Former Mets pitcher Adam Ottavino criticizes manager Carlos Mendoza on his podcast

By the time the Mets whimpered out of the regular season, they’d had eight pitchers suffer season-ending injuries and five undergo Tommy John surgery. It was, in a word, disastrous, but on Thursday, Adam Ottavino found a few more: “embarrassing” and “pathetic.”

Speaking on his “Baseball & Coffee” podcast, the former Mets reliever leveled a scathing criticism at Carlos Mendoza, saying the manager used his relievers “haphazardly,” leading to injury.

“This upsets me deep in my soul,” said Ottavino, who pitched for the team from 2022-24. “This is embarrassing. This is actually pathetic — like pathetic. I would have never let this happen if I was on the team last year. At least half these guys wouldn't have blown out. I would have protected these dudes myself. I would have [jumped] in front of them myself. Unfortunately, there was nobody willing to stand up and talk to Carlos this year.”

Ottavino went on to say that Mendoza was “a really good ‘under stress’ manager” but lacked bedside manner when players got hurt.

“There's a lot of pressure for guys to play, even when they feel a little compromised,” he said. “I know that from the inside . . .  [Mendoza] has no idea what he's doing when it comes to bullpen guys and how to keep them healthy, or even really how to care about them at all. There's no communication there. There's no feel there.”

Ottavino’s comments are in stark contrast with those made by president of baseball operations David Stearns, who, at the general managers' meetings in Las Vegas earlier this month, said the Mets didn’t have a pitching injury problem.

“If you look at our injuries in our organizations, even at the major-league level, we certainly are not outliers relative to the league,” Stearns said. “This is an industry-wide phenomenon. I have a lot of confidence in our medical staff. I think we have a very good medical staff.

“I think what happened to us is that we had a string of injuries to pitchers who were pitching very well and then the replacements for when those guys got hurt, frankly, didn’t pitch very well, and it really exacerbated the injury issues we had. But I don’t think we have an issue with our training protocols or our workload protocols or anything like that.”

Tylor Megill, Dedniel Nunez, Danny Young, Frankie Montas and Reed Garrett suffered UCL tears in 2025 and Max Kranick went down with a flexor strain. In non-arm-related but season-ending injuries, A.J. Minter tore his left lat and Griffin Canning ruptured his left Achilles. Brooks Raley, Drew Smith and Christian Scott  had Tommy John surgery the previous year.

The Mets ended up using an MLB-record 46 different pitchers last season, and the injuries, short starts and porous bullpen were among the biggest reasons for their collapse.

“They need to do better, so I'm not going to sugarcoat that too much,” Ottavino said. “They should not be injuring this many pitchers, especially relief pitchers. There's no excuse for it. Spread it around a little bit in the first half, and then maybe . . . [you] won't blow through all your guys and have a total nosedive in the second half [where] nobody can get any outs and you're relying on a bunch of pitchers that you didn't want on the staff in the first place.”

He said he hopes treating relievers as disposable "is not an actual strategy" because "eventually people will catch on."

Ottavino also called on players to advocate for themselves because "the team is not going to keep them healthy."

"It's funny, [the Mets] were bragging about how good they were at 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."

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.