One of the things at the top of the list for the Mets this offseason will be rebuilding a rotation that could be losing three core members from the 2024 group.
Free agents Sean Manaea and Luis Severino both rejected the Mets’ one-year, qualifying offers in order to hit the open market, and Jose Quintana is also a free agent.
As things currently stand, the Mets’ rotation ahead of 2025 consists of Kodai Senga (who should be healthy after a 2024 that was lost to multiple injuries) and David Peterson, with depth options that include Paul Blackburn (assuming he’s offered arbitration), Jose Butto, and Tylor Megill.
There are two ace-level, inning-eating starting pitchers on the free agent market — Corbin Burnes and Max Fried.
Also available is 23-year-old Japanese ace Roki Sasaki, whose age and years of service in Japan will limit him to a minor league deal, with interested teams able to only offer their international bonus pool money to him. Pretty much every team will be after him.
Then there’s the trade market, with White Sox ace Garrett Crochet at the top of it.
But if the Mets want an ace-level starter without having to trade key assets or give out a deal of six or seven years, there’s one place they can turn.
Enter Blake Snell?
PROS
For the majority of his career, including the last two seasons, Snell has had some of the best stuff in baseball — and his advanced stats via Baseball Savant show that he knows how to deploy that stuff.
In 2024, Snell’s four-seam fastball — a pitch he threw a bit under 50 percent of the time — averaged 95.9 mph. And hitters were pretty helpless against it, hitting just .200 with a .303 slugging percentage.
Snell was among the best in baseball in xERA (96th percentile), xBA (98th percentile), average exit velocity allowed (92nd percentile), whiff rate (98th percentile), strikeout rate (98th percentile), and hard hit rate (99th percentile). He was also elite when it came to chase rate, barrel percentage, and extension.
Featuring a four-pitch mix — a curve, changeup and slider to go along with the fastball — Snell keeps hitters off-balance, resulting in tons of swings and misses and very few hits allowed.
While Snell throws his fastball the most, his second-most-used pitch (the curve) might be his best. Opposing batters hit a paltry .111 with a .183 slugging percentage against Snell’s curve in 2024 after hitting .079 with a .140 slugging percentage against it in 2023.
Snell led the league in hits per nine innings (5.8) during his Cy Young season for the Padres in 2023, and was even better in that regard for the Giants in 2024, when he gave up just 5.6 hits per nine.
As is noted above, Snell misses tons of bats. And the most impressive thing about him is how reliably elite his strikeout rate has been during his career. Snell has struck out at least 11.0 batters per nine innings in every season since 2018, and fanned a career-best 12.5 per nine in 2024.
CONS
The two main drawbacks with Snell are health and an inability to pitch deep into games.
Snell has pitched more than 130 innings just twice in his career (2018 for the Rays and 2023 for the Giants) and has dealt with shoulder, elbow, abductor, and groin injuries. The abductor issue has been recurring, with Snell dealing with it in 2021, 2022, and 2024.
That Snell hasn’t had a serious arm-related injury since 2019 is a plus, but other injuries have nagged him (such as the abductor), severely limiting his time on the mound — including this past season, when he tossed just 104.0 innings in San Francisco.
When it comes to how long he pitches each game, Snell recorded an out after the sixth inning just five times in 2024, and recorded an out after the seventh inning just once in 20 starts (during a complete game against the Reds on Aug. 2). For reference, Manaea recorded an out after the sixth inning 12 times in 2024.
In 2023, Snell recorded an out beyond the sixth inning just three times in 32 starts.
Another issue with Snell? Walks. He walked 5.0 batters per nine in 2023 and has walked 4.1 per nine during the course of his nine-year career.
VERDICT
That Snell doesn’t pitch deep into games often isn’t as big of an issue as it would’ve been 10 or 20 years ago — with most modern pitchers no longer the kind of innings-eating arms that used to dominate the sport.
Even the walks aren’t much of an issue. That’s because Snell pretty much offsets them by getting tons of swings and misses and allowing so few hits.
That means the main question here is health. But it can be argued that gambling on Snell for three or four years is a better bet than handing a seven-year deal to Burnes or a six-year deal to Fried. Not because Steve Cohen and the Mets can’t easily give a massive deal to Burnes or Fried, but because long-term deals for pitchers over 30 rarely work out.
If the Mets make a play for one of the top pitchers on the market, Snell should be the one. An offseason where they land two of Snell, Manaea, and Walker Buehler would be a strong one.
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