Why Mets could add fewer starting pitchers than expected

In a recent piece for The Athletic covering Kodai Senga's desire to stay in New York, Will Sammon mentioned that the Mets may add only one starting pitcher this winter. While it appears that trading Senga is an eventuality, Sammon notes that the Mets' current glut of rotation options would prohibit more than one external addition unless further subtraction from the group occurs.

Even if the Mets are successful in trading Senga, they already have three veteran pitchers under control for 2026: Clay Holmes, Sean Manaea and David Peterson. Rookie Nolan McLean cemented himself as a rotation fixture with a strong finish to the season while rookies Jonah Tong, Brandon Sproat and the rehabbing Christian Scott are also options to fill out a big league rotation.

Peterson will be a free agent after the 2026 season while Holmes has the ability to opt out of his contract, which he will likely exercise with another strong year. Manaea struggled mightily in 2025 due to injury and has essentially no trade value with two years and $50 million left on his deal, even with some of the salary deferred.

Are the Mets putting too much faith in their internal options?

While David Stearns did acknowledge that the Mets needed to add a top line starter earlier in the offseason, he has also indicated that the team views run prevention as a part of their problem. Defense has been a notable theme of the offseason planning so far, with the Brandon Nimmo trade removing a declining defender in left field while putting a plus fielder at second base.

Improved defense could help the starters and Stearns can rightly look at his group to see potential from at least three current starters. McLean's aforementioned strong finish to 2025 should cement him in the rotation while Holmes had a successful transition from the bullpen, tossing 165.2 innings to provide a solid baseline for a push towards 200 innings in 2026.

Peterson was also an All-Star in the first half of 2025 before falling apart down the stretch, a dip in performance that could be attributed to reaching a career high in innings. If all three of those suppositions are correct, Stearns would be justified to add one ace atop his rotation while allowing Manaea and the remaining youngsters to compete for the fifth spot in the rotation.

That is a lot of ifs, however, and assuming Peterson's dip in performance was tied to his workload could be faulty logic since he was largely outpitching his peripheral stats in the first half before regressing to the mean. There is also no guarantee that McLean will be able to maintain his dominant level in 2026 as the league gets to see him more, which could lead to a prototypical sophomore slump.

The big fly in the ointment is Manaea's contract, which has aged poorly since Stearns' bet that he could continue showcasing the ace-like form from the end of 2024 backfired spectacularly. The Mets don't want to light that money on fire and are hoping to get something from Manaea in 2026, but having a swing man earning almost $25 million seems like a waste of resources, so the team is likely to pencil Manaea into a rotation spot unless he shows his performance from 2025 was not an outlier caused by multiple injuries.

Perhaps the Mets could generate an opening for another starter by shopping Peterson, who would have value as a rental pitcher, but a lot will depend how the pitching market shapes up in the offseason. Several top trade candidates, like Tarik Skubal and Freddy Peralta, may not be moved at all while Stearns has a noted history of not handing out long-term deals to pitchers in their 30s, which could take the Mets out of play for the likes of Framber Valdez and Ranger Suarez in free agency.

All of that calculus could factor into the Mets' belief that run prevention could play a big role in helping their rotation, but it is a very dicey bet to make with Francisco Lindor moving closer to the end of his prime and Juan Soto firmly in the middle of his. Wasting those years is not a good option, so it remains to be seen if the Mets' posture towards their pitching changes if the right values present themselves.

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