Adam Ottavino didn’t hold back as he described what he sees as a deeply rooted problem inside the Mets’ bullpen.
In the latest episode of his YouTube show, “Baseball & Coffee,” Ottavino said he’s spent years telling young pitchers they have to take control of their own careers because, in his view, the team isn’t doing enough to keep them healthy. The mounting injuries, he argued, prove the point.
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In his rant, he used the Mets’ 2025 season, which was riddled with injuries, as an example.
“One guy after another went down,” he said, listing Tylor Megill, Reed Garrett, Max Kranick, Dedniel Nuñez and Danny Young — all undergoing Tommy John surgery — and noting Drew Smith and Brooks Raley as additional casualties.
To Ottavino, the pattern isn’t a coincidence. He questioned everything from the organization’s protocols to the way manager Carlos Mendoza deploys relievers, calling the usage “haphazard” and suggesting the club hasn’t shown enough concern for preserving arms.
In his view, the Mets need to be “better than this,” because the current approach simply isn’t keeping pitchers on the field.
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“This is embarrassing, this is actually pathetic, like pathetic. I would’ve never let this happen if I was on the team last year; at least half of these guys wouldn’t have blown out,” Ottavino said, via YouTube. “I would have protected these dudes myself; I would have had to jump in front of them myself. Unfortunately, there was nobody willing to stand up and talk to Carlos (Mendoza) this year; it was just me, I guess. So a little bit of an issue there.
”And if they continue down this path, they’re gonna be F—E-D, because you cannot injure this many dudes every year. Hopefully, this is not an actual strategy because it’s freakin’ pathetic and it’s not player-friendly, and eventually people will catch on. And it’s funny because they were bragging about keeping people healthy the year before, when it had nothing to do with them. So yeah, I’m a little annoyed. Because these are guys that should be playing, so it pisses me off.”
Ottavino didn’t hesitate when asked what he thought had gone wrong.
In his view, the problem was a cocktail of neglect, pressure and mismanagement. Players, he said, weren’t being educated on how to stay healthy, and many felt pushed to take the mound even when their bodies were telling them not to — something he’d seen firsthand.
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And while he believed the manager handled in-game stress well, he said that same steadiness didn’t translate to the bullpen. There was no communication, no feel for how to protect relievers, no sense of how to handle pitchers when they were banged up.
Ottavino stopped himself before venting further, but the frustration was unmistakable.
The team, he insisted, had no excuse for the sheer number of injured relievers. If they spread the workload more evenly early in the season, they wouldn’t burn through arms and collapse down the stretch, forced to lean on pitchers they never intended to carry in the first place.
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