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“This is pathetic”: Adam Ottavino blasts Mets over bullpen injuries
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- “This is pathetic”: Adam Ottavino blasts Mets over bullpen injuries
"This is pathetic": Adam Ottavino blasts Mets over bullpen injuries originally appeared on The Sporting News . Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here .
Adam Ottavino didn't mince words. The longtime reliever unloaded on the New York Mets ' handling of their pitching staff, calling the organization's approach to bullpen health "embarrassing" and "pathetic" in a fiery segment on his YouTube show, Baseball & Coffee.
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Ottavino said he's spent years telling young Mets pitchers to take control of their own workloads because, in his eyes, the team hasn't shown enough interest in keeping them healthy. The 2025 season, he argued, proved the point.
"One guy after another went down," Ottavino said, pointing to a long list of injured arms: Tylor Megill , Reed Garrett , Max Kranick , Dedniel Nunez and Danny Young — all undergoing Tommy John surgery — plus Drew Smith and Brooks Raley , who also landed on the shelf. To him, the pattern wasn't random.
"This is embarrassing… actually pathetic," Ottavino said. "If I was on the team last year, at least half of these guys wouldn't have blown out. I would have protected these dudes myself."
Ottavino accused the Mets of lacking any real plan for workload preservation and directly questioned manager Carlos Mendoza's usage patterns, calling the bullpen deployment "haphazard" and "not player-friendly."
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"There was nobody willing to stand up and talk to Carlos," he said. "It was just me, I guess. So a little bit of an issue there."
In the end, the failure of the Mets' pitching cost coaches their jobs.
Ottavino went even further, suggesting the organization had become comfortable with a dangerous trend.
"If they continue down this path, they're gonna be F---E-D," Ottavino said. "You cannot injure this many dudes every year. Hopefully, this is not an actual strategy."
He also pushed back on the Mets' public messaging, noting that the club had previously bragged about its strong health track record — something he says simply wasn't real.
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"They were bragging about keeping people healthy the year before when it had nothing to do with them," he said. "These are guys that should be playing, so it pisses me off."
Ottavino described the root of the problem as a mix of poor communication, pressure to pitch through pain, and a lack of leadership in the bullpen. He said some relievers felt compelled to take the mound when their bodies were signaling otherwise — and that the staff wasn't equipped to protect them.
The Mets, he argued, have no excuse for the sheer volume of injuries.
"If they spread the workload early, they wouldn't be burning through arms," Ottavino said.
