The 2027 pitching staff
I have read a number of pieces, here and elsewhere, praising the Mets potential starting rotation. The list of pitchers most often named in these pieces is some combination of
McLean, Scott, Thornton, Tong, Manaea, Santucci. Others occasionally mentioned include Wenninger and Megill.
It's a stretch to claim that any five or six of this group makes for a top tier starting rotation: a big stretch.
What's the standard for a top tier rotation?
Frankly, the answer depends on what the modern day game demands of its starting pitchers.
There are a number of ways of answering that question. Let's focus on innings/start and ERA, while recognizing that there are other plausible standards.
Innings and their distribution: On average, teams play about 1450 defensive innings during the regular season. Starting pitchers accounted for between 800 and 900 of those innings (let's peg that at 850 for our purposes) on average/team. That would leave around 600 innings to be covered by the bullpen, again on average/team.
Assume teams carry 13 pitchers (the max allowable), 7 of whom are relievers. This means that although teams are almost always said to have a 5 man starting rotation, they have 6 starters. Even that is misleading. Better to say that they have 6 spots taken by starters, and usually 8 or more pitchers who are primarily starters occupying those 6 spots over the course of a season.
We can therefore calculate two different innings/starter baselines: 850/6 or 850/8.
The latter would give us 105 innings per starter; the former 140ish. Typically, the distribution varies among starters.
Rarely, however, do starters throw more than 200 innings/season. In 2025 only 3 did, and in 2026 only 2 did.
The 3 in 2025 were Logan Webb, Garrett Crochet and Christopher Sanchez. They followed that up with 160, 30 and a bit under 200 (not counting playoffs), respectively. No additional comment required from me.
It's enough to note that a team would be fortunate to have half of its starting rotation cover roughly 170 innings and the rest of 8 or so covering the remainder in varying degrees, reflecting their standing from 4-8. These are just approximations.
What would we have reason to expect in terms of ERA for a top tier rotation?
The average ERA for starting pitchers in MLB last year was. 4.07. Only 11 teams had ERA's below that number as the average for their starters. Of those 11 teams, only two failed to make the playoffs. Of the teams that did make the playoffs, three teams exceeded the average, but just barely.
How About Them Mets?
The Mets starters did relatively poorly when it comes to both ERAs and innings/starter.
The starting rotation combined for an average ERA of 4.57, a half a run worse than league average.
The Mets starters combined for an average of 4.88 innings per outing which translates into a total number of innings covered by the starting staff of 791, or almost 60 innings short of the league average.
That was last year and its fair to say the Mets tossed a few starters over the year who are not mentioned among those likely to make up the bulk of next year's rotation.
So let's focus on the five pitchers most often named as constituting the core of next year's presumably top tier rotation:
The results are mixed: promising ERAs, less than promising innings pitched leading to questions about projectability re: innings and ERA
The top four had very good ERA's but only McLean threw an impressive number of innings. Indeed, McLean is the only pitcher in the group who averaged more than 5 innings per start.
The numbers on Manaea are, by my lights disqualifying. It is not rational to believe that Manaea -- even as the 5th starter -- could be part of a top tier starting rotation.
The numbers on Thornton and Tong are hopeful, but represent way too small a sample size on which to draw an inference -- about either the total number of innings they would pitch or whether their ERAs would hold up under higher work loads.
If we supplement Tong's 2026 performance with his 2025 similarly late call up numbers, the evidentiary base begins to look a bit less promising.
What inferences do these stats warrant?
In discussing the Mets generally I have suggested we apply a modest criteria for judging whether our confidence in projected performance is rational.
I like to think in terms of continuums and in order to do so I favor setting out the two extremes. In this case, one extreme is marked by there being no reasonable or rational doubt about a player's expected performance. Of course we can be proven wrong, but we are talking about rational, evidence based levels of confidence ex ante.
At the other end of the spectrum rest players one should have no rational basis for predicting success. Of course, we can be proven wrong, but again we are making judgments ex ante, given the evidence we have. If any of those who fall on this end of the spectrum succeed, it's best to think of it as a prayer being answered: a miracle.
I apply this approach first to position groups or teams taken as a whole to get an idea of what is reasonable to expect overall performance to be and which groups need to be bolstered and why, and which groups pose less pressing problems.
Here's how it works
Rational confidence in a position group or team's expected level of performance depends first on the percentage of the players who are question marks, and then on the number of those you have to count on the question marks being answered favorably, and finally on the number of those that you have grounds that support a favorable answer as compared with those who you have to 'hope', believe or 'pray for a miracle' to base a favorable answer on.
Here's how it applies in practice. Let's use the Mets 4 (current) outfielder group - Soto, Ewing, Benge and Morabito -- as our example.
Remember two things. We are trying to assess the degree of our rational confidence in what we can expect next year from the group as a whole. We are doing this in part to discover areas of potential improvement and the urgency, if any, of devoting limited resources to making those improvements.
Our continuums end points are marked by 'No doubt or question' at one end, and 'need a miracle' at the other.
OK, going on the evidence we have, it is rational to take Soto as a given.
Benge cannot be taken as a given, but his performance provides plenty of reason for believing that he very likely to succeed next year. The question surrounding him have to do with just how good he will be next year, not whether or not he will perform well.
Another way to put it is to say that it would be very surprising if he doesn't at least come close to his performance of this past year and not at all surprising were he to surpass it.
Soto is the paradigm of a 'no question' player. Benge is the paradigm of a 'question' player on the brink of becoming a 'no question player.'
Ewing is a bit more difficult IMHO. If he learns to take better routes to the ball -- and there is no reason to think he won't -- then there are no questions about his defense or base running.
There are some questions about his ultimate hitting prowess, but if you believe that he performed well enough last year over a reasonably large sample size, then there is no reason to believe that he won't perform in the same range this year - or better.
Ewing is a question mark player, nowhere near becoming an overall 'no question mark player', but close to being a no question mark defender and base runner, but with more evidence needed to judge his offensive promise.
Morabito is a real question mark. Nothing he has done so far should convince you that he will be a sound all around contributor next year, but then again there is nothing to suggest that projecting that he will requires a leap of faith. He is somewhere between where Ewing is and requiring a miracle to be answered, much closer to the former than the latter, but not close enough to bar looking to see if there is a better option to be had at a lower cost.
Overall, one should be reasonably confident that the core 4 in the outfield will provide a positive stable force for good for next year's Mets. On the other hand, no one should believe that the outfield cannot be improved, but also that doing so should not be a major priority.
Back to the projected starting pitchers
In a nutshell, McLean falls somewhere between Benge and Soto -- closer to the former than the latter. Very very good, but not quite beyond question excellent. High rational confidence in near All-Star Level performance, less confident that he is a top 5 Cy Young candidate.
Scott falls somewhere between Benge and Ewing, closer to Ewing. Scott hasn't shown yet that he can provide innings at a high level. His pitch counts get too high too quickly, and he is still working back from the surgery. These factors hold him back from falling in the Benge category.
Thornton falls somewhere between Ewing and Morabito, closer to Ewing on promise, closer to Morabito on sample size. His stuff isn't his calling card. His commitment to his craft, his grit and his confidence in his stuff are.
Tong's ability to get a lot of swing and misses is like Morabito's speed on the bases. It's a great skill.
Morabito's challenge is getting on base; Tong's is throwing enough strikes.
We've all seen what happened to Senga when hitters were patient and able to lay off the ghost fork. Why were they able to lay off the ghost fork this year, but not in previous years. The answer is simple and has two elements. First his ghost fork works off his fastball and he didn't throw enough strikes with his fastball. Second, and independently, the ghost fork works when it starts out in the zone. If it starts out below the zone as it so often did, it is easy to lay off it, whether you confuse it with a fastball or not.
Which brings us to Tong . Everything he throws works off his fastball. He needs to throw more stikes with his fastball which he had trouble doing last year, and he has to increase his swing and miss rate with his fastball. When he does both, his change-up becomes devastating, because even with his new release point, it comes out of the same slot and looks like a fastball, but now has even more break in it than it had previously. It is not confined to movement in just one plane.
He can then add a horizontal or diagonal moving pitch as an out pitch working off both of his key pitches.
He's still a pitcher in transition who needs much more fine tuniing in his pitches and more innings under his belt.
When it comes to both Morabito and Tong, it is not rational to expect success early in the season, but it is reasonable to hope for it by the second half.
The difference between Tong and Thornton is that Tong holds the promise of being able to rise to the level of Scott or even McLean. Thornton does not. At best Thornton can rise to the level Stearns thought he was getting when he resigned Manaea.
Returning to Manaea for a moment, the truth is that if you take Manaea's entire career into account and appropriately weight what he has done with the Mets, hoping that he will be a credible 5th starter on a top tier staff is tantamount praying for a miracle.
In short, it is not rational to be confident that the Mets have the core of a first tier starting rotation; certainly not if you expect the starting rotation to anchor the team's success going forward.
It's not unreasonable to believe in the possibility that they will be a top tier rotation. At this point, I would say that on the available evidence, the staff the Mets currently have provides reason enough to be hopeful, to keep the faith, but to be prepared to hedge your bets.
In short, praise and predict all you want, but hold off a bit on putting your money where your mouth is. Laddering up this year will help ensure that a large window will open for success beginning in 2028.
In Part III, I'll set out what steps and options the Mets have to ladder up next year in their starting rotation, and set out some of my preferred pathways forward. In Part IV I work through various pathways to a bullpen worthy of the starting rotation.
And while I am all for having the owner spend to shed contracts and players who have no future on the Mets, I promise to be very mindful of the costs he would have to bear to turn the starting rotation and bullpen into the anchor the team needs and can rely on.
I think you'll be surprised by the reasonableness of the expenditure that true excellence will cost us over the next five years or so.
In Part V, I make the case that in spite of the initial costs of clearing the books the Mets can attain top of the league performance for a sustained period at what I promise you will be real value for the dollars spent.
Stay tuned.
We're on our way home!
