Mets, Sean Manaea agree to 2-year, $28 million deal, source confirms 

The Mets continued their quest to turn 2024 into a “competitive” bridge year to sustained competitiveness, further rounding out their rotation by signing lefthander Sean Manaea to a two-year, $28 million deal Sunday, a source confirmed.

The former Giant will join Kodai Senga and Jose Quintana, along with recent acquisitions Luis Severino and Adrian Houser, as the Mets pivot from losing out on the free-agent frenzy in which Yoshinobu Yamamoto signed with the Dodgers.

Manaea, who will turn 32 in February, has a career 4.10 ERA over eight seasons. He went 7-6 with a 4.44 ERA in 2023 but showed signs of marked improvement in the latter half of the season. He picked up more than 2 miles per hour on his fastball, reaching an average of 93.6 mph, and introduced a sweeper in May that averaged about 79 mph early in the year.

Manaea had a 3.43 ERA in the second half of last year and pitched 27 of his 37 games out of the bullpen despite being a career starter.

The deal includes a player opt-out after the 2024 season, according to the New York Post, which first reported the signing, meaning that Manaea joins a cadre of players who could be flipped for prospects at the trade deadline if the Mets are out of contention.

Manaea’s sweeper, along with a fastball that maxed out at 97.2 mph last season, emerged via his work with Driveline Baseball, the well-regarded player development company that uses biomechanics and a data-driven approach to optimize its athletes. That secondary pitch, thrown 10.4% of the time, held batters to a .140 average and had a .351 whiff percentage, according to Baseball Savant. He also throws a changeup and slider.

“Manaea began throwing in his underpants with his motion capture report” last year as part of his Driveline training, the company said in a video posted to its X account. “He learned that .  .  . he didn’t exactly utilize [his torso] when throwing a baseball, as torso rotation is one of our strongest correlators in our bio-mec database .  .  . [He] worked on mechanical inefficiencies while going through his training. Manaea shocked himself a bit” throwing 94 mph in his first spring training game. He’s “throwing harder than he has in any previous year.”

The Mets also signed outfield defensive specialist Harrison Bader to a one-year, $10.5 million deal this past week, another low-risk, short-term contract that underlines their desire to develop their young talent for a potential greater push in 2025.

That ethos — put forth by former general manager Billy Eppler last year — remains true despite the $325 million they offered Yamamoto, who took that same amount to head to the Dodgers in a record-breaking deal for a starting pitcher.

“When you’re pursuing someone who is a very highly-sought-after free agent that’s going to get a lot of money, you have to strategize around that,” Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns said last month of Yamamoto. “If we get him, that probably leads us down one path in the offseason. If we don’t get him, we’ll adjust and go down alternate paths.”

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.