SAN DIEGO — The Mets have added their second starting pitcher in a stretch of 24 hours, agreeing to terms on Thursday with right-hander Rick Porcello on a one-year, $10 million contract. New York had reached an agreement with Michael Wacha on Wednesday.
In adding both Wacha and Porcello, the Mets are pairing the former’s upside with the latter’s reliability. Porcello has been one of the game’s most durable starters this decade: He’s made at least 27 starts in 11 consecutive seasons, and over the last four years — a stretch in which he has not missed a single turn in the rotation — he’s behind only Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander in innings pitched. Porcello has qualified for the ERA title (i.e. pitched at least 162 innings) in all 11 of his seasons — a streak currently matched by just Scherzer and Jon Lester.
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That doesn’t mean there’s no upside with Porcello, who of course won the Cy Young for the Red Sox in 2016 and was a significant contributor to a championship team in 2018. Like Wacha, though, he is coming off a rough season. His 5.52 ERA with Boston in 2019 was the highest of his career, and his ERA has been higher than the league average over the three seasons since he won that Cy Young.
Having entered the league as a classic sinkerballer, Porcello has been affected more than most pitchers by the sport’s adoption of the launch-angle swing. He himself has tried to adapt back, throwing fewer sinkers and more four-seamers up in the strike zone. That transition has included growing pains and inconsistency, manifesting themselves most prominently when his two- and four-seam fastballs blend into one mediocre pitch that is often hit hard.
The Mets are hopeful that teaming Porcello with new pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and assistant pitching coach Jeremy Accardo can help him return to his best form.
“When you look at Rick Porcello, he’s done it. He’s been battle tested, he’s performed in the playoffs, he’s got rings on his fingers. We believe that he knows what he wants to do,” general manager Brodie Van Wagenen said Thursday. “We have some ideas to help him do that, and we’ll be working collaboratively and make sure he has the upside to be the Cy Young type pitcher he has been in the past.”
With Wacha and Porcello, the Mets have given themselves two rolls of the bounceback die. Porcello, in particular, provides a sturdy floor in terms of performance: At the very least, he takes the ball every fifth day, and for a team that entered the winter lacking intriguing depth starters, that’s pretty valuable.
“Championships are born by great starting pitchers,” Van Wagenen said. “Adding starting pitching with not only coverage for durability but also upside puts us in a very strong position … I think we’re probably the deepest starting rotation in baseball.”
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Indeed, the Mets now have six major-league capable starters on their roster, and Wacha and Porcello aren’t signing with the club to be relegated to the bullpen if healthy. There are multiple baseball adages in play here, including but not limited to “You can never have too much starting pitching” and “These things tend to work themselves out.”
New York could look to trade one of its incumbent starters, though moving Marcus Stroman or Steven Matz would lower the rotation’s ceiling and deplete the depth it just worked to create. Van Wagenen had previously stated that the team would not deal Noah Syndergaard, and he said Thursday that “nothing has changed” with regard to that stance.
The Mets could also slot a surplus starter in the bullpen. Matz briefly pitched out of the ‘pen around last year’s All-Star break, a cameo that he said later helped him solve persistent issues in the first inning. From that point forward, Matz had a solid 3.52 ERA over his final 14 starts. Wacha was used as a longman out of the St. Louis bullpen when he lost his starting spot last year, and Porcello was effective as a late-inning reliever for Boston between starts in the 2018 postseason.
“We’re going to spring training with six bona fide starters. If all are healthy, then we have more decisions to make that hopefully would be a high-class problem,” Van Wagenen said. “We’re walking in with depth, with upside and we can’t speculate in terms of what the mix of who the five are if all are healthy until we get there and assess what the characteristics are of each.”
Adding both Wacha and Porcello pushes the Mets’ 2020 payroll beyond the competitive-balance tax threshold by about $7 million. New York would thus be in line incur a tax of roughly $1.4 million, should it make no other moves this winter. (If Wacha doesn’t hit all the incentives in his deal, or if the arbitration estimates I’ve been using from MLB Trade Rumors are off, those numbers could change.)
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That’s a good sign. In a win-now position, the Mets should be willing to surpass the CBT threshold, and I was consistently skeptical that they would at any point this offseason. They can still get under the threshold via trade, but for now, they deserve some credit for pushing the payroll further than most expected.
The main downside emerging from these moves, though, is that the club’s weakness in the bullpen remains largely unaddressed. Yes, the additions of Wacha and Porcello allow New York to leave Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman in the bullpen. But they were already significant parts of the bullpen last season, when the Mets finished with the fifth-worst relief ERA in the majors.
Van Wagenen pointed to the risks associated with adding relievers at high transaction costs; the Mets learned that lesson last winter, when deals for Edwin Díaz and Jeurys Familia did not go according to plan. He viewed investing in the rotation as preferable.
At the moment, New York’s bullpen is merely running it back from last season. “We have the ability to do wants now that many of our needs are filled,” Van Wagenen said. The Mets should want to improve that area as well.
(Photo: Hunter Martin / Getty Images)
Tim Britton is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the New York Mets. He has covered Major League Baseball since 2009 and the Mets since 2018. Prior to joining The Athletic, he spent seven seasons on the Red Sox beat for the Providence Journal. He has also contributed to Baseball Prospectus, NBC Sports Boston, MLB.com and Yahoo Sports. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBritton
