Mets left-handed aid prospect Nate Lavender underwent a “variation of Tommy John surgical procedure” with an inner brace added to his elbow ligament and can miss the rest of the 2024 season, president of baseball operations David Stearns introduced yesterday (X hyperlink by way of Tim Britton of The Athletic).
It’s a tricky blow for the Mets and for Lavender, who had a robust probability to make his huge league debut this season. The 24-year-old southpaw was the Mets’ 14th-round decide in 2021 however has elevated his inventory and pitched fairly nicely within the higher minors.
Final 12 months, Lavender breezed via a quick seven-game look in Double-A — his solely profession motion at that degree — permitting simply two earned runs whereas posting a 19-to-3 Okay/BB ratio in 10 1/3 frames. He rapidly moved as much as Triple-A Syracuse, the place he tossed 44 innings of three.27 ERA ball with an enormous 35.1% strikeout fee, albeit towards a 12% stroll fee. He opened the ’24 marketing campaign with one other seven frames and solely three runs allowed in Syracuse, though this 12 months’s 20.6% stroll fee in that small pattern raised some purple flags within the run-up to his placement on the injured record.
In writing up the Mets’ practically MLB-ready prospects, FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen credited Lavender with probably the most misleading deliveries in all of Minor League Baseball. Longenhagen added that despite the fact that Lavender doesn’t throw notably arduous (91 mph common fastball), his heater is so troublesome for hitters to trace that it alone offers him the potential to be an enormous league reliever, regardless of less-impressive secondary choices and below-average command.
Lavender doesn’t flip 25 till January, so he nonetheless has loads of prime years forward of him. If he can get again to his 2023-24 type, he’ll once more be a candidate to make his huge league debut in some unspecified time in the future subsequent summer time. Lavender isn’t on the Mets’ 40-man roster however can be Rule 5-eligible this coming offseason.
