A.J. Minter Moves to the Mets, While José Leclerc Lands in California’s Capital

It must have been fifth grade or so when I encountered the “compare and contrast” essay prompt for the first time. I remember thinking: What the hell? These two passages were written by different people. Why is it on me to tell you what is similar about them?

Over the years, I got better at these prompts. But it appears I’ve regressed. Two relievers signed eight-figure contracts last week. What’s similar? They both closed out games for World Series-winning teams in the 2020s, will likely handle the eighth inning for their new employers, and were born in the glorious and blessed year of 1993. What’s different? One throws right-handed, one throws left-handed. One signed with a contender; one perhaps got paid a premium so his team can try to avoid an MLBPA grievance.

But there are limits to the illuminating qualities of comparison. These days, individualized analysis is required to assess the effectiveness of a pitcher, so that’s how this post will proceed today. A.J. Minter and José Leclerc will earn life-changing quantities of money to chuck leather a few dozen times. Let’s find out why.

A.J. Minter signs with the Mets for two years and $22 million

Minter battled injuries last season. It’s easy to breeze over a sentence like that, but Minter was really going through it. Mark Bowman reported that, during an August surgery, Minter’s surgeon found a “labrum tear, a hip impingement and a lesion on Minter’s femur.” Ouch!

Bowman’s report makes it sound like these injuries accumulated during Minter’s heavy workload over the course of the decade; last season, his body finally broke down. But when he was healthy, he was among the best. Perhaps Minter hasn’t been in the very top tier of relievers in the 2020s, but he’s pretty close: His 5.1 WAR ranks 11th among all relievers in the last five seasons.

Minter wanted to keep pitching through his labrum tear/hip impingement/femur lesion, but ultimately opted for surgery in August — a surgery, evidently, that required the surgeon to “perform” a “microfracture on the hip.” The Mets will hope the procedure reverses 2024’s concerning velocity decline, which saw his four-seamer lose nearly 1.5 mph compared to 2023. The $22 million is a gamble on Minter returning to that level, and it’s not hard to understand why the Mets want to make that bet.

Somewhat unusually for a top-end reliever, Minter throws three pitches. When he was healthy, his four-seamer was thrown with plus velocity, averaging 96 mph in 2023. Besides the velo, the pitch isn’t anything special — Minter’s arm angle, release height, and vertical break are all roughly around league average, meaning the pitch doesn’t have any sort of tricky approach angle.

But the pitch plays up because batters must account for Minter’s favored strikeout pitch: his “cutter,” which is really more like a slider. It’s self-evidently one of the best breaking balls in the game. Minter can throw it as hard as 92 mph with depth and five inches of sweep. Only a few pitchers can match those breaking ball specs; nearly all of those pitches, I’d argue, rank among the elite whiff pitches in the game:

To lefties, he throws it off the plate away to get swinging strikes. You know you’ve got a good whiff pitch when you get Luis Arraez flailing like this:

To righties, he can throw it to the back foot, though his favored way to strike out hitters with a platoon advantage is his changeup, which (as his pitch plot shows) gets a nice amount of vertical separation from his four-seam fastball:

His pitches all travel pretty quickly — Minter’s effectiveness isn’t tied to deceiving hitters with a variety of speeds. But the plus velocity on the heater, the nasty “cutter,” and the changeup that allows him to neutralize right-handed hitters is about as good of a package as one could ask from a backend arm. If Minter recovers his form, the Mets just banked a steal. He’ll slot in well as Edwin Díaz’s setup guy.

José Leclerc signs with the A’s for one year and $10 million

Leclerc is murder on right-handed hitters. He throws a hard fastball with some funky cut-ride movement and tunnels his slow, sweepy slider beautifully underneath the heater, leading to gaudy 36.3% strikeout rates when he’s got the platoon advantage.

Thanks to the new arsenal metrics from Stephen Sutton-Brown at Baseball Prospectus, we can quantify more precisely how Leclerc’s fastball and slider work together to befuddle right-handed hitters. Stephen breaks down arsenal interaction scores into four categories: Pitch Type Probability, Movement Spread, Velocity Spread, and Surprise Factor. Each score is converted into a percentile form, allowing for easy comparisons between pitchers. The knuckleballer Matt Waldron, for example, ranks as a 98 in Surprise Factor, the highest among all pitchers. (I’d recommending reading the full piece for further context on these metrics.) These four variables, in tandem, tell a story about how well hitters can square up a given pitcher. Against right-handers, Leclerc ranks as elite or near-elite in each of the arsenal metrics:

Unfortunately for Leclerc and the A’s, some hitters learn to hit left-handed. And those hitters tend to expose Leclerc’s flaws.

If there are pitchers in the majors (besides Joe Boyle) with worse four-seam command, I’d love to hear of them. I don’t think it takes a sophisticated plot observer to see that these fastballs are all over the place:

That’s less of a problem against righties, where the plurality of Leclerc’s pitches are sliders. His slider command is pretty good — he zones it a decent amount and can reliably land it in the chase zone off the plate — but that pitch doesn’t play as well against opposite-handed hitters. That puts extra emphasis on the fastball and the changeup, his two primary pitches against lefties. The changeup location clusters are tighter than those of his fastball, and Leclerc gets a bunch of whiffs when batters swing at it, but he almost never lands the pitch for a strike — his 26% zone rate ranked in the fourth percentile of all changeups last season. (Pitch-level stats, as always, are courtesy of Alex Chamberlain’s Pitch Leaderboard.)

As one might expect, Leclerc walks a bunch of left-handed hitters. In 2023, his walk rate against lefties was 16%; in 2024, it went even higher, to 17.7% (!). For reference, no pitcher had a walk rate above 15% last season besides the aforementioned Boyle. (Joe Boyle, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry — I’m hopeful the Rays can help you out.) These wild platoon splits aren’t just a small-sample fluke; they are a product of Leclerc’s command and arsenal, limiting his trustworthiness in high-leverage contexts.

The Rangers did a decent job protecting Leclerc against lefties over the last couple of years, almost treating him like a ROOGY. But these limitations mean he must be deployed with his platoon-related struggles in mind, lowering his ceiling as a high-leverage pitcher. That works just fine for the A’s, who employ the best reliever in the sport as their closer. With Mason Miller holding things down in the ninth, Leclerc can be free to do what he does best: run through the best righties on the opposing team.