Wednesday, April 02

Welcome back to the Mets Beat newsletter! Anthony DiComo has covered the Mets for MLB.com since 2007, including the past 16 seasons full-time on the beat.

HOUSTON -- The 2025 season began just a tick inauspiciously for the Mets, who dropped their opener to the Astros with Juan Soto at the plate. So it goes. Even $765 million players can’t come through on every occasion.

Much as one game isn’t enough to judge a player, it’s also not enough to answer questions about a team. The 2025 Mets have plenty of those, including these four that particularly interest me:

How good can Soto be?
In his first year with the Mets, it would be unfair to expect Soto to be better than last year, when -- in terms of adjusted OPS -- he produced one of the 35 best seasons of any player this century. Yet for my bold prediction that ran in Tuesday’s newsletter, that’s exactly what I wrote.

Why do I believe Soto can be better than he was in a year that saw him hit 41 homers with a .989 OPS? In addition to his obvious skill, he’s only 26, a prime age when injury concerns aren’t quite as front-of-mind as they might eventually become. At this point, he’s accustomed to switching teams, and he seems genuinely happy with this one. He’s also never won an MVP award, and while Shohei Ohtani remains the man to beat in that arena, Soto is clearly good enough to do it.

But baseball is a difficult game, as underscored by Soto’s final at-bat on Opening Day. A lot will have to go right for Soto to be even better than he was in 2024.

Can Edwin Díaz’s velocity rebound?
I wrote about Díaz’s velocity toward the end of Spring Training, eliciting a mix of reactions. Some of you seemed panicked. Others were confident it was just a Spring Training thing that would go back to normal once the season began. Díaz didn’t pitch on Opening Day, but he surely will before the end of the weekend. When he does, I’ll be eager to check out his radar gun readings. It’s just a lot easier to envision Díaz as a dominant closer when he’s sitting 99 mph versus 96.

Is this Clay Holmes transition going to work?
So far … not perfect. Holmes was inefficient over 4 2/3 innings on Opening Day, walking four batters and throwing 89 pitches. That’s not the Holmes we saw in Spring Training, where he carved up opposing lineups pretty much every time out.

Afterward, Holmes talked about the “growth” and “learning” process he plans to achieve between starts. He’ll pitch again next week in Miami. Every one of his outings will be instructive, especially in the early season.

Is the rest of the rotation going to be strong enough?

It’s not as if the Mets have a ton of sure things elsewhere in their starting five. Neither Tylor Megill nor David Peterson have ever completed full seasons in a big league rotation. Griffin Canning has, but he’s coming off statistically one of the worst seasons of any Major League starter. Kodai Senga, meanwhile, has to be one of the toughest pitchers to project in the entire league. He just needs to stay healthy.

Reinforcements could arrive sooner rather than later, but it’s not as if injured starters Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas will be guaranteed success when they return. Same goes for prospects Brandon Sproat and Blade Tidwell, who have high ceilings but a lot to prove.

If the Mets are going to win this year, they’ll need their rotation to be solid, start to finish. That’s well within the realistic range of possibilities, but so are plenty of worse outcomes. Let’s see how the next couple of months go. This rotation will surely look different in June than it does right now.

Who is the Mets’ all-time wins leader among pitchers born outside the U.S.? 

A) Bartolo Colon

B) Sid Fernandez

C) Pedro Martinez

D) Johan Santana 

A childhood Mets fan, Kranick made the Opening Day roster on the strength of a 1.46 ERA in eight spring appearances. I caught up with him before Opening Day to discuss his journey.

MLB.com: You haven’t been in the big leagues since 2022. What does this return to the highest level mean for you?

Kranick: It’s special. It hasn’t really hit me yet. It’s been a few years. I got up last year [on the playoff roster], but it felt sort of rushed. Obviously, that felt really good, too, but this is just a different feeling. A lot of hard work the last couple years. A lot of ups and down -- mostly downs, really. But it’s just special, and I’m excited for the opportunity.

MLB.com: How did they tell you?

Kranick: [Carlos Mendoza] brought me in, and the first part of the conversation, I didn’t know which way it was going to go. They played a good little prank on me, but it was good. The way he was wording it, it seemed like I was going to get some bad news. He said, ‘You’ve been through a lot … it’s not easy to finish Spring Training, come out here and have an off-day before Opening Day.’ So it was good.

MLB.com: How does this feel different than your big league debut, given that you grew up a Mets fan?

Kranick: I feel like it’s right there with it. Today kind of feels like when they first told me I was going up in Pittsburgh. Similar feeling. Something about Opening Day is just special. My dad and a couple of his buddies went to Mets Opening Day for years. Hopefully that’s a new tradition that he starts again. … [Laughing] I don’t think we were ever invited, which was messed up.

• If you read one thing this week, let it be this story on Rafael Zapata, Soto’s mentor in the Dominican Republic who was instrumental in his childhood transition from a pitcher to a hitter. My colleague Manny Randhawa spoke to Zapata for the full story. 

• From Whole Foods to The Show: Hayden Senger, who keeps an offseason job at a grocery market, made the Mets’ Opening Day roster. So did these 25 others -- a group that includes Kranick, Luisangel Acuña and plenty more of intrigue.

D) Johan Santana 

Santana’s 46 wins with the Mets are the franchise’s most by a foreign-born pitcher, two more than Colón. (Fernandez has more, but he’s a native of Hawaii.)

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