Meet the next generation of Mets pitchers: 'Something really special going on' (2024)

Dom Hamel was buzzing on the field postgame, his happiness derived less from his own ability to grind through six innings in a Binghamton victory than from what had happened 90 minutes northwest that night.

“Electric outing,” he said. “We were just watching it.”

Mike Vasil had taken a no-hitter into the ninth inning for Triple-A Syracuse, losing it on a ground-ball single.

“It’s awesome when you get close to guys like that in the org, when they bust their butts just as much as you do,” Hamel said of Vasil, who had been his Double-A teammate for the first few months of the season. Now the 24-year-old was surrounded by a new group of pitchers in the rotation, ones just about as promising. “We’ve got a pretty nasty rotation right now — best in the Eastern League.”

“We haven’t really developed that many pitchers, which is actually pretty shocking,” Steve Cohen said earlier this season. With @WillSammon, how the Mets are trying to change that, finally opening a pitching lab that was three years in the making: https://t.co/h4s7LTcw4M

— Tim Britton (@TimBritton) August 22, 2023

Of everything going on in the Mets organization right now, the ongoing development of their upper-level pitchers might be the most vital. At the trade deadline, the Mets dealt away both Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander — a pair of inevitable Hall of Famers and, more importantly in the here and now, 40 percent of New York’s planned 2024 rotation. The franchise has spent Steve Cohen’s three years as owner talking about creating a sustainable pitching pipeline; yesterday, we tackled the protracted steps they’ve taken in that direction and what it could mean for the future.

Where are they right now, in the present?

“From what I hear,” Cohen said in his typically understated fashion back in the spring, “we’re developing pitchers, which is really important.”

Vasil, Hamel, Blade Tidwell, Christian Scott and Tyler Stuart constitute the next core of pitching prospects for New York. None of them were in big-league camp in spring training, only Vasil has graduated yet to Triple A. Yet the majors feel a whole lot closer for all of them than they did in late July, before the Mets “repurposed” themselves into a new 2024 reality.

“All of us, pretty obviously, are subconsciously thinking about that all the time,” Hamel acknowledged. “Those are two big names to trade away. There’s some open spots. … That gets us all excited.”

But?

“It’s really easy to let that take you out of your plan,” Hamel said. “You’ve got to shovel where you’re at.”

For Vasil, that was PNC Field in Moosic, Penn., part of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area two Tuesdays ago.

Vasil’s first eight Triple-A starts following a promotion from Binghamton had not gone well: He’d averaged fewer than four innings per start, and his ERA was over seven.

But that Tuesday?

“It was like a next-level focus,” Vasil said.

He carried that no-hitter into the ninth before a ground-ball single ended the dream and his outing. The key, Vasil said, was an adjustment he’d recently made to his fastball grip. The baseball used in Triple A is the same as used in the majors; the baseball used in Double A and below is not, and so it had taken Vasil several weeks to acclimate to the ball. The change in grip — he basically flipped the ball 180 degrees — allowed him to get the same amount of ride on his four-seam fastball as he’d had at the lower levels. (When pitchers talk about “ride,” they mean a pitch that doesn’t drop as much as a hitter would expect based on gravity, and thus the pitch appears to elevate as it crosses the plate. Most any pitcher who throws a four-seam fastball has spent offseasons trying to amplify the pitch’s ride by adding to its spin or refining that spin’s efficiency.)

“It’s two inches better than it was previously,” he said. “When you see those things, it really helps you and it gives you confidence. Guys should believe in their heater. It’s a very crucial pitch.”

The heater has been the most crucial pitch for Vasil. A very good prospect coming out of high school, Vasil tumbled down draft boards during his college tenure at the University of Virginia, in part because the school emphasized a sinker over Vasil’s four-seamer. Drafted by New York in the eighth round of the 2021 draft, Vasil has quickly moved through the farm system on the strength of a renewed arsenal, topped by a ride fastball.

“Ultimately, when you get to pro ball, you’re always wondering: Who am I going to be?” Vasil said by the dugout the day after his near no-no in Moosic. “For me, they’ve really helped me find my identity of who I am, who I know I need to be, personality-wise, on and off the field, mental state, physical state, everything. It’s been awesome.”

Starting with that outing in Moosic, Vasil has allowed just four earned runs in his last three starts, a span of 19 1/3 innings.

“Since Day 1, he showed up, we knew there was something there,” Triple-A pitching coach Kyle Driscoll said. “He’s very routine- and process-based, and that’s going to help him get through the dips and downs. Every level promoted, he has to figure something out, and he keeps his head up and works through everything. His work ethic and the work he puts in on the field is going to keep him advancing in the game.”

Vasil is keenly aware that there’s only one more step of advancement through the organization: the biggest and hardest one.

“Obviously, (the majors) feel very close,” he said. “There’s only one more level. But at the same time, I’ve just got to be happy I’m here and be where my feet are and enjoy the process. When you do that and really trust where you’re at and trust the org, it makes the time you actually get there even better.”

He paused for a second.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said with a smile, “but I think that’s the right way to approach it.”

Vasil is the pitching prospect closest to making an impact in the major leagues. The pitching prospect with the chance of making the biggest major-league impact? That’s probably Tidwell.

A second-round pick in 2022 out of the University of Tennessee, Tidwell has found his stride in the second half of his first full pro season. An uneven open to the year bottomed out when he allowed seven runs in 1 2/3 innings on May 10. Since then, he’s posted a 2.37 ERA over 16 starts at High-A Brooklyn and Double-A Binghamton. He’s struck out better than 30 percent of opposing hitters. After five scoreless innings Tuesday, he surpassed 100 frames on the season — a goal from the spring.

“I’ve made some adjustments,” Tidwell said earlier this month. “I have a different slider, a different curveball and a different changeup.”

That is more than “some adjustments,” and Tidwell’s matter-of-fact demeanor belies the challenge of incorporating three new pitches into a mix comprised of four total.

The slider was the easiest. Driscoll suggested a change in grip for Tidwell late last year during a game of catch.

“I moved my thumb a smidge to where it got comfortable, and then my throwing partner missed it,” Tidwell said. “So I never threw my other one again.”

The curveball he changed on his own into a slurvier pitch, though one with more vertical break on it. The changeup is the one he talks about most cryptically.

“My changeup is completely different,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know. It’s just super weird.”

“He calls it the Starfish,” Brooklyn pitching coach Victor Ramos explained back in late April, right when Tidwell adopted the pitch. “It’s like a three-fingered grip, and he focuses on throwing a fastball with his two fingers and (the ring finger) is just a support one. It looks like one of those airbenders. He has the sweeper going west, the curveball going south, the fastball that can ride. Something that can go east in his arsenal would be super beneficial, so we can spread that location plot.”

All of that adaptation helps explain why it took a month for Tidwell to find his stride. It’s also suggestive of the type of worker he is. This is a pitcher whose senior year of high school was waylaid by the pandemic. His final year of college was interrupted by a shoulder injury that affected his draft status. In each instance, Tidwell said, he “put his head down and worked.”

“He’s special because you tell him something to do and he’s trying to do it a minute later,” Ramos said. “He’s putting his max effort on it.”

“Everything he does is 100 percent,” said Brooklyn manager Chris Newell in April. “He wants to be the very best. He’s just reliable, in every sense of the word, and he’s hungry.”

One aim of the developmental system is to turn a higher draft pick like Tidwell into a top-of-the-rotation starter. Another is to turn less established draft picks into useful pitchers at the big-league level. Enter Hamel (a third-round pick in 2021), Scott (fifth round in 2021) and Stuart (sixth round in 2022).

Like Tidwell, all of them have worked through significant alterations to their arsenals. Hamel added a cutter, has tried to get more sweep on his slider and has changed the grip on his changeup, all since the start of spring training. Scott was experimenting with different changeup grips until finding one that works earlier this year. In barely 12 months, Stuart has gone from a fastball-centric college reliever to a Double-A starter leaning heavily on his slider but confident throwing any of four pitches in any count.

Isn’t that a lot to work on simultaneously?

“It certainly is,” Hamel chuckled, “but somebody’s got to do it.”

Hamel has spent the full season at Binghamton, and he conceded it’s “been a grind and a struggle.” He spent the first part of the season learning how to play his new sweeper alongside his cutter; his inability to consistently locate the sweeper led him to use it almost exclusively in two-strike counts. Now he feels confident enough to break it out whenever.

The changeup is the next important element, and he’s felt better with that over the last two months — a stretch during which he’s compiled a 3.09 ERA.

“At this level, everyone has something they can pull, they can sweep, they can spin off,” he said. “When you have that and you can show this (changeup) right on right, when you throw you can throw it in the zone in tough counts to make the hitter uncomfortable, it makes a difference for the rest of the upcoming hitters’ approaches.”

The changeup has also been key for Scott. Both Scott and Stuart are converting from college careers in the bullpen to professional ones as starters. As such, their previously two-pitch mixes have had to be supplemented.

Scott experimented with grips all last season and into the Arizona Fall League, where he finally found one he felt could work. He received an important boost on the pitch in late May from a major-league source.

“My first start in Brooklyn was with Omar Narváez, and he called a 2-0 changeup,” Scott said. “I thought, ‘If he has faith in it, then I’m going to have faith in it.’ I landed it, and that’s what really took it off for me.”

Scott already creates some deception with his delivery, which allows his fastball to play up more than its velocity would suggest. Incorporating that third pitch means he can now effectively work to a lineup several times in the same game — something he didn’t do as a reliever. Two starts after that changeup to Narváez, he started a third turn through an opposing lineup for the first time in his career. In the 11 starts since then, he’s averaging more than 21 batters faced per game, with a 2.45 ERA — even with a promotion baked into that time.

Scott, though, didn’t spend a large chunk of this season carrying the best ERA in the minor leagues, like his fellow bullpen convert and teammate, Stuart. The 6-foot-9 right-hander pitched to a microscopic 1.55 mark over 14 starts at High-A Brooklyn, earning his promotion to Binghamton. He hasn’t been as dominant since, with a 4.34 ERA over his first six outings for the Rumble Ponies.

Since being drafted just last year, Stuart’s overhaul of his repertoire is a good example of what’s possible. After relying on his four-seam fastball at the University of Southern Mississippi, Stuart now feels confident with a sinker, slider and changeup. The key for his season, he said, was developing the ability to land any of those pitches in the strike zone.

“The technology has gotten really good in the game of baseball. Since I stepped foot in August, we started using Edgertronic cameras (to show) the different pressures you’re putting on the baseball,” he said. “As soon as I came back for spring training, it was hitting it hard and looking at every single piece of where I can work on my game. … Every time I wake up in the morning, I know exactly what I’m going to do to attack the day.”

“It’s a lot about experimenting and seeing what they can do,” Driscoll said of both Stuart and Scott. “It’s all about managing their workload, managing their stuff and making sure their bodies are recuperating and not trying to push too hard, too quick.”

It’s worth calibrating overall expectations for this group of pitchers. None of them will be Verlander, none of them will be Scherzer, none of them are top-100 prospects at the moment. None of them have the prospect status of any one member of the Mets’ 2015 postseason rotation.

Tidwell has a chance to be a front-half starter if things break right. The consensus is Vasil can be a back-end starter; one evaluator said that could change if he were able to add a few more ticks on the radar gun. Hamel’s future might be in the bullpen, and Scott and Stuart are too early in their transitions to project confidently where they’ll go.

But beggars cannot be choosers, and the Mets are begging for internal options to add to their pitching staff. Only six of the 34 pitchers New York has used this season were drafted or signed by the club. Those half-dozen combined for a 5.47 ERA over 218 2/3 innings this year. Only one of them has an ERA below four: Luis Guillorme, who tossed a single scoreless inning in a 10-0 loss back in April.

This quintet wants to change that.

“When you build a community of guys that get along and they’re all performing and all coming up together and starting to move up at the same time, it builds a relationship,” Vasil said. “Every guy is pulling for each other, every guy is rooting for each other. To me, that’s something really special going on.”

— Reporting from Somerset, N.J., and Moosic, Penn.

(Photo of Mike Vasil: Mike Janes / Four Seam Images via Associated Press)