Ryan Garcia
When discussing the Yankees’ organization it’s easy to only look at the names with high draft picks attached to them or high international free agent bonuses.
A team’s investment into a player is the easiest way to determine their internal evaluation of that player, and so it might be odd to hear about whoever the Yankees landed as an undrafted free agent.
Tyler Boudreau wasn’t going to make our top 30 prospects list given that he had thrown less than 10 innings for the Yankees after signing with the team last summer, but that’s likely to change this midseason.
Off to a red-hot start and flashing an excellent fastball, Boudreau has gone from an easy-to-ignore prospect to someone fans should keep some tabs on when he starts in Tampa.
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Why Tyler Boudreau Could Be a Steal For the Yankees
When parsing through Tyler Boudreau’s pitch mix and looking at the film, you could mistake him for a mid-round draft pick who had some buzz coming into the 2026 season.
His four-seamer is averaging 92.9 MPH with 19.2 inches of Induced Vertical Break, but he’s also shown the ability to frequently toprail the pitch to maximize whiff rates.
Batters have a 42.5% Whiff% on this pitch with a .250 SLG% allowed as they’re struggling to make contact and fail to square the ball up when they do.
The rest of his mix is comprised of a slider, changeup, and curveball with unimpressive characteristics on their own, but when paired with his fastball these pitches can be tricky to do damage against.
By generating so much ride on his fastball and being able to locate it at the top of the zone, Boudreau is able to get more chases on his secondaries at the bottom of the zone due to how well he tunnels these pitches.
Against lefties he’s a fastball-changeup-curveball pitcher and flips to a fastball-slider pitcher against righties, which reminds me a lot of when Richard Fitts first came onto the scene as a prospect in 2022.
Both pitchers possessed high-carry fastballs with good spin capacity, and both struggled to move the ball laterally which created a clear ceiling in their profiles.
Fitts has gone on to make serious gains in fastball velocity that you cannot project onto someone like Boudreau, there’s a lot of room for the latter to gain some weight and fill out his frame a bit more.
The Yankees don’t need Tyler Boudreau to sit 95-97 MPH to make him a viable MLB starter, but if he can bump up from 92-94 to 93-95 that would make a fairly significant difference.
Part of this excitement is that New York has a strong reputation in the pitching development world which indicates that their prospects are being exposed to the right kind of information for them to succeed.
If there’s an organization that could find a UDFA and turn them into an MLB-caliber starter, it would be the Sam Briend-led Yankees.
I wouldn’t start running up the flagpole calling Tyler Boudreau a future big-leaguer, but the foundation here is incredibly strong and I’d consider him a top 30 prospect in the system right now.
His stuff is excellent, he’s still very raw and inexperienced at the professional level, and the Yankees could be the right place for a breakout to occur.
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