Tong takes home MiLB Pitching Prospect of the Year honors

NEW YORK – Say the magic words, and Jonah Tong will instantly go reaching for his equipment bag.

“Be like water.”

It’s a Bruce Lee phrase, first shared with him by Mets Florida complex pitching coach Garrett Baker in 2023 (one year after he signed as seventh-round pick out of Ontario by way of the Georgia Premier Academy), he now keeps stitched on the inside of his glove – a reminder of where he’s been and how fluid he needs to be moving forward.

“Month after month, year after year, it formed into this persona,” he said. “No matter what this day is going to bring, no matter what the situation is going to bring, I know that I'm built enough to adapt on the fly and go with the flow of things.”

The culmination of that mentality came in 2025 as Tong has been named this season’s Pitching Prospect of the Year.

Spending time with Double-A Binghamton and Triple-A Syracuse, MLB Pipeline’s No. 43 overall prospect sported a 1.43 ERA (best among Minor League full-season qualifiers) and led the Minors with 179 strikeouts in 113 2/3 innings – his spot on the leaderboard secured even though he ascended to the Majors in late August. His 40.5 percent K rate, 29.9 K-BB%, .148 average-against, 1.68 FIP and 2.16 xFIP were all tops among Minor Leaguers with at least 100 innings pitched, while his 0.92 WHIP placed second among that group of 288. You’d have to lower the innings threshold to 60 before you’d find a MiLB pitcher with a lower ERA in 2025.

On paper, it was one of the most dominant end-to-end Minor League seasons on the bump in recent memory. But Tong’s dominance was more than just numbers on a stats sheet. Instead, it’s what’s happened when one of the most unique pitchers in baseball, at any level, continues to grow over the years.

The 6-foot-1 right-hander has become famous for his over-the-top delivery and drop-and-drive nature on the mound – the former developed throwing back at home in Canada with his dad, who was concerned that a sidearm motion would lead to future injury. He generates elite ride on his four-seam fastball, averaging 18.7 inches of induced vertical break in his two Triple-A starts, and even added velocity to sit more comfortably in the mid-90s in his age-22 campaign in ‘25. The drop on his curveball helped feed that north-south feel, but before the season even began, the Mets and Tong recognized that a new-look changeup could open up even more possibilities for his arsenal.

The 2024 version of his cambio came with a Vulcan-style grip (learned from Robby Rowland on Instagram) with the ball wedged between his middle and ring fingers but otherwise held similar to a four-seamer. It almost acted like a mid-80s edition of the heater too with 15.2 inches of IVB on average during his stint with Single-A St. Lucie. That could still fool the occasional low-level hitter, but wanting to find Tong some more consistency with the pitch, Mets vice president of pitching Eric Jagers met with the hurler early last offseason over Zoom with a few proposals, among them a rather simple alteration – just move the orientation of that Vulcan grip to line up his fingers with the horseshoe of the baseball.

Dedicated work with the change at Mets camps in November and January carried into Spring Training, and that proceeded into the regular season. Before long, Tong’s new-look pitch was his most-trusted secondary.

Per Synergy Sports, the usage on the pitch went from seven percent across Single-A, High-A and Double-A in 2024 to 26 percent in the Minors in 2025. Batters whiffed on 50.8 percent of their swings against the cambio, which still sat in the mid-80s but came with roughly three more inches of armside run and seven more inches of drop while coming in with the same armspeed as the heater.

“I've stood in the box for him I can't tell you how many times,” said Binghamton pitching coach Daniel McKinney, who also worked with Tong at St. Lucie in 2023 and Brooklyn in 2024. “It really messes with your brain. He's really good at frontdooring it somewhat unintentionally to lefties, and they just can't pull the trigger.”

“I don't think anybody in the organization, outside the organization, Jonah himself could have kind of projected him to use it quite as much as he did,” Jagers said. “I think he found something that he got really comfortable with and practiced a lot, and he just incrementally gained confidence in the pitch.”

Even as he leaned on the changeup more, Tong still kept the curveball and slider in his bag to keep hitters’ heads spinning.

“I think it helped improve the confidence in all my other secondaries, where no matter what count, I'll be able to throw it competitively,” he said. “It was weird. As the year went on I threw it only four or five times, but the attack percentage went up or the effectiveness went up and I thought, OK, that's the weird trade off. I'll throw it less, but I'll have more confidence in it, which means I execute it better.”

That isn’t to say there weren’t still speed bumps in the Minors or in the Lee philosophy, times needed to stay fluid.

When asked for a seasonal highlight, Tong, Jagers and McKinney, independent of one another, all identified a June 4 start for Binghamton at home against Yankees affiliate Somerset. Or more specifically, the second inning of that outing.

Tong walked the bases loaded with one out in the frame while landing only nine of his first 22 pitches for strikes, leading to a mound visit from McKinney.

“I don't know what I ate or drank, but I literally felt like I was going to throw up every pitch and I couldn't get over my front side,” Tong said. “I remember he said, ‘Hey, this is one of those moments we were talking about earlier. How are you going to get through it? Are you going to abandon what you have? Are you going to trust everything that we try to work towards?’ I got tunnel vision from there.”

Tong fanned Antonio Gomez swinging on a righty-righty changeup in the very next at-bat and worked another punchout against Roc Riggio with an additional cambio to end the threat unscathed.

His final line indicated a gem: 5 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 3 BB, 11 K. But those close to the situation didn’t believe this was sustainable.

“That was the most frazzled I've ever seen him, despite getting out of the jam, because he felt like this doesn't feel right,” McKinney said. “What he was doing was not competing at the level that he felt he was capable of. I really just challenged him in that moment to decide that this was going to be a test of his mental fortitude and fully commit to that.

“That was really the beginning of defining his process and really how he viewed himself.”

Even with a 2.02 ERA and 83 strikeouts through his first 10 starts (49 innings), Tong and McKinney sat down for a heart-to-heart conversation soon after that Somerset outing to find and set a new comfort level on the mound. The diagnosis: attack and improve the first-pitch strike rate.

“Just worry about the first pitch,” Tong said. “Then, every pitch after that is just one more pitch, one more pitch. I’m going to give every ounce of my body and focus into this single pitch and see where that gets us. It kind of freed up my head.”

Through the first 10 starts, the first-pitch strike percentage was 58 percent. In his final 12, it moved up to 62. He had a 0.97 ERA with 96 strikeouts and 20 walks in 64 2/3 innings in that span.

“The coolest comment that he made to me,” McKinney said, “was he said this is the most freeing feeling of baseball that he's ever played.”

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Tong’s combination of improved stuff and dominant results sent him surging up prospect boards and comfortably into the Top 100 this season – a designation he’ll hold into the offseason even after a rough beginning to his MLB career (7.71 ERA in five starts).

Then again, this is just another opportunity to prove how fluid – and dominant – he can be.

“Being able to be an adapter and, again, like water was one of those lightbulb moments for me,” he said. “If I want to be in this game for a long time, I'm gonna have to be able to think on the spot and adapt on the spot, or else, the game's gonna eat you alive.”

“From a mental side, he’s just an empty cup, and he's going to form to a situation,” Jagers said. “Something we latch onto is ‘That’s Met.’ For me, Jonah is an easy one to look at as a model Met.”