Quintana has outperformed his contract, but he may not project well into 2025.
The Mets signed Jose Quintana to a two-year, $26 million deal ahead of the 2023 season with no intention of the 11-year veteran becoming a top-of-the-rotation presence.
And then 2023 happened: Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander were traded, Carlos Carrasco got hurt, and all of a sudden Quintana was the late-season, stable veteran presence on a team where Tylor Megill and David Peterson each pitched more than 100 innings.
That did not make Quintana the ace—Kodai Senga took that title fairly quickly—but it made him an important part of the rotation, and he brought that stability once again in 2024 with 175 innings of thoroughly average pitching—plus another 14 1⁄3 pretty good postseason innings. So, should the Mets bring him back?
There are plenty of warning signs around Quintana that shout a bright red “no” on the front office’s laptop screens. By ERA (3.75), Quintana was slightly above average in 2024, but one could argue he way outperformed expectations, notching the worst FIP- (113) of his career. That creates a stark difference between his ERA-based Baseball-Reference WAR (2.5, his best since 2016) and his FIP-based FanGraphs WAR (1.0, his worst in any full season).
There’s also plenty of blue on his Savant page, with Quintana landing below the 25th percentile in expected ERA and expected batting average for 2024. If there’s any saving grace in Quintana’s profile, he remains pretty good—but not elite—at inducing weak contact and ground balls.
Also, he’ll be 36 years old next season, and only four pitchers aged 36+ pitched more than 100 innings in 2024 (Charlie Morton, Lance Lynn, Carrasco, Kyle Gibson), all with below-average ERAs.
Still, there are some things to like about a potential reunion with Quintana. For one, there’s a lot of value in volume these days. Quintana has led the Mets in starts (44) and innings pitched (246) over the last two seasons and is seventh among active starters in innings pitched. There’s a high price for the “starter who can pitch 150 average innings” model, which means Quintana will almost certainly find work somewhere if not in Queens next season.
There are also a lot of unanswered questions about the Mets’ rotation next season, of which the only currently certified members are Senga and Peterson. If Quintana joins that list, it would ideally be in the same role he signed up for in 2023—as a veteran depth piece ready to step in for long stretches if one of the top guys gets hurt.
For a less ambitious (and worse-resourced) franchise, that would make Quintana a no-brainer signing. But for a Mets team with World Series expectations in 2025, that’s probably not good enough.
It helps that there are more top-tier starters on the market this season than last, and the Mets have been linked to quite a few of them. Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki is probably a long shot to land with the Mets, but former Cy Young winner Corbin Burnes is not. Blake Snell is basically a younger, better version of Quintana, and the Mets could certainly find themselves in the Garrett Crochet sweepstakes.
None of these pitchers would override a Quintana reunion, but they would certainly make one less likely, especially with the Mets already extending qualifying offers to Sean Manaea and Luis Severino, but not Quintana.
The Colombian lefty could still fit into the Mets’ plans next season—after all, teams can’t have enough pitching. But an optimized version of the 2025 Mets may not include Quintana in their plans.