Sources: Manaea back to Mets for 3 years, $75M

Left-hander Sean Manaea and the New York Mets are in agreement on a three-year, $75 million contract, sources told ESPN, keeping the veteran with the team he helped lead to a surprise National League Championship Series appearance.

Manaea, 32, blossomed into a front-half-of-the-rotation starter with the Mets this year, going 12-6 with a 3.47 ERA and striking out 184 over 181⅔ innings pitched. The deal, which is pending a physical, will more than double Manaea’s career earnings and continues a winter of lavish spending for the Mets.

Last winter, Manaea signed with the Mets for two years and $28 million. The contract included an opt-out, which Manaea exercised. When he rejected New York’s one-year, $21.05 million qualifying offer, he hit the free agent market and drew interest from a wide variety of teams.

The starting pitching market, in particular, has been a boon for players, with Manaea the sixth pitcher to sign a free agent deal exceeding $21 million per year and the 12th to surpass $13 million in average annual value. Manaea left a strong enough impression on the Mets — both on the field, with his new arm slot leading to a standout year, and in the clubhouse, where he developed into a clubhouse leader — that adding him to the Mets’ winter haul proved too alluring to pass up.

Already the Mets had handed out the largest contract in sports history, a 15-year, $765 million deal for outfielder Juan Soto. And with Luis Severino and Jose Quintana free agents, they backfilled their rotation with right handers Frankie Montas and Clay Holmes, the latter of whom plans to transition from a relief role to starter. Additionally, the Mets had signed right-handed starter Griffin Canning. Their total free agent spending on the winter is $916.25 million.

New York’s desire for Manaea’s return was strong enough that he joined Blake Snell, Max Fried and Nathan Eovaldi in this winter’s club of starting pitchers earning $25 million per year. Since going to Kansas City with the 34th pick in the 2013 draft, Manaea has been a physical gem, with his 6-foot-5, 250-pound body creating deception that helped his low-90s fastball play up.

With the Mets, Manaea returned to a much more sinker-heavy arsenal after two years of throwing almost exclusively four-seam fastballs. That, along with the dropping of his arm slot to mimic NL Cy Young Award winner Chris Sale, did wonders for Manaea’s production and allowed him to look more like the 2021 version of himself.

He excelled in the postseason, too, allowing two runs over five innings in a wild-card round start and pitching seven innings of one-run ball in a division series win against Philadelphia. After yielding two earned runs during a Game 2 NLCS win in Los Angeles, Manaea got knocked out of Game 6 in the third inning of what could have been his final start for New York.

It wasn’t, and he’ll spend his 10th season in Queens after a career in which he has thrown 1,184⅓ innings with a 4.00 ERA, 1,109 strikeouts, 335 walks and 158 home runs allowed.

The Mets, meanwhile, could go in multiple directions to further complement their addition of Soto to the lineup. First baseman Pete Alonso and third baseman Alex Bregman are the best remaining free agent hitters, and the Mets could re-sign Alonso or sign Bregman and shift Mark Vientos from first to third. The Mets also have dabbled in the free agent outfield market, sources said, and they remain active in trade talks as well.