Jack Bennett's Mets Blog

On June 12th of 2025, the Mets were 45-24, holders of the best record in baseball. They finished the season at just 83-79 and missed out on the playoffs due to a record tiebreaker with the Cincinnati Reds. The story of how the bottom fell out can be very easily summed up by the fact that their starting pitching failed them. They had multiple major injuries to guys in the rotation and David Peterson and Sean Manaea, formerly strong members of the pitching staff, had struggled and were forced into lesser roles. This led the Mets to call on three pitchers all 24 and younger to attempt to rescue the season. The plan did not work and the young players were clearly not quite ready to be major leaguers, but the front office clearly knew what they needed to acquire in the offseason, veteran starters.

There were a number of options on the market, but the Mets elected to trade for veteran Freddy Peralta from the Milwaukee Brewers. The Brewers are a notoriously cheap organization who decided to trade one of their best pitchers a year before he reaches free agency, knowing full well that they do not intend on paying him after the 2026 season concludes. Instead of letting him go to another team for nothing, the Brewers put Peralta on the market in hopes of a decent return in prospect capital for a year of his services. The desperate Mets offered the Brewers two top 100 prospects in baseball (Pitcher Brandon Sproat and Second Baseman Jett Williams) and Milwaukee obliged.

Peralta came into the season excited to play for an organization that he knew had the pocketbooks to potentially sign him to a long-term extension. Before he ever took the mound, he voiced in the media his desire to remain with the team for the better part of a decade. The Mets did not give the pitcher the seven or eight year deal he was searching for prior to the year, and appear to have made the right decision.

After the worst start of his career Saturday night in Philadelphia, “Fastball Freddy” now holds a 4.83 era, good for the second worst season of his nine year career. In terms of advanced analytics, the most commonly accepted metric is Fielding Independent Pitching. The Dominican starter is posting a 4.32 FIP, the worst of his career. The graphic below shows these two metrics over the years.

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly is causing Peralta to struggle as much as he has. Some fans on Saturday night suggested he may be tipping his pitches, giving off a tell in his stance what pitch is coming. Nowadays, teams have entire departments dedicated to watching film on pitchers to see very subtle indicators that a certain pitch is coming. The 30-year-old gave up 10 runs on 10 hits in just 2 2/3 innings in Philadelphia, which is almost impressively putrid. A pitcher that clearly is of his caliber and potential almost never should have an appearance that shocking, which led the conspiracies to the forefront.

The most unsettling thing for Met fans is that it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. At times you can look at the underlying data and look for stats that could indicate that he is experiencing bad luck, which is certainly a part of the game. For Peralta, this doesn’t seem to be the case. If anything, this just may be what he is for the rest of the season. His hard hit percentage has also topped out at 39.6%, the highest of his career by a full percentage point. The chart below shows his hard hit rate over the years.

As you can see, his hard hit percentage was up from 2023-2025, but so was his number of strikeouts. If batters aren’t putting the ball in play very much, it doesn’t matter if the ball is hit hard. In each of those three years, his strikeouts per nine innings was over 10. In 2026, it has come in at 8.72, a significant decrease.

Time will tell whether or not the Mets trade Peralta at the end of the July before the trade deadline or keep him in hope that he reverts back to his former self, but either way his current performance is a major problem. If he continues to pitch this poorly, not only will they continue to lose games, but the prospect return will lessen. The 2026 season can be embodied almost entirely by the story of Freddy Peralta – first the hope, then the confusion, then the acceptance of failure.