☀️ Good Morning:
When David Stearns decided to shop in the bargain aisle of the pitching market instead of pulling from the top shelf, nobody expected the Mets to start the season with the best ERA in baseball.
When Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas both went down with injuries in spring training, nobody expected the starting rotation to pitch over 1/2 run better than the next closest team.
When Griffin Canning signed a one-year, $4.25 million “prove it” deal over the winter, nobody expected him to go from quite literally the very worst starter in baseball into one that looked the way he did last night.
Only three teams in franchise history have pitched better than this year’s squad (2.30 ERA) through the season’s first 19 games: the 1968 team (1.76 ERA), the 1971 team (2.13 ERA) and the 1978 team (2.30 ERA).
Just as everyone predicted, your 2025 Mets, winning games with pitching, pitching and more pitching.
☕️ Grab your coffee for your morning dose of Mets Fix!
🔥 Grand Canning
Playing a stretch of 13 consecutive games without a break, after a bullpen game, Carlos Mendoza needed length from his starter. The question was whether his starter had recovered enough from a mid-week illness to answer the call.
Not only was he ready, Griffin Canning completed six innings of one-run ball, striking out eight, firing 102 pitches, the most by any Mets pitcher in a game this season.
His performance a microcosm of the success David Stearns, Jeremy Hefner and the Mets’ coaching and analytics staff have found with unheralded and bygone starters. We saw it last season with Sean Manaea and Luis Severino. We could be seeing it this year with Canning and Clay Holmes.
“Tonight is the blueprint,” Canning said of his dominant outing. “Tonight is how I want to pitch.”
⚾️ NEW APPROACH: Upon arriving in New York, Hefner had a key recommendation for Canning: lean into your better pitches. That meant throwing his slider and changeup more often and his four-seamer less. It produced an exaggerated result in his first few starts.
On Thursday, Canning took a slightly different approach, as you can see in the chart below. His four-seamer was back leading the way, but with reason.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Mets Fix to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.