The sidearming lefty was excellent after coming over to the Yankees, and could fill a role in the Mets pen.
David Stearns’s bullpen strategy is likely to be one that is hard for fans to project, with him acquiring droves of interesting-but-flawed pitchers with the idea that a Reed Garrett is among them. One potentially low-risk reliever that could yield a high reward is Tim Hill.
Tim Hill is a weird choice for this on the surface—he’s never had a truly elite season and will be 35 when the 2025 season begins. However, his performance in the Bronx makes me think that he has possibly figured something out.
Hill spent his first two seasons in Kansas City before being traded to San Diego for Franchy Cordero, spending four years there before being non-tendered before the 2024 season and signing with the White Sox. He was, for lack of a better word, bad in Chicago, earning a 5.87 ERA before getting DFA’d in the summer. He was signed by the Yankees and took off, pitching to a 2.05 ERA over 44 innings in the Bronx.
Hill will never miss bats—he has a career 17.3% strikeout rate—but he has a fair bit going for him despite that. First off, as if you could not tell based off of the article picture, he is a sidearming lefty, and frankly that is just an extremely fun thing to watch day in and day out. On top of that, a pitch change has maybe spurned this change:
Baseball Savant
His sinker rate skyrocketed this season, and his four-seam rate dipped to the lowest it has ever been. He basically is a one trick pony, throwing sinkers at 68% of the time, but due to his extreme arm angle and how a sinker breaks (arm-side, towards the left handed batters box), it is likely an absolute house of horrors to try to hit.
The numbers bear out that deception, as he ended 2024 with the second-lowest barrel rate in the entire league at 1.7% (of all pitchers who threw 50 or more innings), trailing Aaron Bummer, who has a sidearm-y delivery as well, though much less extreme. His ground ball rate fell to a career high 68.2%, and his fly ball rate fell to 15.7%, a career low.
The combination of his arm angle and his newfound love of the sinker made him a valuable piece of the Yankees American League pennant winning team, and the Mets have holes to fill in their bullpen. They only have one lefty in their bullpen at the time of this writing, Danny Young, who showed some interesting things in 2024 but is far from a sure thing. While signing someone like Hill is far from glamorous, it could also prove helpful for a bullpen in flux.