The Mets Are Seeing Results of New Pitching Infrastructure

Lots has been made in recent years regarding the Mets’ new pitching lab, the pairing of owner Steve Cohen and president of baseball operations David Stearns, and when the Mets would begin to see the fruits of this pairing. As their 2025 season began to hang in the balance, the Mets were suffering through a plague of short outings from their starters. Knowing that something had to be done, the Mets took a leap of faith and turned to their young pitching.

When the Mets promoted RHP Nolan McLean, the team was in an incredible rut in terms of depth from starters. Only David Peterson was routinely pushing the six-inning threshold, and it appeared as though the likes of Clay Holmes and Kodai Senga were hitting a wall after substantial increases to their workloads from last year. The ripple effects from this were incredible, especially in an overworked Mets bullpen that was tasked with providing more outs than the starter far more frequently than any team would like.

McLean is the first true test of the Mets’ pitching development lab. He was a two-way player coming out of Oklahoma State in 2023. He only logged 57 career innings in college, with just three starts. At the plate, he set the NCAA single-season offensive strikeout record in 2022, which is a dubious honor that McLean still holds. Ultimately, it was not exactly clear where his career would go positionally, let alone if he would become an impact major leaguer.

The tides began to change for McLean around the time of the 2024 MLB Draft, when it was announced that he would give up hitting at the professional level to focus on his pitching. At the time, the former Cowboy owned a .585 OPS for Double-A Binghamton and was averaging over a strikeout a game. After giving up his bat, McLean posted a 2.86 ERA over 173 minor league innings, an entire run lower than his career ERA to that point.

McLean’s prospect stock has soared since, going from somewhere in the No. 15-20 rank within the Mets’ organization to now being widely considered a top-25 prospect in baseball, ranking No. 19 overall in Kiley McDaniel’s recent update for ESPN. In his first three starts, all McLean has done is post a 0.89 ERA over 20 1/3 innings with 21 strikeouts, highlighted by his eight shutout innings on Wednesday night to complete the Mets’ sweep of the first-place Philadelphia Phillies.

Two spots behind McLean on McDaniel’s list was righty Jonah Tong, a former seventh-round draft pick who has gone from completely unknown to potentially the most talked-about prospect in baseball. He began to catch eyeballs in 2023 with an impressive 38 strikeouts in 21 innings, but his ERA and command problems stood out just as much.

Tong followed that up with a strong 2024 season that began to put him on the map for prospect evaluators and Mets fans, logging a full-season K/9 of 12.74 with a 3.03 ERA in 113 innings. 2024 would ultimately serve as an opening act to what would come in 2025, which has yielded him unanimous top-100 prospect rankings, with some going as far as to rank him as one of the premier pitching prospects in baseball, just as McDaniel did. With his major league debut looming, Tong arrives in Queens after posting an absurd 1.43 ERA and 14.17 K/9 over 22 starts between Binghamton and Triple-A Syracuse this season.

Tong arrives as the Mets still seek to find stability in their rotation. Frankie Montas‘ season is over due to injury, while Holmes is still bull-rushing through his career high in innings. The duo of Sean Manaea and Senga has been incredibly shaky lately, with neither providing ace-level performances.

“He’s pushed us. To his credit, he really conquered everything we put in front of him. He exceeded our expectations throughout the year, and he put himself in a position to be considered for a day like this,” Stearns said regarding Tong’s promotion.

To Stearns’ credit, he is absolutely correct: at only 22-years-old, it felt that Tong’s best-case scenario was to complete his season in Syracuse, and that multiple other Mets prospects would get a shot at Queens before he did.

Tong and McLean represent what is possible for the Mets with their pairing of Stearns and Cohen. Neither were high-profile prospects heading into the draft, and neither broke out of the gates on fire when they began their pro careers. In 2024, the first year of Stearns and the pitching lab, both prospects started to turn the corner, and both solidified themselves as legitimate top-flight arms in 2025. These two, along with Brandon Sproat, are at the forefront of an abundance of riches in the Mets’ farm system.

All three pitchers have greatly changed their arsenals and pitching skills since joining the Mets, which is reflective of the work being done at the Mets’ pitching lab in Port St. Lucie, Florida. When interviewed in 2023, Mets pitching prospect Ben Simon credited the Mets’ pitching lab with presenting him with everything he needed to be successful.

Behind this three-headed monster, the Mets have a wealth of other pitching prospects. Arms such as Jonathan Santucci, Will Watson, Zach Thornton and Jack Wenninger have all had incredibly impressive seasons, including strong showings in the ever-important Eastern League, and have seen their prospect stocks rise significantly. Further down on the farm, the likes of Camden Lohman and Peter Kussow were added to the system during the 2025 MLB Draft.

Cohen famously asserted when he purchased the team that he wanted to turn the Mets into the “East Coast Dodgers”. In order to do so, the Mets have to first find pitching: the Dodgers have been able to sustain so much success thanks to the likes of Walker Buehler, Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw and several others who have turned in strong seasons over their last decade of dominance.

The Mets have gotten great individual pitching seasons since Cohen took over: the three-headed monster of Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom and Chris Bassitt in 2022, Senga in 2023, Manaea in 2024 and now Peterson in 2025. The issue, however, is that Peterson’s 2025 campaign is by far the youngest of any of them at 29-years-old. If the Mets want to build their franchise into a perennial contender, young and consistent starting pitching is vital. Historically, far more sustained winners were led by young starters than by the alternative.

If the Mets truly believe they have what it takes to become the “East Coast Dodgers”, they are going to need to have young, sustainable, cost-controlled pitching. For the first time since the group of Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz and deGrom, the Mets have a chance at just that: young, sustainable, cost-controlled pitching. McLean is off to a start that has only been rivaled by Tom Seaver in Mets history.

With McLean’s career off to such an incredible start and Tong debuting on Friday, the future is now for the New York Mets. FanGraphs gives the team a 94.5% chance to make the playoffs, which would be the team’s second berth in as many years under the Stearns-Cohen duo. Their chances were slipping just a few weeks ago, but their quick rise back up correlates with the debut of McLean. If his success can continue, and Tong can perform as many believe he can, the Mets could have the most important building block firmly underneath them and could be well on their way to establishing East Coast dominance.

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