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David Stearns strikes again. Never content to stop the churn of arms, the Mets acquired Bryan Hudson from the White Sox in exchange for cash considerations earlier this month. Hudson is coming off a season where he threw only 15 innings with an ERA approaching 5, and now he’s penciled for a bullpen spot on Roster Resource. What gives?
Originally drafted by the Cubs out of high school in 2015, Hudson never made the majors on the North Side. Instead, he was snapped up by the Dodgers in minor league free agency prior to the 2023 season. Peek under the hood at his Triple-A pitch metrics in Oklahoma City and it becomes clear why: 99th percentile extension, 98th percentile horizontal release, and 87th percentile Z-contact. Put another way, he gets down the mound extremely well with an extremely sidearm delivery that batters just can not square up, at least when he’s going well.
Hudson’s strong showing in Triple-A was enough to get him to the majors, but his time in LA was unsuccessful. No matter, Milwaukee was more than happy to roll the dice here, and boy how they were rewarded. Hudson tallied a 1.73 ERA over 62.1 innings in 2024, running a 19.5% K-BB% and holding batters to a paltry .148 BABIP. An unsustainable mark to be sure, but strong evidence of his ability to keep the ball off the barrel and consistently induce weak contact. There’s a solid argument that he was one of the best relievers in baseball that season, the latest in a long-line of stellar Brewers relievers magicked out of thin air.
Despite that, Hudson didn’t survive the entire season on the major league roster. A sharp decline in his velocity across the board—all the way down to 89.1 in September after starting the year at nearly 92—prompted the Brewers to send Hudson back to Triple-A Nashville, and he didn’t make it back on the major league roster that season. His velocity rebounded only partially early in 2025, the results suffered, and he lost the zone to boot. The end result was a 4.35 ERA, a K-BB% of 1.9% (yikes), below average stuff metrics for the first time in his career, and eventually a DFA.
Hudson finished out his 2025 by posting a 5.79 ERA over 4.2 innings for the White Sox. What the ugly ERA on the South Side is hiding is a potential return to form: an average fastball velocity of 91.8 MPH, rebounding stuff metrics, and a return to a Zone% in the high 50s. Yes, it’s only 4.2 innings and yes, Hudson ended the season with a lower back strain, but that’s an intriguing signal.
When he’s going good, the stuff here is a lot of fun. Hudson’s extreme horizontal slot gives him outlier horizontal attack angle traits—in other words, the ball is coming in from an angle that is extremely unusual for batters. HAA is not as strongly correlated with results as vertical arm angle (and we know more about arm slots and expected movement now to appreciate that these variables aren’t a be-all-end-all), but at these extreme scales you can understand why batters are kept off-kilter. Couple that with the aforementioned elite extension—nearly 7.4 feet, 99th percentile in baseball last year—and you have a platoon-neutralizing lefty who offers a very different look to other arms.
At the moment, Hudson is not likely to be a load-bearing piece in the Mets bullpen for 2026, nor should he be. If he’s as bad as he was last season, he gets booted off the roster when Minter returns, or perhaps he doesn’t even make it out of camp (in favor of someone like Joe Jacques or Anderson Severino or Nate Lavender or Matt Turner). If he’s decent, he sticks around for a bit but still potentially loses his job at some point (he is unfortunately out of options), the latest victim of the eternal bullpen churn. And if he somehow returns to his 2024 form, well then the Mets got a controllable late-inning weapon for free.
With no less than 12 NRIs competing for bullpen spots in addition to the 10 relievers already on the 40-man roster and the bevy of starters that might wind up in the bullpen, the Mets are clearly taking a volumetric approach to filling out most of their bullpen. Throwing someone with Hudson’s upside and potentially promising performance signal in the mix at nearly no cost is a gamble you take ten times out of ten.