The right-hander still has every chance to make good on the 2024 trade that brought him to the Mets.
A 29-year-old reliever who has bounced between the Royals, Diamondbacks, Guardians, and Rays, Tyler Zuber is exactly the sort of arm you expect teams to bring in as a long-shot camp body. There’s a lot more beneath the surface, however, with a real chance for late-inning impact.
Zuber joined the Mets at last year’s deadline, a component of David Stearns’ nimble midseason roster reconstruction. Here’s what was said about the deal at the time:
On deadline day, the Mets hooked up with the Rays again, acquiring Tyler Zuber for relief prospect Paul Gervase. Zuber was at one point a notable relief prospect for the Royals who began suffering shoulder problems right as he made the majors. Those issues derailed his early career, and he was pitching for the Long Island Ducks earlier this year before Tampa signed him. Since that point, he’s dominated the upper minors, featuring a fastball with outlier characteristics out of his release point and a useful cutter / sweeper combination. He’s also optionable and under team control for multiple seasons after this one. Zuber is basically a present-value version of what you’d hope Gervase is, and the Mets didn’t even have to sacrifice team control to get a player who can help this year; slam dunk A.
Unfortunately, that grade looked far too optimistic down the stretch in 2024. Zuber’s gains didn’t port over to the Mets particularly well, and he walked 15 batters in 16 innings in Syracuse (never appeared for the major league team) with an ERA approaching seven. Meanwhile, the Rays made some tweaks to Gervase and watched him post an absurd 40.6% K-BB% in Double-A for the rest of the season.
We know better than to draw conclusions over 20 innings of relief work. We also know that the Mets have been hard at work with seemingly all of their arms all offseason. Zuber is no exception; he’s come back with pitch shapes even better than those he displayed in his time with the Rays last year, and now looks like a potential late inning arm once again.
Zuber’s four-seam, which averaged ~14 inches of induced vertical break and ~9 inches of arm-side run last year, now has even more movement. He’s clearly been tinkering with the pitch during Spring Training, adding movement along one axis or the other outing-by-outing. It’s impossible to say whether this is intentional experimentation, a product of inconsistency, or part of his normal ramp. What we can say is that the version he threw on 3/3 added significant vertical break—averaging 17 inches of IVB—making it similar to Joe Jimenez’s primary offering from 2024 (.277 xwOBA against).
Like most Mets, Zuber has also fiddled with a sinker and a tighter slider, but it’s his sweeper that most stands out. It was a decent offering in 2024, but he’s now throwing straight up frisbees that have averaged ~20 inches of horizontal movement across two spring outings, and even more if we look only at March 3rd. For context, the only pitcher to average that much sweeper movement in 2024 was Boston’s Greg Weissert, and Weissert’s version comes in several ticks slower with less vertical movement.
There’s obviously a “but” coming, so here it is. We are dealing with laughably small sample sizes, fewer than 30 total pitches so far this spring for which we have Statcast data. Pitch shapes can fluctuate significantly. particularly for guys who are as wild as Zuber has been throughout his career (notably, he walked three in his first spring outing, though he’s walked zero since). Weird Florida weather or poorly calibrated pitch tracking equipment in Spring Training parks could also explain some of the outlier numbers we’re seeing. Additional outings where Zuber recreates his 3/3 pitch shapes would go a long way towards increasing confidence here.
Yet you can’t deny that the early data is exciting. Stuff models are unsurprisingly very high on the latest version of Zuber’s arsenal. Reportedly, Zuber showed similar shapes during his indoor work this winter, which perhaps makes it easier to buy in. And of course, Zuber still has options, meaning the Mets can cycle him up and down if none of this sticks quite as well as we want it to.
Realistically, Zuber will feature in a middle relief role, one where his frequent bouts of wildness are less of a problem. He’s also likely to be shuttled back and forth between Syracuse and New York several times throughout the year, providing valuable bullpen flexibility when the Mets need it. And there’s always the chance that this uptick in stuff is real, that Zuber has finally harnessed his arm talent and can function as a late-inning option. This combination of utilities makes him the ideal sort of depth you want to fill out your 40-man roster with, and should give him ample time to add one more win to the 2024 deadline.