me almost insane,” he said.
Tong, a 20-year-old right-handed pitcher whom the New York Mets drafted in the seventh round in 2022 out of Ontario, Canada, tantalized evaluators last year with scary stuff and ghastly command.
Across his time in the Florida Complex League and Low-A St. Lucie in 2023, Tong struck out 38 percent of the batters he faced, but also walked 22 percent of them, which equated to 9.4 free passes per nine innings. The strikeout numbers grabbed attention, but the huge walk totals pointed to a major problem. He needed to make some changes.
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Now, with a new slider mirrored after one of the game’s best pitchers and fine-tuned mechanics, Tong could follow Christian Scott’s lead as the next Mets prospect worth getting excited about from an improving farm system for pitchers.
Over five outings (23 2/3 innings) with St. Lucie and High-A Brooklyn, Tong has yet to allow an earned run. He has maintained a robust 48.9 percent strikeout rate. He has cut his walk rate more than half, lowering it to 9 percent.
Jonah Tong was as advertised in his Cyclones debut on Thursday. The 20 year old has not allowed an earned run this season over 25.2 innings. #AmazinStartsHere #LGM #MiLB pic.twitter.com/52UHzs1lDk
— Brooklyn Cyclones (@BKCyclones) May 2, 2024
“He’s a guy who has really ascended through a lot of hard work and patience,” Brooklyn pitching coach Dan McKinney said. “He made a big-time commitment to cutting down on the free passes. And he’s confident in what he needs to do to have success. He has really bought into his process.”
For Tong, the turnaround started with a mix of exasperation and openness.
After another short outing last year in the Florida Complex League in which he issued a few more walks, Tong said he returned to the dugout and told coaches, “Hey, I gotta figure something out here because this is just getting ridiculous. The pitches are great. They are in spots I want them to be. But they are just not getting the results I need.”
During spring training in 2023, Mets officials, including integration pitching coach Garrett Baker, first talked with Tong about adding a slider. Part of Baker’s job is to help players learn new pitches and make changes using data and building off a pitcher’s original arsenal. Several within the Mets’ staff believed Tong needed to give batters a different plane. After the walks piled up during the 2023 regular season with Tong using just his fastball and curveball, he reintroduced the conversation by telling Baker, “Let’s look at a short slider thing we were talking about in spring training.”
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Tong’s arsenal features a fastball that sits around 93 mph with ride, which gives the illusion that it’s rising. He also has a big, slow curveball that contains depth. The Mets wanted to give him another pitch to bridge the gap between the curveball and fastball, one that he could locate more in the strike zone. Hence, the addition of his slider.
Tong referred to Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow as “a big influence” on the slider he ended up adopting. The night Tong spoke to Baker, he said he stayed up with a ball in his hand in the hotel, just getting a feel for the grip and hand placement. He studied other pitchers’ sliders. He spoke with a couple of teammates. He listened to Glasnow’s lucid interviews. For months, he worked with Mets coaches. By January 2024, he said he was confident in the pitch. So far this season, at least one rival evaluator has compared the pitch mix, including the slider, to Glasnow’s (though Glasnow throws much harder).
It wasn’t the first time Tong tried to emulate a great pitcher.
Tong said that since he was 4 years old, his father has coached him and “wanted to shape him into a certain pitcher.”
“One of the first names he brought up was Tim Lincecum,” Tong said. “He said, ‘I want you to pitch like Greg Maddux, throw as hard as Nolan Ryan and be deceptive like Lincecum.’ I’m like, ‘OK.’”
Jonah Tong struck out Nick Maton, a guy with more than 500 plate appearances in the major leagues, for his first Brooklyn strikeout as part of a scoreless top of the 1st.
#AmazinStartsHere #MiLB #LGM📷 pic.twitter.com/XfgWZB4bz1
— Brooklyn Cyclones (@BKCyclones) May 2, 2024
Tong added, “My father is really competitive and has always said, ‘You might as well shoot for the moon.’”
Tong is listed at 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds (Lincecum was listed at 5-11, 170 pounds and Maddux was 6-0, 170 pounds) but he was a couple of inches shorter and a couple of dozen pounds lighter in high school, when the Mets first heard of him. Tong is from Markham, a place like others in Canada where hockey dominates. No matter. Late at night — even on school nights — Tong and his father would search the internet, inputting words like “best curveball ever,” and get to work.
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“His dad and him, it was like a Tim Lincecum-type story,” former Mets scout Jon Updike said. “They did all their work. They did all their studying on movement and how to move better and how to become stronger and get the hand moving faster and basically manufactured what he did. It’s kind of an amazing thing. They created a plan. The kid stuck to the plan and is incredibly disciplined.
“There are a few kids at the high school age over the years that are incredibly self-aware, and he’s one of them. He had an understanding of himself like a guy in Double A would have.”
Tong’s work ethic and personality helped him overcome last year’s struggles and implement the changes. In addition to the slider, he prioritized balance within his delivery and cleaned up some mechanics resulting in a more consistent landing spot pitch to pitch.
“He’s definitely hard for the batter to pick up,” Brooklyn manager Gilbert Gomez said. “There’s ride on the fastball with a slow breaking ball. And he’s in the zone more than ever this year, which has opened up everything for him.
“It’s a different plane for the hitter. There’s a lot of swing-and-miss in his game. I think that will continue for him. It’s just how much in the zone is he going to be in order to play out of it?”
Gomez, McKinney and Mets director of player development Andrew Christie all cite Tong’s dueling personalities as another element behind his success.
On the field, he’s a fierce competitor. Tong had to learn how to replace constant critical thoughts — mostly about the walks last year — with more positive feedback. Tong said he has “learned to detach himself from angry thoughts” because, he said, “the more you beat yourself up mentally the harder it’ll be for you.” These days, he is also focused more on reading batters, regardless of the result. He’s not even worried about his streak of not allowing an earned run. Tong said: “I’ve really tried to close that aspect of it. My goal is to try to keep us in the game as long as possible. I’m really not too focused on the numbers piece.”
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Off the field, he’s the kind of person who asks an interviewer questions: Where are you coming from? How long does that take? Do you like it there?
On Saturday, a few days after his first start with Brooklyn, Tong said he planned to take the subway for the first time. He wanted to see Central Park. He had promised his girlfriend they’d do that, and they hadn’t yet.
It’s a good thing he showed his girlfriend one of the city’s main attractions. It’s not too hard to visit Manhattan from Brooklyn, since he’s still at least within the five boroughs. Once he gets promoted to Double-A Binghamton or Triple-A Syracuse — both are upstate and, for New Yorkers, what feels like a million miles away — he won’t have that chance. And the way he’s throwing, he may not have a ton of time left in Class A.
— Tim Britton of The Athletic contributed to this report.
(Photo of Jonah Tong from spring training: Joe Robbins / Icon Sportswire via Associated Press)
