Clay Holmes will join a star-studded club tomorrow afternoon, when he becomes the sixth Mets pitcher to make his debut as the team’s Opening Day pitcher.
He’ll also become the least-experienced starter to take the mound for the Mets on Opening Day — and the latest symbol of how the role of the starting pitcher has changed.
Holmes and the White Sox’s Sean Burke are scheduled to make their fifth and fourth career starts, respectively, tomorrow. They will be the ninth and 10th pitchers since 1961 to make Opening Day starts with four or fewer previous starts — but the third and fourth to do so in the last five years and the fourth and fifth to do so in the last 11 years.
Eleven of the pitchers starting on Opening Day are doing so for the first time. To be fair, many of those — including emerging aces Tanner Bibee, Logan Gilbert, Mackenzie Gore and Paul Skenes along with Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga, who started in their native Japan when the Dodgers and Cubs opened in Tokyo last week — are no-doubters.
And in a perfect world for the Mets, Holmes — who made four starts as a rookie with the Pirates in 2018 before emerging as a shutdown reliever and spending the last three seasons as the Yankees’ closer— probably would have opened as the fourth pitcher in the rotation.
But Sean Manaea, the Mets’ best returning starter, is sidelined with an oblique injury while Kodai Senga, the closest thing the club has to an ace, is being slow played following an injury-ruined 2024 and will open this season as the fifth starter. And southpaw David Peterson, who emerged as a potential star last fall, is being held back to face the Marlins next week instead of pitching against the righty-heavy Astros.
Still, the presence of Holmes and Burke on the mound today is a reminder that the Opening Day assignment as we knew it — one which rewarded accomplishment and tenure — is disappearing along with the long-tenured and accomplished starting pitcher.
Only four pitchers today are making an Opening Day start for the fifth or sixth time. None of them are the Hall of Fame-bound Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer or Justin Verlander. Kershaw is on the injured list recovering from left toe and left knee surgeries while Scherzer (Blue Jays) and Verlander (Giants) are beginning their first season with new clubs who have established upper-rotation pitchers. And Gerrit Cole, the most viable Hall of Fame candidate among starting pitchers younger than 35, won’t pitch at all this season after undergoing Tommy John surgery on Mar. 10.
The six-time Opening Day starter is the Braves’ Chris Sale, who put himself back on a Hall of Fame track by winning the Cy Young last season following an injury-wrecked half-decade. Sandy Alcantara, a former Cy Young Award honoree who was beginning to craft an interesting Cooperstown case before he missed last season following Tommy John surgery, is slated to make his fifth Opening Day start for the Marlins.
The other five-time Opening Day starters are the Blue Jays’ Jose Berrios and the Rangers’ Nathan Eovaldi, who rank among the top 24 active pitchers in wins, innings and starts but each have a career ERA of 4.07.
Such unspectacular reliability is becoming less valued by teams. The quintet of Carlos Carrasco, Patrick Corbin, Kyle Gibson, Martin Perez and Jose Quintana all rank among the top 20 active pitchers in wins, innings and starts and were all free agents over the winter.
But only Perez signed a major league deal before spring training — with the epically rebuilding White Sox. Carrasco will open the season in the Yankees’ rotation after inking a minor league contract in February while Corbin, Gibson and Quintana will all begin the season in the minors with the Rangers, Orioles and Brewers after they remained unsigned until March despite combining for 514 2/3 innings last year.
The continued devaluation of the starting pitcher is turning Opening Day into just another day for hurlers — and ensuring there’ll be fewer pitchers like Mike Hampton, Tom Glavine, Pedro Martinez and Johan Santana, never mind another Tom Seaver or Dwight Gooden.
Hampton (2000), Glavine (2003), Martinez (2005) and Santana (2008) all started on Opening Day in their Mets debuts after arriving the previous winter via blockbuster trades or signings. But the two pitchers who signed the biggest deals of the just-concluded off-season — Corbin Burnes and Max Fried — will not be unveiled today by the Diamondbacks or Yankees.
No Opening Day pitcher anywhere could be like Seaver, whose 11 Opening Day assignments for the Mets would almost surely remain an unbreakable franchise record even if the role of the starter hadn’t been transformed.
Seaver posted a 2.46 ERA over 2,563 2/3 innings in his first stint with the Mets, during which he made 10 straight Opening Day starts from 1968-77. That’s a better ERA over 239 1/3 more innings Sandy Koufax (2.76 ERA), the standard bearer for post-World War II pitching greatness, posted in his entire career — and more innings than any active pitcher in baseball except Verlander, Scherzer and Kershaw.
The final six of the eight Opening Day starts Gooden made between 1985 and 1994 — he didn’t start in 1987, when he was in rehab, or 1992, when he was recovering from shoulder surgery — were more about who he used to be (the generational talent who went 41-13 with a 2.00 ERA and 544 strikeouts from 1984-85) than who he was (the good but no longer great pitcher who went 116-72 with a 3.42 ERA and 1,331 strikeouts over 1,675 innings from 1986 through 1994).
But those 1,675 innings are more than 300 more than any Mets pitcher has thrown since. And to catch Al Leiter, who was acquired to front the rotation prior to the 1998 season and threw 1,360 innings through 2004, Holmes would have to qualify for the ERA title in each of the next nine seasons – and single-handedly reverse the trends that helped make him and Burke Opening Day starters.