Mets’ pitching, 2025
The pressure is on Jeremy Hefner and Carlos Mendoza
“I hope I never win 20 games is a season: they’ll expect me to do it again.” – Brooklyn Dodgers’ pitcher Billy Loes
Good morning and Happy Super Bowl Day, everybody! Being a native and close-to-life-long resident of the New York Metropolitan Area, I do not have a dog in tonight’s fight: I cannot in good conscience root for any Philadelphia team and like many parts of the country, I’m suffering a bit of Kansas City fatigue. So tonight will be about laughing at the commercials, enjoying the crowd shots of Taylor Swift and eating most unhealthily. And hoping for some good, entertaining football – no blowout, please.
But enough of all that. More important matters are at hand. Mets’ pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report to Port St. Lucie on Wednesday. Wednesday! Some three days hence! Spring is around the corner, all evidence to the contrary: out the window of the office where I write this lies a tundra of snow mounds and slick streets. Thoughts of warmer weather and sunnier skies are simultaneously immediately present and thousands of miles away – spring is close, but not that close. Anyway, with pitchers and catchers due to check in on the twelfth, and now that Pete Alonso is thankfully back in the fold, the focus of attention from media and fans alike has become the starting pitching staff. Consensus of opinion? It ain’t great.
President of Baseball Operations David Stearns has provided the squad with roughly the same pitching staff as this time a year ago. Remove Luis Severino, signed as a free agent by the Athletics (Do we call them Oakland? Sacramento? Las Vegas? What…?) and replace him with Frankie Montas, a hurler in similar circumstance to Severino’s of a year ago: right -handed ex-Yankee, coming off some disappointing and injury-marred seasons. Heck, Montas even signed a roughly equivalent contract – I refuse to quibble over $3,000,000, couch-cushion money for veteran baseball players in this day and age. Stearns also signed Clay Holmes away from the Yankees’ bullpen, with an eye towards re-converting him into a starter. Last year, with 2023’s ace Kodai Senga on the shelf the whole season, Stearns struck gold with his fingers-crossed staff of Severino, Sean Manaea – brought back on a new free agent deal of his own – Jose Quintana, David Peterson and Tylor Megill. Throw in the odd starts by Adrian Houser, Christian Scott, Paul Blackburn and Jose Butto. Pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and manager Carlos Mendoza did a masterful job of navigating this motley and frankly on-paper-unimpressive group through a sixth game of the National League Championship Series against the all-conquering, example to follow Los Angeles Dodgers.
This year, Quintana and Houser are gone, Scott and Blackburn are due to miss large swaths of the season as they both recover from injury, Butto is ticketed for the bullpen and no one is sure if Senga has yet fully recovered, despite his appearances in the 2024 postseason.
So, yes. We expect Hefner and Mendoza to do it again. Barring anything unforeseen, that is.
In the aftermath of the mega-signing of right fielder Juan Soto and the return of Alonso, the question remains if the Mets have done “enough” to address their possible pitching shortcomings. Among the pundits, the answer is a resounding “no!” The website MLB Trade Rumors did a major article, making no bones about it. They thought the subject was so important that they hid it behind their version of a paywall, so – full disclosure – I haven’t read it, let alone being able to quote it, but you can get the gist from the headline: “The Mets Have Not Done Enough With Their Rotation.”
But I’ve got some news for the pundits: spring training hasn’t started yet. There is still time for improvements to be made. The San Diego Padres, in a period of ownership turmoil at the moment, may be looking to offload Dylan Cease or Michael King or both. Might Stearns have the prospect capital to swing a deal for either? How much of it would he be willing to surrender? San Diego is, predictably, asking for the moon. As an aside, bringing King in would be more than a little ironic, seeing as he was a key piece in San Diego trading Soto to the Yankees last offseason. Are there other deals out there that we might not have heard about? I’d be surprised if there weren’t, but let’s assume the pundits are right and Stearns has folded up the tents and is headed into the season as-is. The Mets, then, would need to rely on whatever that magic was that Hefner and Mendoza were able to spin last year. As we speak the rotation looks like this:
Manaea
Peterson
Senga
Montas
Holmes
With Megill, Blackburn, and possibly Butto slotted in as depth pieces/sixth starters.
Luckily, as we saw last year, the games are played on the field, not on paper. Most feel that Holmes will end up back in the bullpen before we get near October. Who knows? There have been pitchers who have successfully gone back and forth, so it’s unusual, but not unheard of. And if last year is any indication, Hefner is one of the few instructors able to pull that one off.
As of now, the Mets are threading the needle with their pitching staff, and there’s a lot riding on a Hefner/Mendoza repeat.
I'm not too worried about the SP. There's the obvious health concern but other than that, there's no one likely to make a start who's going to make me react like last year when Julio Teheran got a start.
May Frankie Montas not make me eat those words...
Screw the pundits… how do y o u feel Charlie?
Let’s set aside the ten aces in Los Angeles, none of whom are Angels pitchers, how do the Mets stack up against Philadelphia, the best starting rotation of the competitors in the NL East? Senga and Manaea can match Wheeler and Nola, as Wheeler is the best and Nola is the worst. The rest of the rotations are comparable, with the Phils getting the nod on ceiling but the Mets getting the nod on depth. Let’s make it back to the NLCS, and then we can see if the Mets offense can make those Dodger pitchers cry.