Mets Sign Severino, Wendle, and Adams

The David Stearns era is officially off and running when they signed a flurry of low-risk high reward pitchers and a solid utility player.

Luis Severino

If you said five years ago that Luis Severino was signing a one year prove it deal with The New York Mets you would probably laugh. Luis Severino's tenure with the Yankees was a mixture of a little bit of the good, quite a bit of the bad, and some ugly. When healthy he was a good pitcher with at one point being considered the future ace for The Yankees. When he has made over 30 starts he has posted 200+ strikeouts and threw over 175 innings with some all-star selections as well. The rest of his tenure has been injury riddled except this past year where he was flat out bad. In 2023, Severino started in 18 games posting a 6.65 ERA while giving up 23 HRS in 89 innings pitched. This is a very intriguing reclamation project for The Mets because Severino hasn't lost any velocity on his fastball. While also looking at his analytics, all of his pitches remain the same from last year and from his peak in 2017-2018. On SNY's Baseball Night In New York former Met/Yankee pitcher Adam Ottavino stated that he might've been tipping his pitches stating "Sevy was one of those guys that had a notable tip for awhile, the whole league knew about it". If this was the culprit to his abysmal season, then it would be interesting to see how Jeremy Hefner can fix this issue so that Severino can be a solution not a problem.

Joey Wendle

This is a move that could be a very underrated signing for The Mets. Although the bat hasn't been effective the past couple seasons, Joey Wendle provides positional flexibility and quality leadership this young core needs. When the bat was right Joey Wendle was a valuable everyday player for the savvy Tampa Bay Rays especially in 2021 where he was named an all-star posting a 108 OPS+. His bat might not be the same, but his defense is still above average. According to Joe DeMayo Wendle posted from the years of "2020-2022 he was 85th, 95th, and 83rd percentile OAA". David Stearns had a clear emphasis on run prevention this off-season and Joey Wendle prevented runs at three different positions which is very impressive. His role on this team is to be that plug in play guy like Luis Guillorme was, but with a higher upside.

Austin Adams

The Mets signed their potential first bullpen arm of the off-season by signing Austin Adams to a non-guaranteed split major league contract. Adams posted a 5.71 ERA in 17 innings for the Diamondbacks this past season with a xERA of 3.55. The one thing that really intrigues me about Adams is how he throws his slider over 89 percent of the time and his savant page shows that he doesn't give up hard hit balls which means he gets into a lot of bad luck.

I know that the start of the off-season has gotten off to an underwhelming start, but the winter meetings haven't even started yet. There was this old saying that when you build a house you don't start with the top, you gotta start at the bottom and build your way up.