As the Mets shook up their roster over the course of the offseason, the biggest names added to the bullpen were Devin Williams and Luke Weaver. But in late January, the Mets inked 39-year-old right-handed reliever Luis García to a modest one-year deal, and he remains a very likely candidate to make the team’s Opening Day roster.
García’s big league career began in 2013 with the Phillies, and he remained in Philadelphia through the end of the 2018 season. Since then, he’s pitched for the Angles, Rangers, and Padres, had a second stint with the Angels, pitched for the Red Sox, Dodgers, and Nationals, and ended the 2025 season with a third stint with the Angels.
In total, García has a 4.07 ERA and a 3.92 FIP in 583.1 innings in his major league career. And over the past two seasons, during which he’s pitched for the final four aforementioned clubs, he has a 4.17 ERA and a 3.68 FIP. Perhaps the Mets were particularly high on his 2025 season, which saw him end the year with a 3.42 ERA and a 3.28 FIP, both of which were his best marks since his very good 2021 and 2022 seasons.
García is not a strikeout machine, having put up 20 percent strikeout rates in each of the past two seasons and peaked at just 26.3 percent in 2022. His walk rate was atypically high last year at 11.2 percent, at least compared to the standard he’d established over the four seasons that preceded that one with a 7.0 percent walk rate. He offset the potential damage that those walks could’ve done by limiting home runs to just 0.33 per nine innings pitched. He’s given up 0.82 per nine in his career and combined to give up 1.06 per nine in 2023 and 2024.
A three-pitch pitcher, García didn’t make any drastic alterations to his pitch usage last year. He threw his sinker a plurality of the time rather than the majority, continuing an overall trend that’s seen him throw the pitch slightly less often over the past few years. He upped his usage of his slider and splitter a bit, and the most notable distinction in that data is that he threw the splitter more often last year than he had in any other season, albeit by a relatively small margin.
Last year, García still threw pretty hard, averaging just shy of 97 miles per hour on his fastball, which put him in the 87th percentile according to Statcast. The rest of his metrics there aren’t super encouraging, but he did remain pretty good at inducing ground balls. Should he continue to do that, the Mets’ infield defense will go a long way in determining his effectiveness, especially if the K rate doesn’t improve from last year.
As for projections, there are no real surprises in the ones published at FanGraphs. Every system sees García finishing the 2026 season with a regular major league reliever workload, an ERA in the high threes or low fours, and a FIP that pretty much lines up with it. Given his long major league track record, options haven’t been on the table for years, which means the Mets will have to expose him to waivers if they want to choose to cut him at any point this season. Based on the events of the past couple of years, though, he’d almost certainly get claimed on waivers by another team. If he starts the season strong, expect him to stick around.
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