Rays Rough Up Canning

Before Sunday, the Mets had only one outing in which a starter gave up more than four earned runs. After Max Kranick gave up a two-run double to Jonathan Aranda in the fifth inning of the series finale against the Rays, scoring the fifth and sixth earned runs attributed to Griffin Canning, that changed. The other thing that changed? The 2025 Mets have now been swept this year.

Nobody expected much from Canning in 2025. However, Mets’ fans and personnel have been pleasantly surprised with their offseason pickup. After being hit hard in 2024, leaning more on his fastball, Canning and the Mets pitching staff decided that his slider would be his go-to pitch this season, and the evidence of that was clear going back to spring training.

Unfortunately, the negative to throwing pitches with the most movement early in the count is that in the wrong situation, you can get behind in the count.

That wrong situation came into play on Sunday, and it wasn’t just with the opponent.

Lance Barksdale was the home plate umpire, and before the first pitch was even thrown, Gary Cohen noted that Barksdale was the most hitter-friendly umpire in the game. Later on, Ron Darling said that the Rays were uncharacteristically patient in their hitting approach.

For someone like Canning, who wants to use as much of the edges of the strike zone as he can get, as opposed to his opponent Shane Baz, whose 100-mile-per-hour stuff overpowered the likes of Pete Alonso, it was exactly that wrong situation.

Canning was behind batters all day, walking five. Winding up in negative counts, Canning chose to shy away from his slider, only throwing it 24 percent of the time, down from his season total of 32 percent. The pitch that mostly replaced it was the cutter, which he threw the same amount, up from his season total of two percent.

Canning and the rest of the Mets’ starting staff have been due for a regression to the mean. Canning’s Baseball Savant page is a sea of blue. His xERA is 4.49, ballooning his real ERA of 3.80. His average exit velocity and hard-hit percentage stand at 91.3 mph and 47.0, landing in the 11th and 12th percentiles. But the early expectations of the Mets pitching staff have held. Canning’s Offspeed Run Value and Breaking Run Value are both above average. As long as Canning can get ahead with his strength, he’ll be able to return to his winning ways.

The post Rays Rough Up Canning appeared first on Metsmerized Online.