Mets, Sean Manaea agree to three-year, $75 million deal, source says
Sean Manaea of the Mets looks on after Game 5 of the National League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Citi Field on Oct. 18, 2024. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Sean Manaea is coming back home.
After a season of reinvention in Flushing – one where he went from reclamation project to staff ace – Manaea and the Mets decided to run it back, agreeing to a three-year, $75 million contract, pending a physical, a source confirmed.
Manaea was 12-6 with a 3.47 ERA last year, filled the gaping rotation hole left by Kodai Senga’s season-long injury, and helped lead the Mets to the NLCS, where they fell to the Dodgers. The Mets signed Manaea to a two-year contract after the left-hander pitched to a 5.20 ERA with the Giants in 2023; the second year, though, came with a player option worth $14 million that Manaea logically rejected given his performance last season.
He joins a rotation that (for now) includes Senga, Clay Holmes, David Peterson, Frankie Montas and Paul Blackburn.
Manaea pitched to a 2.70 ERA in July – a pivotal month where the Mets began their playoff push in earnest. At the end of that month, motivated by watching Atlanta’s Chris Sale pitch, Manaea decided to experiment with a lower arm slot. The move paid off: hitters had a hard time picking up his pitches and he was getting more swings and misses.
“Let me try this,” Manaea told Newsday last season. “I feel like naturally, I want to get lower and lower and lower, but for the longest time, it was like, we’ve got to climb higher . . . So that was like an internal battle where I should be having a higher arm slot but naturally I want to get down lower, so when Sale pitched against us, it was like, ‘OK, this guy throws from a super-low angle; why shouldn’t I try that?’ I tried it the next day. It felt good. The sounds it made, the feeling it made in different body parts, it just naturally feels really good.”
All of it was part of a sustained effort to improve after struggling in San Francisco. He began working with Driveline Baseball pitching lab after a tough 2022, introduced a sweeper and started throwing harder.
Last season, he openly said he enjoyed his time in Flushing and would like to return.
“I definitely had a lot of crazy expectations — ‘It’s tough to play in New York; if you do bad, it’s not going to be a fun time,’ ” he said. “But I was like, maybe I’ve just got to lean into this, and if we want to be great, then let’s go take on a hard challenge. I think it’s been kind of like that.”
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
