A Changeup Is Gonna Come to Queens

Devin Williams, the lights-out reliever with the M. Night Shyamalan changeup, has agreed to a three-year deal with the Mets. A two-time All-Star, Williams earned NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2020 and scored a down-ballot MVP vote as recently as 2023. Even after a disastrous 2025 season kicked his career ERA all the way up from 1.83 to 2.45, he still has a career ERA of – you guessed it – 2.45. Here’s my first piece of analysis: That’s so good, you guys! Assuming he won’t keep running a 55% strand rate from here on out, the Mets just signed up for three years of one of the best relievers in baseball; meanwhile, Williams just signed up for a quick ride from the Bronx to Flushing, but it’s important to note that the ride is always going to be longer than Google Maps predicts, because the odds of actually catching an express 7 train rather than the local are vanishingly small.

Let’s start with the terms of the deal and the credit for who reported which parts of those terms, and then we’ll take a nap and perform some more light analysis. Cool? Cool.

The deal is for $51 million. That would work out to a tidy $17 million per year, but because $5 million per year will be deferred for 11 to 20 years, the net present value and the average annual value for luxury tax purposes drop to a bit under $14.8 million. Also, $2 million per year will take the form of a signing bonus. The deal doesn’t include a no-trade clause or options, but it does have a $1 million assignment bonus in case Williams gets traded. How do we know all that? We know because Anthony Franco of MLB Trade Rumors told us that Will Sammon of The Athletic broke the news that Williams was signing a three-year deal, Jeff Passan of ESPN broke the news that the dollar value was above $50 million, Jon Heyman of the New York Post reported the actual terms of the deal, and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic broke the news about the assignment bonus, and also because Jon Becker of our very own FanGraphs calculated the AAV down to the cent: $14,792,239.20. See, didn’t all that make you want a nap?

Story lines should wake you up, and you can really take your pick here. Williams is now the ninth former Brewer David Stearns has reconnected with in New York, according to Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal. He’s also the first reliever for whom Stearns has ever shelled out serious money. It’s fun that Williams is staying in the big apple because, like so many players who struggle in their first season wearing pinstripes, Yankees fans quickly decided that he just couldn’t handle the outsized expectations and corresponding pressures of playing in New York City. It’s even more fun that Williams was the impetus for the Yankees’ ending their decades-long facial hair policy, only to put up the worst season of his career for them and then decamp to their crosstown rivals. More importantly for Mets fans, as soon as the news of the signing broke, so did reports that the signing won’t preclude the team from re-signing Edwin Díaz. Should that come to pass, the Mets bullpen would boast one of the most devastating one-two punches in the game.

Let’s analyze all those dollars. First, we should note that ever astute FanGraphs readers pegged Williams for a median contract of three years and $42 million. Good work, team. Next, we should note that Ben Clemens had Williams at two years and $24 million, while MLB Trade Rumors had him at double that, four years and $68 million. That’s quite a bit of variability. As Andrew Mearns noted for Baseball Prospectus, Williams didn’t get the megadeals of Díaz and Josh Hader because he entered free agency after his age-30 season and because he put up an ugly platform year. How ugly was it? How does a 4.79 ERA, a WPA of just 0.08, and losing the closer job twice in one season sound to you? Here I’ll quote BP’s Ginny Searle: “You could add up Williams’ ERAs from his final three seasons as a Brewer and they wouldn’t come to the mark he posted in his single (and likely only) season in pinstripes.”

On the other hand, how does a 2.68 FIP and being above the 96th percentile in chase rate, whiff rate, and strikeout rate sound to you? You know about this dichotomy already. Michael Baumann wrote about it. Ben Clemens and Eric Longenhagen wrote about it. Mario Delgado Genzor wrote about it twice at BP. For that reason, I won’t dive too deeply into it here, but the point is that while the Mets are spending quite a bit of money, they’re still buying pretty low on a truly elite reliever coming off a fluky season. Somebody was always going to pay Williams closer money on the assumption that one bad season didn’t completely change who he is as a pitcher. In that sense, it’s a little surprising that Williams signed so early. It’s not hard to imagine another team offering opt-outs, an extra year or two, or a guaranteed closer role. Sammon reported that five other teams were interested, including one that tried to swoop in with a competitive offer on Monday night.

Time for the baseball analysis. I mentioned strand rate in the first paragraph, but let’s make sure we hammer that point home. Some pitchers really are worse with runners on base, but strand rate is a classic indicator of bad luck. Over the first six years of his career, Williams ran a strand rate of 81.8%. In 2025, he was at 55.2%. That’s a drop of 26.6 percentage points. It’s impossibly large. Since 2000, we’ve seen 6,897 different player-seasons of at least 60 innings pitched. Williams’ 55.2% mark ranks 6,888th. That’s 10th from the bottom. It’s impossibly low. No matter what happens next year, even if Williams is actively bad all of a sudden, we should still expect his strand rate to jump way, way up (and his ERA to fall).

That’s not to say Williams’ 2025 numbers contained no smoke at all. Both his fastball and his changeup lost some induced vertical break, and the fastball lost some horizontal break too. In other words, the fastball was just a bit straighter, and stuff models accordingly graded it just a hair worse than they had in seasons past. Williams’ arm angle also dropped down to an average of 21 degrees, the lowest mark of his career. That more horizontal arm angle could render his trademark wild horizontal movement a bit more predictable for hitters. Lastly, although his fastball velocity has stayed more or less constant over the past four years – he averaged 94.1 mph in 2022, then 94.2, 94.7, and 94.1 again – the league’s average fastball velocity hasn’t remained constant. In 2025, that 94.1-mph mark meant that his fastball was below average in velocity for the first time ever.

All that showed up in the numbers. Although they were fantastic, his 34.7% strikeout rate and 40% whiff rate were his lowest since since his 13-game debut in 2019. The bigger problem was what happened when batters didn’t miss. In 2025, Williams ran the highest exit velocity (89.5 mph), hard-hit rate (35.7%), and barrel rate (9.3%) of his career. As a result, his .367 xwOBA on balls in play was the highest of his career too. That was the exact league average in 2025.

To be clear, none of this really needs to change in order for Williams to get back on top. If you can run absurd strikeout numbers while giving up league-average contact when batters do put the ball in play, you’re going to be just fine (unless you have some abysmal luck). While the Mets would love nothing more than for Williams to turn in yet another season with a sub-2.00 ERA, they’re probably not expecting that either. They would surely settle for three years of mere excellence.