Mets Need More From Their Rotation If They Hope to Salvage Season

The Mets are treading dangerously close to being irrelevant before the summer kicks into full gear. They need more from their starting rotation to prevent that.

Freddy Peralta and the Mets' rotation have been underwhelming this season. | Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images

The Mets have some good news on tap as Francisco Lindor should be back from the injured list in the coming days. The problem is that the Mets have barely treaded water while Lindor was out, entering their four-game series with the Cubs nine games under .500 on June 23.

While a six-game National League Wild Card deficit seems manageable enough with three-plus months to go, it is hard to take the Mets seriously as contenders when they carry a 34-43 record. A big part of the issue has been the fact that the starting rotation, which killed the 2025 season, has been subpar to date.

Most of the focus will be on Freddy Peralta, who has hit a rough patch and now sports a 4.83 ERA as the staff's ace. Peralta has undoubtedly been underwhelming, but he is not the only issue in the rotation.

Freddy Peralta answers what he is most unhappy about in his outing tonight:

"Everything in general, but only being able to throw 2+ innings" pic.twitter.com/H4VvkvvuZj

— SNY Mets (@SNY_Mets) June 21, 2026

Clay Holmes's injury exposed the lack of depth in the back of the rotation, which has seen the Mets cycle through bad option after bad option to try and get some innings beyond their top three of Peralta, Nolan McLean and Christian Scott. Sean Manaea's turnaround has helped, but the Mets have been hemorrhaging runs early in games, with The Athletic's Tim Britton noting in his "This Week In Mets" column that the club's pitchers have an ERA of 5.39 in the first three innings of games.

That statistic includes both traditional starters and relievers who have functioned as openers, such as Tobias Myers and Huascar Brazobán. Putting your team in an early hole in nearly every game is a huge downer for morale and helps explain why the Mets have seemed to be pushing a rock uphill for most of the season.

How did the Mets' pitching get in such a bad situation?

Much of the blame for the pitching staff's issues falls on President of Baseball Operations David Stearns, who saw the rotation's downfall ruin the 2025 campaign and didn't do nearly enough to fix it. Adding Peralta was certainly a good idea, and neither prospect the Mets traded for him has done much in Milwaukee, but the big mistake was having Peralta be the only meaningful change in the rotation.

The Mets saw four starters fall off a cliff in the second half of the 2025 season: Manaea, David Peterson, Frankie Montas and Kodai Senga. Montas became a non-factor after undergoing Tommy John surgery, leading to his release, but logic would dictate that bringing back the other three and hoping they would all rebound to previous performance levels was not an optimal strategy.

Stearns did shop Senga in the offseason and held onto him when he didn't receive an offer to his liking. The move appeared to pay off when Senga had a strong spring training and earned a rotation spot, but he quickly reverted to inconsistent form after two starts and missed a ton of time with a back injury.

Kodai Senga has left much to be desired in the Mets' starting rotation this season. | Aaron Doster-Imagn Images

Manaea had no trade value and was shuttled around between long relief, bulk innings, and mop-up work while Peterson lost his grip on a rotation spot with a poor start to the season. Instead of relying on all three to be key parts of the rotation depth, Stearns should have moved on from two of them and added another veteran in free agency to go with Peralta, McLean and Holmes.

That alignment would have kept Christian Scott and Jonah Tong as depth pieces, while Myers could function in a similar fashion as Trevor Williams did for the 2022 Mets, working as the long reliever and an occasional sixth starter. Instead, the Mets' inconsistent usage of their starters has created a mess.

How the Mets can fix their rotation issues

The easy answer is simply for pitchers to pitch better, but a lot of that is beyond the Mets' control. What they can do, however, is try to put these pitchers in better positions to succeed by establishing set routines.

Pitchers are creatures of habit and tend to perform better when they can prepare for their roles as usual, as we have witnessed with Manaea. Since moving back to more regular appearances as a starter or appearing after an opener in June, Manaea has a 3.10 ERA in 20 1/3 innings, a solid sample size suggesting he may be functional as a No. 4 or No. 5 starter.

Sean Manaea strands the runner at third after a leadoff triple! pic.twitter.com/spYjbjtZ5d

— SNY (@SNYtv) June 18, 2026

The Mets have been data-driven this season and have used pitchers like Manaea, Peterson, Myers and Tong in a variety of roles, such as starting, working in short relief, bulk relief or entering late in games. This kind of inconsistency, even if communicated to the pitcher ahead of time, makes it hard to get consistent performance out of them.

Myers, in particular, has been a lost cause of late after the Mets began moving him out of the Williams role and into a bunch of different spots to try and maximize his skill set. The Rays have shown the kind of acumen that can make such a strategy successful, but duplicating what Tampa Bay does is a tough ask for an organization that is admittedly trying to play catch-up in analytics from years of neglect at the end of the Wilpon era.

The smartest play the Mets could make to help their pitchers is to simply give up on the openers or bulk games and let the starters, you know, start. The impending return of Scott from the injured list within the next week should also help by pushing Senga or Peterson back out of the rotation, which should give the Mets a set starting five of Peralta, McLean, Scott, Manaea and one of the other two.

Instead of playing mind games to get a minute tactical advantage, the Mets should simply commit to a five-man rotation and let them work for a few turns. There may not be enough talent in there to save the season, but the constant juggling they are doing now hasn't worked, and continuing it while expecting better results is the definition of insanity.