Sean Manaea and the Mets Run It Back

Every story written about the Mets this offseason starts with Juan Soto, but pretty much all of them immediately introduce a caveat: “They’ll also need to sign more pitching.” And it’s true! The Mets, as constituted after signing Soto, had a fearsome top of the lineup and a mystery box of a pitching staff. But they also had money, which can be exchanged for goods and services, and now they’ve given that money to Sean Manaea, who signed a three-year, $75 million deal to return to Queens last week.

Manaea was comfortably the team’s best starter in 2024. He signed a one-year prove-it deal that valued him somewhere between a swingman and a fourth starter, and he delivered the goods, to the tune of a 3.47 ERA over 181 innings of work. He got even better in the second half, adopting a new cross-fire delivery and changing the shape of his fastball for the better. A down postseason hardly put a damper on his year; the 2024 version of Manaea fulfilled the promise he’d shown since breaking into the majors in 2016.

The question, then, is whether he can do it again. There’s plenty of reason to believe he can. Manaea’s fastball plays much better from a low slot, and he misses enough bats to run an above-average strikeout rate even without a true wipeout pitch. He also got his walk rate under control in the second half of the year, which has long been a sticking point in his game. It’s not so much that Manaea’s wild, but at his best, he was running walk rates around 5%, and that number had ballooned into the 8-9% region in recent years. After changing his delivery in late July, he walked only 6.2% of opposing batters. He’s never going to strike out a gaudy number of guys, but if he isn’t issuing free passes, his stuff keeps hitters off balance and results in a lot of easy innings even without strikeouts.

This might feel like slicing samples into vanishingly small segments to tell a story. I’m sympathetic to that view, honestly. It’s a lot easier to say some change was revolutionary after you’ve seen a few games of results, and pitchers make small adjustments all the time. But this one really does feel meaningful; even if it didn’t completely change Manaea’s underlying statistics (he posted a similar FIP, for example). The new arm angle suits his pitches better, he struck out more batters and walked fewer of them, and the new cutter/sweeper combination he introduced in 2024 seemed to work better from that crossfire position.

Does that mean Manaea is now an ace? No. He’s an above-average pitcher, though, and that’s been a hot commodity this winter. Projection systems have Manaea down for an ERA between 3.75 and 4.00 in 2025, good third starter territory. You can adjust that estimate down slightly if you want to put some stock in his tweaks — that would get him right into solid second starter status, basically a repeat of 2024. That fits perfectly with the Mets, who probably don’t want to add more long-term commitments this winter but who still need to bulk up their starting rotation.

Contracts like this are the lifeblood of big budget teams. You might think it’s the stars, but those are largely luck of the draw; sure, you occasionally get Juan Soto in free agency, but Bobby Witt Jr. in Kansas City, Julio Rodríguez in Seattle, and Tarik Skubal in Detroit are just a few examples of how stars are more often developed than signed. You feel the budget further down the roster, in adding Clay Holmes to compete for a rotation spot and bringing Manaea back for more than he was expected to make. You feel it in signing Frankie Montas to a pillow contract the same way Manaea signed one last year.

Is there a little bit of paying for last year’s performance in this deal? Most definitely. But that’s what the money is for. This Mets team needed a reliable pitcher who can credibly make playoff starts. Manaea delivered exactly that last year, he looks like a reasonable bet to do so again this year, and he’s already familiar with the team. It’s the kind of signing that any GM could get on board with – bring back the guy we already like to pair with the superstar who was our key offseason target.

For some squads, this would be an either/or thing. The Diamondbacks signing Corbin Burnes sure feels like a prelude to making some payroll-reducing trades and letting Zac Gallen leave next winter. But the Mets don’t have to choose in the same way. That’s a luxury that plenty of teams wish they had. No one wants to build a team like the Brewers or Rays. It’s hard having to win nearly every transaction to make a small budget stretch. This signing wouldn’t really make sense for teams living by those rules, but it makes perfect sense for the Mets, who have some stars and plenty of money and want to compete now.

For the record, I might be underselling Manaea by making this article all about acceptable splurges in pursuit of winning. Maybe 2024 was Manaea’s career year, but 2025 could be, too. Sometimes the little mechanical changes that players make throughout the season make for cool stories and then disappear the following year; sometimes they’re career-altering. Maybe changing his arm angle will change his offseason prep in some meaningful way. Maybe a winter of throwing low-slot four-seamers will teach him a new approach. Acting like we know what will happen is one of the biggest overreaches of data, and I don’t just mean in baseball. The future is still unknown, even if we can guess at its central tendency with greater precision these days.

So let’s frame it slightly differently to close this out. I don’t know what Manaea will look like in 2025, and the Mets don’t either. No analyst does for sure. But if you consider the range of possible outcomes, the vast majority of them will help the team compete for the NL East title. At the end of the day, that’s what the game is really about, and for that reason, I love this signing. It’s a great match of team and player. You can’t ask for much more than that.

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