The Mets’ starting rotation is a mixture of homegrown players and acquired talent heading into the 2026 season. They’ve got some young players fresh from the minor leagues either firmly entrenched or knocking on the door in Nolan McLean, Christian Scott, and Jonah Tong. And they have a group of starters they acquired outside the organization, either in free agency (Sean Manaea, Clay Holmes) or by trade (Freddy Peralta).
The one starter sort of stuck in the middle is longtime Met David Peterson. After
an offseason of roster upheaval, Peterson finds himself the longest-tenured Met, having made his debut with the team during the COVID-shortened 2020 season. He has been with the team his entire career, and 2026 is his final season before hitting free agency. A good walk year could set him up for a good payday, but will he be able to be consistently good for a whole season?
Over the course of his career, Peterson has a 4.12 ERA in 622.2 innings pitched. He has 614 strikeouts, a 1.373 WHIP, and a 98 ERA+, and he’s accumulated 6.7 bWAR in his six major league seasons. His ERA+ perfectly explains his career, he’s been an almost exactly average pitcher. Sometimes he’s been a bit better, sometimes he’s been a bit worse. But he’s never had that transcendent season or the absolutely awful season, instead just cruising through every season right around the middle of the pack.
His 2025 season was split into two parts that couldn’t be more starkly different. Through the end of July, he was enjoying one of the best stretches of his career. In the first half of the year, he had a 3.06 ERA across 109 innings, with 93 strikeouts, a 7.7 K/9 and a 1.239 WHIP. He threw a complete game shutout, his first and only one in his career thus far. And he pitched well enough to be named to the All-Star Game as a roster replacement. His performance in the month of July was transcendent, with a 1.05 ERA in 25.2 innings across four games that month. At the end of July he looked like he was the only dependable option in the Mets’ rotation.
But starting in August, the wheels came off and he imploded. He threw 59.2 innings across the last two months of the season, and in September he only pitched 16.2 innings in four games. His ERA in August was an awful 6.68, and his September was even worse with a 9.72 ERA. In August, there was at least the lone bright spot of his best K/9 of the season, with a 10.2 K/9. But in September he went back down to a 7.6 K/9, and he had an unbelievably bad 1.920 WHIP, giving up 18 hits in fewer than 17 innings.
Now, one of the other positives of Peterson’s 2025 season was that it was the first time in years that he didn’t have his season interrupted by an injury. He might have been way worse in the second half, but he played the whole season. He had suffered through multiple injuries in his career, with shoulder fatigue in 2020, side soreness that ended his 2021 season in July, and a torn labrum in his left hip in 2024. But he stayed healthy in 2025 and didn’t once get sent to the minor leagues, which happened in his only other healthy season in 2023.
Peterson is entering the 2026 season with an eye on his impending free agency at the end of the season. If his season is more like the first half of 2025, he could find himself signing a nice contract and setting up his future, as well as helping the Mets immensely this year. If his season is more like his second half of 2025, though, it could be a disaster for both him and the team.
