The Mets' Rotation Needs Help
The time is ripe for a pitching prospect to join the big league club
Jose Quintana is becoming a problem.
He has a 8.27 ERA in four August starts, over which span his season ERA has risen from 3.89 to 4.57. His Statcast page is a blue (i.e. bad) collage — his xERA ranks in the 13th percentile — and all of his important metrics have declined, many precipitously, since last season. He’s allowed 22 home runs in 25 starts, after allowing only 13 in 45 starts from 2022-23. Four starts, of course, is a small sample size, but this isn’t just based on four starts: Quintana had a strong stretch from mid-June to the end of July, but that followed a horrendous beginning to the year (5.29 ERA in 13 starts), and preceded what could be the start of a collapse in the last third of the season.
But with every cloud, as they say, comes a silver lining, and Quintana’s struggles provide one. You can’t exactly sit Quintana down — he’s not a candidate for demotion, and despite the rough stretch, he’s still too valuable a starter to release — but at the very least, his turn for the worse is a reason to give the rotation some help. The Mets are ripe for a shot in the arm, a transfusion of energy and morale, and a new face or two could provide exactly that. Which is why the Mets should call up Blade Tidwell, Dom Hamel, Mike Vasil, or some combination of the trio.
DISCLAIMER: I’m not one of those prospect guys. I haven’t seen any of these three pitch in person, and what I’ve seen on video just looks like guys pitching, albeit well. I don’t have any inside information; for all I know, the Mets have already looked into the possibility, but have determined that none of the three is ready yet, or maybe they’re already winding down for workload management purposes. I can’t give you one of those monologues: “Hamel still needs work on the way he manipulates his pitch shapes, whereas Vasil — while his ‘tunneling’ is superb — hasn’t quite made the transition from ‘thrower’ to ‘pitcher,’ and when you look at Tidwell, the ‘makeup’ is a concern, no doubt about it, and while there’s ‘helium’ there, his middle school coaches have reported concerns about work ethic, and we’ve seen that in concrete terms looking at the stagnant spin rate on his circle-change…”
I have no idea, in other words. These guys may just not be ready for the Show. But if there’s even a chance, it’s one the Mets should take.
This isn’t like some of the desperation call-ups you hear people wishing for: Gilbert, Clifford, Acuña, Alvarez, Baty, Conforto, Milledge, etc. Position player prospects, quite often, get called up and simply aren’t very good for a while. Depending on a position player prospect to change a club’s fortunes is like depending on winning the lottery to make rent. But pitchers can sometimes make the transition seamlessly — and you don’t have to look too far back in Mets history to remember the last time it happened.
2016: the Mets are chasing a Wild Card spot, but the rotation needs help. So they turn to two relatively unheralded arms: Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman. The duo proceeds to turn in some of the most understated clutch pitching in Mets history: Lugo (5-2, 2.67 ERA) and Gsellman (4-2, 2.42 ERA) help lift the Mets out of a funk, climbing through the standings and earning a Wild Card berth.
Wouldn’t it be nice to look back in a month and a half, heading into the Wild Card series, and say, “Man, didn’t those two rookie pitchers coming up big and helping us win the Wild Card remind you of 2016?”
Lugo and Gsellman, incidentally, also help contextualize a key point about all three of the pitching prospects at Triple-A. It’s no secret that none of the trio has put up strong numbers so far. Tidwell (5.55 ERA at Triple-A), Vasil (5.74), and Hamel (6.66) haven’t quite found their top forms. But neither had Lugo (6.50 ERA at Triple-A in 2016) or Gsellman (5.73). Sometimes pitchers just put it together. Maybe one of the current crop can do it; maybe none of them can. But if there’s a chance, it’s a worthy one.
(Again, don’t yell at me about the hyper-specifics, because I just won’t get that far into the prospect weeds: “How can you advocate calling up Tidwell? Everyone knows that his fastball needs some tinkering before improving from ‘average’ to ‘plus,’ and you really want ‘plus-plus’ for a pitch with that spin profile, and frankly, the ‘pitchability’ has been a problem for years, and what about the lack of a projectable frame? MY GRANDMA has a more projectable frame! And I’ll tell you another thing…”)
Hypothetical call-ups often reek of desperation, and there’s certainly an element of that here; the Mets are in fairly desperate need of starting pitching help. But there’s a difference between “desperation” and “fantasy.” Sometimes, a move to fill a desperate need makes perfect sense.
DESPERATION: “We need some starting pitching help — maybe one of these pitchers can do the job!”
FANTASY: “James McCann is having a bad year — maybe 20-year-old Francisco Alvarez can come up and instantly turn the season around!”
We’ve talked lately about what the Mets need to compete with better teams down the stretch: aggression, creative thinking, and boldness. Now, a problem in the rotation has provided a perfect opportunity. Get on the phone, call up a pitching prospect, and see if he can’t open his chapter in Mets history with a playoff run.