This is a bullpen appreciation post.
The 2025 Mets are 8-4—half a game out of first place in the NL East—and just snapped a six-game winning streak. A huge part of this early success has been the Mets’ bullpen, which has been nothing short of remarkable in this young season. The Mets bullpen has pitched to a collective 1.70 ERA in the first 12 games of the season. Up until yesterday, the Mets had the best bullpen ERA in baseball and it was only just surpassed by the Padres last night. They have allowed just two home runs as a group. In just about every category measuring pitching performance, the Mets are near the top of the list.
Of course, it’s hard to imagine the bullpen will be quite this good across a whole 162-game season. But there are plenty of reasons to believe the bullpen will remain a strength of this team all year and chief among them, in my opinion, is the versatility of the pitchers in the relief corps. The Mets don’t have one long man. They have multiple pitchers capable of pitching more than one inning in relief. The Mets don’t just have one set-up man or two or three guys Carlos Mendoza has to go to again and again in high leverage. All eight Mets relievers currently on the roster have already pitched in high leverage spots. Edwin Díaz is the closer, but Ryne Stanek and Huascar Brazobán have already each recorded a save. Every reliever in the bullpen besides Díaz and (somehow) Max Kranick has at least one hold.
“You’re not just beating four guys to death,” Ryne Stanek recently said to The Athletic on the matter. “We have eight guys that are all capable of getting outs in leverage. That matters. That’s how you get really good bullpens over the course of a season, is guys comfortable in a variety of roles.”
Assessments of the Mets’ depth when it comes to relievers go beyond the big league roster. Dedniel Núñez continues to work his way through his progression in the minors and will contribute to the team at some point in the near future. There are a plethora of other interesting arms in the minor leagues that could contribute to the big league bullpen this season, like Tyler Zuber and Luis Moreno, who impressed in spring, or even Brandon Sproat, who David Stearns hinted in his recent presser could be used as a reliever.
“They’ve been a huge reason behind our success,” Brandon Nimmo said of the bullpen. “They have amazing stuff. We have a few different weapons that can matchup well with the other side — it’s not just one guy, we have different guys in different positions in order to get it to Díaz.”
“We’ve needed them and they’ve performed at a very high level,” David Stearns said. “Clearly we wouldn’t have the record we have right now without the contributions from every single member of that pen — that’s probably been the most impressive part to me.”
Another encouraging fact: it may feel like the bullpen is being a tad overtaxed (at least it felt that way to me) in the early going because the starting rotation, while also performing well, is not going that deep into games. But the bullpen’s collective 47 2⁄3 innings pitched thus far are tenth in baseball and they were even lower down the list until Megill’s early exit from yesterday’s game. Huascar Brazobán and Danny Young lead the team with six appearances apiece. But, they’re both outside the top 30 in the league in appearances this season. So even though it may feel like the relievers are being used a lot, the Mets are not really above average when it comes to bullpen usage across baseball.
On an individual level, there are a lot of kudos to hand out. Max Kranick has been a revelation. In his first big league appearance in three years, he was immediately thrown into the fire and produced results—and has done so again and again since that first appearance in Houston. It looks every bit like his rising star that he put on display in spring training is the real deal. Reed Garrett has built on his success last season and has turned into the Mets’ primary fireman, retiring 14 of the 18 hitters he has faced via a strikeout, popup, or ground ball. Edwin Díaz has looked shaky at times and had his first true meltdown yesterday (to be fair to him and the rest of the pitching staff, it was freezing), but he has yet to blow a save and perhaps more importantly, he has silenced concerns about his velocity that arose during spring training. He looks mostly like Edwin Díaz. José Buttó and Huascar Brazobán have taken big steps forward and already look like better versions of themselves than last season, which is huge for the long-term outlook for the pitching staff, considering the years of control both have remaining. Ryne Stanek has picked up right where he left off when he was an essential part of the Mets’ playoff success last season. A.J. Minter looks healthy and has already shown why he was a positive addition to the team, recording several key outs and providing much-needed left-handed firepower out of the bullpen.
This piece is mostly about giving the pitchers who have worked their butts off their flowers. But, David Stearns, the front office, and the coaching staff deserve credit too. Although guys like Edwin Díaz and José Buttó were in the organization prior to Stearns assuming the helm, this bullpen is now primarily made up of guys signed or acquired in the David Stearns era. And his fingerprints are all over this pitching staff. On paper, this bullpen does not look all that remarkable. It includes multiple pitchers who were let go by their previous organizations or in some cases were out of Major League Baseball entirely. But we now find ourselves in an unfamiliar position: we can trust the organization’s leadership to target the right cast-offs and trade targets from other organizations and we can trust the organization’s player development staff to maximize their potential.
Over the past decade or so under the previous regime, the most interesting reliever the Mets developed on their own was Drew Smith and the team was forced to use its resources to sign name-brand free agents to fill out their bullpen (often using the patented Closer for the Eighth Inning approach). Drew Smith is great and I hope his recovery is going well, but if the Mets are to truly realize Steve Cohen’s ambition of being “Dodgers East,” they need to follow the model of organizations like the Dodgers, who frequently produce a half-dozen Drew Smith-or-better types every season, seemingly by spontaneous generation. The Mets aren’t quite there yet, but we’re seeing the blueprint in this 2025 bullpen and it’s exciting.