‘I think our pitching is going to surprise people’: Can the Mets’ rotation quiet the critics again?
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Jorge Castillo
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Mid-February live batting practice sessions are usually forgettable, but the one held on the main field at Clover Park the day after Valentine’s Day was different for the New York Mets.
Kodai Senga, the presumed ace a year ago, faced four hitters. He threw 16 pitches, touched 96 mph and didn’t appear compromised from the shoulder injury that kept him out for all but 5⅓ innings during the 2024 regular season. Afterward, he shared laughs with catcher Luis Torrens and pitching coach Jeremy Hefner.
“I saw a smile on his face,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “That’s a good sign.”
Last spring, Senga, coming off an outstanding rookie year, was supposed to be a sure thing. Instead, he was shut down with a shoulder injury before appearing in a Grapefruit League game and started just the one game in July.
The Mets thrived without him, even with a rotation full of newcomers and uncertainty, completing an 89-win campaign capped by a trip to the National League Championship Series. But as they look to improve on that finish after a monster offseason, questions around the rotation remain.
Can Senga stay healthy? When will Frankie Montas, shut down for up to eight weeks with a lat strain, return? Will Clay Holmes, exclusively a reliever the past six seasons, successfully transition back to starting games? Will Sean Manaea continue where he left off last season after a midseason delivery change produced elite results? Was David Peterson’s career year — he posted a 2.90 ERA in 21 starts — an aberration?
“I will say, I feel much better about our starting pitching depth sitting here today than I did a year ago,” Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns said days before Montas sustained his injury during his first bullpen session of camp. “We made that a priority of our offseason. We brought in a number of players at all levels of free agency.”
All levels but one: proven ace-level starting pitchers.
The Mets’ offseason will be remembered for bookend investments in All-Stars to fortify their lineup: Juan Soto in early December and Pete Alonso the week before pitchers and catchers reported for camp. For the second offseason under Stearns’ direction, though, they had holes to fill in the rotation and did not acquire any of the premium starters available.
A year after their long-term bid for Yoshinobu Yamamoto fell short, the Mets did not aggressively pursue the three top starters available in free agency: Max Fried, Blake Snell and Corbin Burnes. (Fried strengthened an already-strong rotation strength across town, signing with the New York Yankees on an eight-year, $218 million deal.)
Instead, they made low-risk, high-reward short-term investments with an emphasis on depth. They re-signed Manaea to a three-year, $75 million contract. They signed Holmes, a two-time All-Star closer, to a three-year, $38 million deal to become a starter. They added Montas, an injury-plagued right-hander who recorded a 4.84 ERA in 2024, on a two-year, $34 million deal. They signed Griffin Canning, a former top prospect, to a one-year, $4.25 million deal after the right-hander pitched to a 5.19 ERA and surrendered 31 home runs last season, the second-most in baseball, for the last-place Los Angeles Angels.
The additions join Senga, Peterson, Paul Blackburn and Tylor Megill to round out the options for a six-man rotation, which the Mets plan to deploy in large part to accommodate Senga.
“I think our pitching is going to surprise people, even though there’s a lot of talk about starting pitching,” Mets owner Steve Cohen said. “And another thing is we’re flexible. If we have to make changes or improve the team during the year, you saw what we did in ’24 and we’ll do it again in ’25.”
For all the offensive fireworks and Grimace-engineered vibes the 2024 OMG Mets produced, extracting value from the starting rotation was the foundation for their success. Luis Severino, signed to a one-year, $13 million deal, recorded a 3.91 ERA over 31 starts last year after posting a 6.65 ERA with the Yankees the year before. Jose Quintana registered a 3.75 ERA in 31 starts in his age-35 season on a $13 million salary. Manaea dropped his arm slot in his 21st start and pitched to a 3.09 ERA over his final 12 outings before the playoffs.
“[We] want to be a team that can improve players,” Cohen said. “And I think from a pitching perspective, we’re able to do that.”
Hefner pointed to Severino’s jump from 89⅓ innings in 2023 to 182 innings last season as evidence that, with the required work ethic, a successful sizable workload increase is possible.
“I feel like our performance staff does a good job of monitoring guys and not just putting reins on them,” Hefner said. “They’re very much like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s push. How far can we take them?’ As long as they’re recovering and they’re honest with us and they’re staying on top of their programs, we have full confidence that a guy could make a big jump in innings.”
In Holmes, the Mets will attempt a more extreme escalation.
The Yankees’ former closer has totaled 337⅓ innings over his seven-year career, including 63 innings each of the past two seasons. He hasn’t started a game since September 2018. To get through a lineup two or three times, Holmes said he plans on incorporating a changeup — a pitch he started tinkering with in bullpens last season — for the first time and using his four-seam fastball more often to complement his sinker (his best pitch). The goal is to build up to 90 pitches by Opening Day.
“I would say now it’s starting to get a little different,” Holmes said last week. “I threw three innings the other day. It was probably the first time I’ve done that in a while.”
Relievers have successfully made the jump to starter. Hall of Famer John Smoltz famously converted from starter to closer back to starter. For the Mets, a club with World Series aspirations, it’s a risk they decided is worth taking.
Of course, that risk won’t matter if they can’t keep their starting pitchers healthy — and that starts with Senga, who, alongside Manaea, will top a rotation the Mets hope will help lead them back to October.
“He just needs to be healthy,” Mendoza said. “As long as he’s taking the ball. But we got some good options. And we talked to him about that. He doesn’t have to be the hero, feeling like he’s the ace of the staff, because we got some options. And we like those guys at the front end of the rotation.”
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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — The Dodgers activated third baseman Max Muncy off the injured list Monday and placed utility man Tommy Edman on the IL because of a right ankle injury.
Edman suffered what the Dodgers called a sprain while rounding first base in the fifth inning of Sunday’s road game against the Tampa Bay Rays. Edman, 30, missed the first two weeks of May because of a right ankle injury and had been struggling since he came back, slashing .214/.273/.323 over a 56-game stretch.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts didn’t provide a timeline for Edman’s return but said he would “be back at some point.” The Dodgers don’t want to bring him back until he is fully healed this time.
“Where we’re at on the calendar,” Roberts said, “we’ve got to make sure we do everything on the front end that we don’t have a setback.”
Muncy returned to his customary No. 5 spot for the opener of a three-game home series against the St. Louis Cardinals. He finished 0-for-3 and ended the game with a line out in the bottom of the ninth.
A little more than a month ago, he didn’t think he’d return to the field this year.
In the sixth inning on July 2, with Clayton Kershaw a strikeout away from 3,000, Chicago White Sox outfielder Michael A. Taylor slid headfirst into Muncy’s left knee. Muncy said his initial thought was, “I’ve got to get off this field so Kersh can keep pitching.” As he went down the tunnel, Muncy was convinced his season was finished.
With Muncy on the trainer’s table, the Dodgers’ medical personnel examined his left leg. He was told the knee felt strong, that the swelling wasn’t nearly as bad as anticipated. An MRI the following morning revealed no structural damage.
“As I was laying there on the ground that night, I thought for sure, ‘This is it,'” Muncy said. “At that time, obviously, you have a million things that start going through your mind. Obviously, they’re all the worst. It’s hard to stay positive in a moment like that. But just trying to be thankful and blessed to be able to get back on the baseball field this year. I’m going to try to enjoy every second of it knowing how close it was to not being there for me.”
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Jesse Rogers
CHICAGO — New Chicago Cubs starter Michael Soroka left his first game with his new team with right shoulder discomfort and will require a stint on the injured list, the team announced on Monday after its 3-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds.
Soroka, who turned 28 on Monday, felt something grab in his shoulder after throwing a pitch in the second inning. He didn’t come out for the third.
“Went to go put a little extra on a fastball and it grabbed me a little bit,” Soroka said afterwards. “And it didn’t go away.”
Soroka was acquired last week from the Washington Nationals for two prospects and though he’s experienced a dip in velocity over the last month, he claimed he wasn’t in any pain as he took the mound for the first time as a Cub.
“There was no reason to believe there was anything wrong,” Soroka said.
The six-year veteran has been searching for answers to his drop in velocity, eventually getting an MRI before his last start before being traded. It came back clean, according to Soroka, so he stayed focused on his mechanics.
“Everyone knew the velocity hadn’t been there the last month,” he said. “I still had life on everything. The breaking ball was still playing like it did in the first [inning].”
Soroka struck out two in the first inning on Monday, displaying a nasty slurve to whiff TJ Friedl and Austin Hays, but then his velocity dipped in the second when he gave up a home run to Tyler Stephenson before leaving a few minutes later.
“You’re always concerned when you have to come out of the game,” Soroka stated. “It’s never fun. I’m embarrassed. You come to this org and hope to hit the ground running and two innings later, we’re having to pull the plug.”
The Cubs need fresh arms as Soroka was their lone addition to the starting rotation before MLB’s trade deadline last Thursday. Righties Jameson Taillon (calf) and Javier Assad (oblique) are on the mend and due back soon, but the team is still short in the starting staff.
Ben Brown took over for Soroka on Monday but he has been shaky as the every-fifth-day starter. They may need to turn to him again.
“We didn’t have any signs of it,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said of Soroka. “His velocity has gone backwards. He’s trying to figure out how to fix that. He was optimistic in the first couple days here that we could help him there and things could get better.
“This is unfortunate.”
Soroka was 3-8 with a 4.87 ERA for the Nationals before being traded for Single-A prospect Ronny Cruz and Triple-A outfielder Christian Franklin.
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