The 29-year-old is in his fifth year with the Mets.
Believe it or not, Sean Reid-Foley is entering his fifth season with the Mets. The last man standing from the trade that sent Steven Matz to Toronto ahead of the 2021 season, Reid-Foley is coming off a 2024 season that saw him finish with a 1.66 ERA in 21.2 innings of work at the major league level.
All of Reid-Foley’s work with the Mets came in the early months of the season, as he was called up to the big league roster on April 22 after starting the season on the injured list. By the middle of June, he was back on the injured list with a shoulder impingement that wound up costing him the rest of his major league season. Reid-Foley made some rehab appearances at various levels of the minors in late July and August, but his last appearance of the year came on August 13 with Syracuse.
When he was healthy, Reid-Foley’s work included a decent number of strikeouts and a whole lot of walks. Among the 315 relief pitchers who threw at least 20 innings last year, his 15.6 percent walk rate was the sixth-worst in baseball. Thanks to the fact that he didn’t surrender a single home run and that solid 27.8 percent strikeout rate, he finished the season with a 2.80 FIP despite the alarmingly high walk rate.
Reid-Foley is out of options, and at the moment, Roster Resource has him slotted into the final spot in the Mets’ bullpen. That assumes that both Paul Blackburn and Griffin Canning make the team’s six-man rotation, leaving just two spots in the bullpen up for grabs in spring training.
Staying healthy will be a challenge, as Reid-Foley’s innings total last year was his highest mark as a Met thus far. And there are a bunch of arms in camp that could catch the team’s attention over the next few weeks, bumping him from the 40-man roster in the process even if he is fully healthy come Opening Day.
Every projection system at FanGraphs has Reid-Foley’s walk rate improving this year and him putting up an ERA in the high-threes to low-fours. We’ll just have to see if this elusive reliever makes the Mets’ roster and sticks around long enough for us to get a better sense of what he might be at the major league level.