Mets In Agreement On Two-Year Deal With Sean Manaea

The Mets and left-hander Sean Manaea are in agreement on a two-year deal worth $28MM guaranteed, per Jon Heyman of the New York Post. The deal comes with an opt-out following the 2024 season.

Manaea, 32 in February, was a first-round pick by the Royals back in 2013 and was swapped to the A’s alongside Aaron Brooks in the 2015 deal that brought Ben Zobrist to Kansas City. The southpaw made his big league debut in Oakland early in the 2016 season and fashioned a solid rookie year for himself with a 3.86 ERA and 4.08 FIP across 144 2/3 innings of work. Manaea continued to provide mid-to-back end of the rotation consistency for Oakland over the next few seasons, and he owned a career 3.94 ERA (105 ERA+) and 4.15 FIP in 464 innings by the end of the 2018 season. Unfortunately, the lefty’s success was interrupted by shoulder surgery late in the 2018 campaign and he missed nearly all of 2019.

Upon his return to action late in the 2019 season, Manaea more or less picked up right where he left off. In 48 starts from 2019-21, the left-hander posted a solid 3.73 ERA (111 ERA+) with a strong 3.64 FIP. During this stretch, Manaea saw his strikeout rate climb considerably. Though he entered the 2019 season with a rate of just 19.2% for his career, the lefty struck out 24.8% of batters faced over the next three seasons while walking just 5.2% and generating a 43.8% groundball rate that was a near match for his 44.1% figure in the first three seasons of his career. With just one year left before the lefty would hit free agency and the team going nowhere in 2022, the A’s shipped Manaea to San Diego as the Padres in a four-player deal, netting a pair of prospects for the left-hander’s services.

Unfortunately, Manaea began to struggle upon departing Oakland. The lefty’s lone season in San Diego was something of a disaster as he struggled to a 4.96 ERA, 24% worse than league average by ERA+, with a 4.53 FIP. Manaea’s strikeout rate dipped to 23.2%, his walk rate climbed to 7.5%, and he generated grounders at a career-worst 38.2% clip. While the southpaw mostly looked like himself in the first half of the season, with a 4.11 ERA and 4.07 FIP in 100 2/3 innings of work (17 starts), that production fell off a cliff down the stretch as he allowed a whopping 6.44 ERA over his final 13 contests. Those struggles led Manaea to sign a two-year, $25MM deal with the Giants last offseason that gave him the option to return to the free agent market this winter.

At first, Manaea’s time with the Giants saw similarly disastrous results as his final outings with the Padres the previous year. The lefty was booted from the club’s rotation in early May and by mid-June had put together a 5.84 ERA in 49 1/3 frames as opposing batters teed off to the tune of a hefty .474 slugging percentage. However, as MLBTR’s Darragh McDonald noted in a recent profile of Manaea, the lefty added a sweeper to his repertoire at the end of May and found massive success with…