MACK - The Sunday Report - 2026 Mets Rotation, Ryan Clifford, Tobias Meyers, Vidal Brujan, F reddy Peralta,

 

Good Morning –

 

Let’s move on to the 2026 Mets pitching staff.

Starter wise, a new stud and a plethora of meh.

Freddy Peralta joins Nolan McLean as two formattable front-end starters and Clay Holmes joins them as a middle to back-ender. THIS JUST IN – Peralta is expressing an immediate interest in signing an extension with the Mets past the 2026 season… why  not? Mr. Money Bags (Steve Cohen) is in the front office checking the Dow Jones.

Jonah Tong is the wild card here and, if he has a strong spring and joins this rotation, he will start off at SP3 with SP1 potential.

My guess is Tong will freeze his arse off in Syracuse come April and the Mets will have to pick from Kodai Senga, David Peterson, Sean Manaea, and Christian Scott to fill slots SP4, SP5, and possibly, SP6.

I’ve been told two things… Senga is fully healed and is 100% going into ST… and the only thing that might limit Scott is the fact he has had no game experience since his IL stint. I’m told his arm is stronger than he went into that injury and is hitting 99 on the back mounds., and Manaea (if he’s still around).

Right now, my guess is the opening day rotation will be Peralta, McLean, Senga, Holmes, and Manaea (if he is still around). Peterson is out of options and will line up as the long man while on hold as the SP6. As for Scott, yes, he does have an option left and he will build up game arm strength in the warmth of Syracuse in April.

We will discuss the pen in my next report.

 

Running From The OPS     - @OPS_BASEBALL

Ryan Clifford won’t turn 23 for another six months and popped 29 HR with a reduced 25.6% K%.

Easy pull side juice from his 6'3"/200 frame & stays relaxed prior to unleashing his swing. Connected w/ minimal moving parts & posted a 93.6 MPH Avg EV and 53.1% H-H% in his 142 AAA PA.

      MACK  – Clifford is getting a lot of positive ink lately, especially because of the reduced K% last season. This was the one stat everybody hated about Ryan, if this is the new Clifford, the Mets. just may have found their starting 2027 first baseman

 

Thomas Nestico          @TJStats

Tobias Myers (acquired by NYM) is a depth arm who spent 2025 is a hybrid role split between MLB and AAA

His carrying trait is a high-riding fastball which struggled to produce positive results in 2025 and a deep array of secondaries. Two intriguing traits the Mets can play with.

MACK – this guy could be the stead of the off-season

 

Mets Acquire Vidal Bruján from the Twins for cash considerations

GROK –

Vidal Bruján is a Dominican professional baseball player born on February 9, 1998, in San Pedro de Macorís, Dominican Republic.

He's currently 27 years old (turning 28 soon) and plays as a versatile utility infielder/outfielder.

He's a switch-hitter and throws right-handed.

Standing at 5'9" and weighing 180 lbs, he's known for his defensive flexibility rather than power hitting. He can play multiple positions including second base, shortstop, third base, right field, and occasionally others.

Bruján signed as an international free agent with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2014 and progressed through their minor league system. He made his MLB debut with the Rays on July 7, 2021.

His MLB career has involved several teams and transactions:

Started with the Rays.

Traded to the Miami Marlins in November 2023.

Later to the Chicago Cubs (around late 2024).

Claimed off waivers by the Baltimore Orioles in 2025, then to the Atlanta Braves shortly after.

Claimed by the Minnesota Twins off waivers from the Braves in January 2026.

Designated for assignment by the Twins shortly after, then traded to the New York Mets for cash considerations

Career MLB stats (through the 2025 season):

Batting average around .199–.253 in various seasons (career ~.199 overall in some sources, with a slight uptick in 2025).

5 home runs.

48 RBIs.

Some speed with 16 stolen bases.

He's appeared in a few hundred games, mostly in a bench/utility role.

In 2025, he hit .253 in limited action (around 61 games across teams), with no home runs but some contributions in RBIs and steals, plus even a couple of pitching appearances (not his primary role—more of an emergency thing).

Bruján was a solid minor league prospect earlier in his career, with good contact skills and versatility, but he hasn't established himself as a regular starter in the majors.

He's valued as a depth piece and defensive option on benches.

Recent moves show he's been bouncing around as teams shuffle roster spots, but landing with the Mets gives him another shot at MLB time in 2026. He's arbitration-eligible soon and has some service time accumulated.

  

Lance Brozdowski        lancebroz@substack.com

Freddy Peralta

Freddy Peralta and his morphing slider now reside in Queens. If you’ve followed my Substack, you have probably read a post of mine from years past highlighting how this pitch has shape-shifted (here, here, and here). Last year, the evolution was the lowest slider usage of his career at ~10%. Instead of throwing 30% slider to righties as he did in 2023 and 2024, he split up his non-fastball usage. He threw curveballs and changeups each around 15%, and cut back his slider to that mark as well. The results were positive. Peralta pushed his K-BB from 18.5% to 24.6% against righties when compared to 2024. Against lefties, he mimicked his 2023 approach, throwing fewer sliders and embracing his curveball and changeup. Refining both attack plans allowed him to post the best season of his career (2.70 ERA). He also moved toward the third base side of the rubber at the beginning of the season and stuck there throughout the year.

I bet the Mets attempt to right the ship with his slider and feature that pitch more against right-handed hitters. It grades better than his changeup and curveball and seems as though a blip in performance back in 2024 pushed him off the pitch. I’ll also point out his feel for the offering remains a mystery. As I mentioned, the pitch morphs. If you look at a monthly log of this shape since 2024 and focus on the glove-side movement, you’ll see how much the pitch has contracted and shortened its shape. Is his feel just bad? Is it all intentional? Is his feel actually very good, hence the manipulation? These are questions I have that I’ve not discovered answers to, but my lean is that he lost his feel for the pitch. Otherwise, he’d be throwing it more. I do think this shape is a key to beating his projections by a material amount. He’s currently pegged for a 3.80 ERA across 180 innings with a really strong 27% strikeout rate and a ~1.20 WHIP, a top 30 pitcher in baseball.

The prize of his profile I have buried the lead on. Peralta has one of the better righty four-seam fastballs in MLB. He extends nearly 7 feet down the mound despite standing just 6 feet in height. He has an average arm angle (40°), but a release height that is nearly 6” lower than average for pitchers with comparable arm angles. This results in a very flat approach of his four-seam fastball into the strike zone. It’s a tough pitch to generate damage on in the zone. Peralta presents stability for the Mets in what was an otherwise unstable rotation. Let’s see if he can push well beyond his projections in a contract year.

 

Tobias Myers

I didn't think I’d be considering Myers a key to a trade that involves Freddy Peralta and Brandon Sproat on a random Wednesday night in late January, but here we are. It’s not that Myers will make or break the trade for the Mets. It’s more that turning him back into the 2024 version of himself would surely help calm the sting of losing 6 more years of Sproat. Baseball Prospectus released new arsenal metrics early last season, and Myers was the cover boy. In short, he “disguises” his pitches well. This means the trajectories of his shapes converge such that it’s difficult for the hitter to discern (among other things presented in their article). The problem? Myers strained his oblique early in the season and never seemed to right the ship after a demotion to Triple-A. We were never able to back up a stellar 2024 with confirmation that he is an odd enough pitcher to buck Stuff+ models, which think he’s mediocre and reliant on location.

Myers has a 61° arm angle, which is higher than 98% of pitchers in MLB. Because he has good extension, his release height is spot on the average for MLB righties, but the visual he creates as a pitcher is anything but standard. He also gets behind the ball well, meaning much of what he creates from a pitch shape standpoint has a lot of lift. Put another way, he has trouble creating depth on his shapes or getting around the ball. This is why almost everything on his plot sits higher than the 0” horizontal line (look at the far right widget at this link). I wonder if this is really what Baseball Prospectus’ arsenal metrics were highlighting—Myers shapes look the same out of the hand because they all have a vertical component that makes them hard to distinguish.

Myers appeared to have some issues with right-handed hitters in 2025 compared to 2024, but looking under the hood, he generated a comparable number of whiffs, his locations looked similar, and the underlying batted ball data wasn’t awful. Perhaps he just ran into some sequencing luck that locked up his ability to put away hitters? Maybe it was a result of being in zone too much with his slider compared to 2024 (45% in 2024 compared to 59% in 2025)? He’s historically been slightly worse against left-handed hitters, so there’s not much to knock between 2024 and 2025. From glancing at his heatmaps, however, his consistency of location was poor. Put another way, it seemed like, despite being in the zone more, he was non-competitive at a higher rate, a weird combination.

Pitch designing Myers is going to be tough, given the limitations of Myers’ release. I think he currently possesses every pitch he’ll probably need to find his ceiling. The question is how his 2024 locations and consistency reemerge in what I’d imagine is a non-starter role. It wouldn’t hurt to see more velocity than 93.5 on his four-seamer as a reliever, too.