NY Mets minor league team has social media post blow up for all the wrong reasons

Many people’s jobs involve tedium or a task of some kind that just needs to get done. In a previous job, my boss had me hashtagging things on Facebook despite it having no effect on social media posts. Some poor soul working for the New York Mets minor league team in Syracuse experienced a little more backlash than I ever did for putting a number sign in a Facebook post.

Exactly what caused panic in the Syracuse control room? A statistical leaderboard from April involving Blade Tidwell immediately caught the eye of fans who don’t need to know launch angle or WRC+ to realize this is pretty bad.

It’s not fun pitching for the Syracuse Mets, is it?

A 5.73 ERA to apparently lead Syracuse pitchers (among those with the qualified innings) isn’t anything to celebrate. The point of the original post wasn’t to celebrate Tidwell’s numbers but rather to meet the need to run a post sponsored by Nissan. Let this be a lesson. Go with strikeouts instead.

Syracuse has been a tough place to pitch for many starters we assumed would fast-track their way to the pitchers. Last season, we saw Syracuse make Dom Hamel and Mike Vasil irrelevant in the farm system. It’s giving Brandon Sproat trouble. Tidwell has a wall to climb up, too.

What’s odd about the semi-viral social media post is that it doesn’t actually seem to be true unless Brandon Waddell missed the innings cut off. Another one of those pitchers we saw called up by the Mets to eat some innings, his appearance as a long reliever, Waddell had a far better April than Tidwell. He posted a 1.30 ERA in 27.2 innings of work. Why was he missed here?

Somebody seemed to fumble something somewhere. Anytime you go to a leaderboard, it should be an acknowledgement of glory to celebrate what an athlete is doing. Nissan wouldn’t have requested a post about who leads the Syracuse team in errors—that’s more of a Fiat thing to do.

Tidwell is scheduled to pitch for Syracuse on Saturday in Jacksonville. Will he be the ERA leader for March? He has his work cut out for him. Nolan McLean threw 7 shutout innings in his Triple-A debut on Friday.