It’s been a little over a year since the Mets claimed right-handed relief pitcher Austin Warren off waivers from the Giants, and with today being Warren’s 30th birthday, it seems like as good a time as any to take a look at what might be in store for him in 2026.
Taken by the Angels in the sixth round of the draft in 2018 as a reliever out of UNC Wilmington, Warren has spent the vast majority of his career thus far in the minors. After relatively brief stops in rookie ball, Single-A, and Double-A in the first two years of his career, he found himself in Triple-A to start the 2021 season as minor league baseball returned from the pandemic.
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Since then, Warren has thrown 151.0 innings in Triple-A, but he made his major league debut during that 2021 season and now has 58.0 big league innings to his name. The Angels released him ahead of the 2024 season, and the Giants signed him shortly thereafter.
Over the course of his Triple-A career, Warren has a 4.35 ERA with 168 strikeouts and 63 walks, and he’s given up 20 home runs. So his 4.97 ERA with 58 strikeouts, 19 walks, and 9 home runs allowed in 50.2 innings in Syracuse last year mostly check out. The fact that he gave up nearly half of his home runs at the level in just one-third of his innings there is the part that’s the least ideal.
In his short stints with the Mets at the major league level, however, Warren fared well. He had a 0.96 ERA and a 3.89 FIP in 9.1 innings over five appearances. That’s extremely small sample size stuff, but it was nice to see him pitch better than anyone might’ve expected in those outings.
Per FanGraphs, Warren has an option remaining going into the 2026 season, which means it’s incredibly likely that he’ll spend at least some time in Syracuse again this year. Roster Resource currently has him penciled in to the team’s Opening Day bullpen, but there figures to be quite a bit of competition for at least one or two spots in the bullpen in spring training.
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Warren throws five pitches, per Statcast: a sinker, a sweeper, a cutter, a four-seam fastball, and a changeup. By modern standards, he doesn’t throw particularly hard, as his fastball averaged just shy of 94 miles per hour in 2025. Assuming he survives any potential 40-man roster crunch between now and the start of the season, it’ll be interesting to see if the Mets work with him to tweak that approach or have him keep doing what he was doing last year. And if he starts the year in Syracuse, cutting down on that home run rate seems like it would be the best potential path back to Queens.
