Mets Make Trevor May Their First Major Offseason Addition
Mets fans have waited a long time to be as optimistic about an offseason as they are this winter. After decades in which conservative spending was only part of the self-destructive tactics the Wilpons inflicted upon the franchise, new owner Steve Cohen has stated plainly he bought the team with the purpose of buying up talent and transforming the team into something “iconic.” With no shortage of star players available both in free agency and via trade, Mets fans can let their imaginations run wild imagining what the roster could look like in 2021 and beyond.
Before this week, though, the Mets had yet to make a major move of any kind. That finally changed Tuesday, when they signed former Twins reliever Trevor May to a two-year deal. SNY.tv’s Andy Martino was the first to report a completed deal, while MLB Network’s Jon Heyman was first on the terms.
Mets have signed Trevor May, per source. Deal is pending physical. @AnthonyDiComo first mentioned talks.
— Andy Martino (@martinonyc) December 1, 2020
Trevor May’s 2-year deal with the Mets is for about $15M
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) December 1, 2020
May ranked 21st on Craig Edwards’ Top 50 Free Agents list at the beginning of the winter, the second reliever listed behind ex-A’s closer Liam Hendriks, and ahead of big names such as Brad Hand, Blake Treinen and Kirby Yates. That might seem like an aggressive ranking considering his age, injury history, and production. At 31, it isn’t as though May is hitting the market as a young man. He has a Tommy John surgery in his past, which cost him the 2017 season and a good portion of ’18. Since his return from that injury, he’s posted a 3.19 ERA, 3.56 FIP and 1.8 WAR in 113 games. Those are perfectly solid numbers, but not what you would call elite.
But as Edwards notes, the ranking isn’t so much a reflection of May’s past as it is the potential teams see in him. That sounds strange to say about an over-30 pitcher with a surgically rebuilt elbow, but it does apply here. When May broke into the majors in 2014, his average fastball velocity sat around 92.6 mph. When he returned from Tommy John surgery in ’18, he was at 94. Then he jumped up to 95.5 in ’19 and 96.3 last season. He’s also increased the spin rate on his fastball in each of the past two years. May’s stuff just keeps getting better despite him being 12 years into his professional career.
May aims high with that fastball to make it even tougher to catch up with. Of the 233 fastballs he threw in 2020, nearly 70% were in the top third of the strike zone or higher:
Opponents swung and missed on 46.9% of the cuts they took at May’s fastball in 2020, a rate usually reserved for a good breaking ball; the league as a whole ran a whiff rate of 22.6% against four-seamers. He also generated whiff rates of 34.4% against his slider — a pitch with hard vertical drop that May says has more in common with his old curveball than the slider he had when he first broke into the majors — and 38.7% against his changeup, which was actually his most difficult-to-hit pitch inside the strike zone last season.
Put all of that together, and May had the eighth-highest whiff rate in all of baseball last year. His strikeout percentage of 39.6% ranked ninth among pitchers with 20 innings thrown. He’s one of the game’s very best strikeout arms, so why aren’t his run prevention numbers proportionately strong? Part of it is some bad luck. He had a HR/FB rate of 21.7% in 2020 — tied for 16th-highest among all qualified relievers — and also allowed a career-high fly-ball rate, leading to an icky HR/9 rate of 1.93. You’d prefer May allow fewer flies, but that’s not likely to trend down much given the way he pitches. Instead, you have to hope that such an outsized number of those fly balls stop leaving the yard. If that were the case in 2020, his 3.62 FIP would have been closer to his 2.74 xFIP, and his case as a top free-agent reliever wouldn’t be the slightest bit controversial.
With a $7.5 million AAV over two years, May’s contract beat both Edwards’ prediction and the crowdsource on this site, as well as the figure over at MLB Trade Rumors. He did it by a relatively small amount, but it is a continuation of a trend that provides reason for cautious optimism: Of the free agents ranked at each site (not counting qualifying offer guys), Edwards was under on two and exactly right with one of the free agents he listed; MLBTR has been under on all five of their signees. It’s still early, the predictions haven’t missed badly, and all of the big money players are still out there. But it’s good to see players signing for more money than analysts and fans alike thought they would receive then for less.
May’s signing is particularly reassuring when it comes to the reliever market. Again, this is one top reliever getting signed by a new owner who wants to be ambitious with his money. But when Hand and his $10 million option were spurned in November by not only penny-pinching Cleveland but also every other team, it cast a shadow over what top-tier relief talent may be worth on the market, as well as the market the dozens of merely good relievers may be subject to. If May can get a multi-year deal and a $7.5 million AAV, that should bode well for Hendriks and Hand at the top of the ladder, as well as players like Shane Greene and Jake McGee lingering a couple of rungs below them.
It is also good news for the Mets, who were in need of another good power arm to pair with Edwin Diaz at the back of the bullpen. Diaz was his old self in 2020, striking out nearly two batters an inning and keeping homers in check en route to a 1.75 ERA and 2.18 FIP. But the arms who were in line to throw ahead of him in next year are less imposing. Dellin Betances didn’t look right last season coming off an Achilles injury, and pitchers like Chasen Shreve and Miguel Castro are interesting but probably shouldn’t be the second-best arms in a contender’s bullpen. When spring arrives, May’s assignment will be to tide Mets fans over until the bigger star arrives. Come to think of it, that might be his job right now.
Tony is a contributor for FanGraphs. He began writing for Red Reporter in 2016, and has also covered prep sports for the Times West Virginian and college sports for Ohio University's The Post. He can be found on Twitter at @_TonyWolfe_.
Perhaps understated in May’s decision to join the Mets is his previous relationship to pitching coach Jeremy Heffner (who previously was employed by the Twins).
As for the Mets’ offseason plans…1 Trevor down, 1 Trevor to go.
It doesn’t get much better than Lugo, May, and Díaz closing out games. Hopefully the Mets acquire enough starting pitching so they don’t have to use Lugo as a starter.
I guess I’m the last Mets fan that still believes Lugo could be a very solid #3 starter
I ended the season thinking that maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a starter after all. But when I looked back at his game logs, he actually only had 2 bad starts- one of them was a flukish performance in Philly when he gave up 4 HR- and his other starts were all decent to good. On second look, I would be cautiously optimistic if they penciled him in as the 4th or 5th starter next season.
I recall in the discussion in the Cano suspension article that lots of Mets fans suggested that the $20 million in savings should be poured into three relief pitchers. I believe we identified May as one of our preferred candidates. Perhaps Sandy is following FanGraphs!
When no team wants Brad Hand at $10M in one year but someone wants Trevor May for $15.5M over two, that means either (1) most decision makers in baseball have a weirdly low opinion of Brad Hand, (2) a whole lot of teams thought the pitching market was going to be much, much worse than it’s going to be, (3) the Mets way overpaid.
I actually do like Trevor May. But if you’re looking for a 31 year old who gets a ton of strikeouts and has a ton of fly balls, Brad Hand has been clearly the better version of that player over the last two years (and, frankly, every year going back to 2016). Between this and the starters getting much more than we all expected on one year deals, I’m leaning towards #2.
Hand has lost velo while May has added velo post Tommy John surgery so that might play a part
That is true. He changed his arm slot, I think, which seems to have led to both the drop in velocity and also the increase in fly balls. But it seems to have improved the horizontal break on his pitches, too. These all seem to be related.
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/brad-hand-fly-ball-enthusiast/
In fairness: the Mets may have taken Hand at $10 mill, but Cohen wasn’t controlling owner at that point. I believe Sandy specifically mentioned Hand by name in the opening press conference with this point.
Still surprising that they’re the only ones though.
Of course the Mets should target the high profile guys, but beyond the one or two guys they want from that pool they should aim to eat in the low-to-mid tier signing pool. Other teams will be shying away from it with the losses they’ve incurred, and it’s an easy way to manufacture depth for an organization that has none of it. Until they build a Dodgers level pro-scouting system and a player dev infrastructure to find and build players, they can make do by dominating the market for the “Trevor May”s of the world.
This is a nothing signing in the sense that May merely replaces Justin Wilson in the pen. A slightly better pitcher, sure, but the Mets are paying around 4m for that slightly better; 4m they won’t be spending elsewhere.
With Alderson still unaccountably at the helm, we can expect more patching and filling throughout. It’s likely Liam Hendriks could have been had for less than the AAV of May, Matz, and Gsellman. Hand, significantly better than May, could have been had for 1/10m vs. May’s 2/15.5 + 500k. Mike Minor, 2/18m + 12m was signed for close to what May got (the cheap option year probably makes their AAVs all but identical), and you’re likely to get 160IP with an ERA+ of 120 from Minor, who was also an excellent reliever in 2017.
Alderson is not the answer. It’s entirely likely the Mets won’t even add a starter as good as Minor. There’s nothing wrong with adding Trevor May, of course, but with his other moves it’s starting to looking like more like a Wilpon-Alderson offseason than a Cohen-Alderson one.
Saying Alderson isn’t the answer in early December while the Mets are still in play for literally every big free agent other than LeMahieu and he’s publicly committed to not recklessly trading prospects away like BVW and Jeff Wilpon seems overly pessimistic.
It’s hardly too early or overly pessimistic.
You have a decade of material to look at when examining Alderson’s capacity to build a strong contender this offseason along with his bland statements and uninspired collection of moves since Cohen bought the team. Even Hoyer of the ostensibly rebuilding Cubs has led with more inspired rhetoric and de facto promises to *seek* to go deep into the postseason, whereas Alderson appears unaware that the Mets current nucleus plus 80m (and that’s even if they’re staying under the LT threshold) can easily build a powerful contender capable of going deep into the postseason without sacrificing the team’s potential after next year.
Instead he appears to have convinced Cohen that, somehow, 2021 is not the time–else why conceal your intentions from fans? Or why would this produce the contrary statement from the team’s owner about perhaps winning a World Series in three to five years instead of inspiring language such as Hoyer’s (to give an example of how it’s done without making foolish promises)?
Put another way, you’d never voluntarily hire Alderson to effectively GM the Mets during the 2020-21 offseason–at least I hope you’d have the sense not to–yet here we are, stumbling along, with a weak collection of early moves of the kind all too typical of Wilpon Alderson.
As for being “publicly committed to not recklessly trading prospects away like BVW and Jeff Wilpon,” yes, you’d expect that from any 12 year old, yet in response to specific points, that’s all you can come up with.
If that’s the best you can do, at least admit you’re not working with much.
Mets are a good team!