The 31-year-old made five starts for the Mets following a trade last year.
While the Mets’ roster is pretty well balanced across its three major components, the team’s starting rotation is probably the iffiest one of the the bunch. Grapefruit League games haven’t gotten underway just yet, but at least for now, the team is planning to use a six-man rotation for the 2025 season. And Paul Blackburn will probably be one of the six starters on the Opening Day roster.
The Mets got Blackburn from the A’s at the trade deadline last year, and he went on to make just five starts before he was sidelined by a back condition that eventually required surgery. Before the trade, Blackburn had spent the entirety of his major league career in Oakland, and he had a 4.83 ERA and a 4.36 FIP in 404.0 innings of work. In his limited time on the mound with the Mets following the trade, he had a 5.18 ERA and a 4.69 FIP.
Coming into the first phase of spring training, the Mets appeared to have a competition among a few pitchers of a similar caliber for the sixth starter job: Blackburn, Tylor Megill, and Griffin Canning. With Frankie Montas having suffered a lat injury that will keep him out for months, two of the three pitchers in that competition now figure to have the best shots at the Mets’ fifth and sixth starter jobs. And Megill has one year of options remaining, while the other two don’t, giving both of them a leg up in that competition.
As for Blackburn specifically, the projections at FanGraphs all have him somewhere in the low-to-high fours. Durability has never really been his things, but ideally, the Mets would be able to get 100 or more innings of capable work from Blackburn somewhere in the back of their rotation. Given how strong the team’s offense look and the bullpen’s potential to be pretty good, that would make Blackburn a useful if unexciting contributor to a playoff contender.