Jose Quintana’s Unlikely Roll Continues

NEW YORK — With his sixth-inning grand slam off Carlos Estévez, Francisco Lindor was the clear hero of Game 4 of the Division Series, providing the New York Mets with all the runs they needed to knock off the Philadelphia Phillies and advance to the National League Championship Series with a 4-1 win. Not to be lost in the spray of champagne — the first postseason clincher at Citi Field since the ballpark opened in 2009, incidentally — is the work of Jose Quintana. For the second time in as many starts this October, the 35-year-old lefty took the ball in a potential clincher and turned in a stellar effort, continuing a remarkable run that began in late August. As in Game 3 of the Wild Card Series against the Brewers, Quintana received a complete lack of run support, but once again the Mets’ bats came to life in the late innings while the bullpen held firm enough for the team to advance.

In five-plus innings, Quintana held the powerful Phillies lineup to just two hits, walking two while striking out six over the course of 90 pitches. The only run he allowed — the only run of the game until Lindor’s slam — was unearned. Including his six shutout innings in the Wild Card Series, and the 36.1 innings he threw over his final six regular season starts, he’s allowed three runs over his last 47.1 innings, good for a microscopic 0.57 ERA.

“It’s been hard for him, he’s been through a lot of ups and downs, and he always found a way to get the job done,” said manager Carlos Mendoza after the game, eyes red from some combination of champagne spray and emotional release. “We felt really good going into this game because of who he is, how much he prepares, how much he cares, and he went out there and did it and gave us a chance. [I’m] proud of him because he never gave up, never put his head down, kept working, and he’s been amazing for us the whole year.”

“Amazing for us the whole year” may be a bit of a stretch. At the time I checked in on the Mets on August 20, Quintana had become the weakest link among the rotation regulars. He’d carried a 3.89 ERA and 4.91 FIP through July; after the Orioles lit him up for seven runs in five innings in that start, he’d allowed 19 runs in a 20.2-inning stretch, raising his ERA to 4.57 and his FIP to 5.12.

In that light, this has been an unlikely roll for a pitcher who hardly fits the profile of a hard-throwing, dominant starter in the first place. Indeed, Quintana’s 90.7 mph average four-seam fastball velocity ranks in just the ninth percentile according to Statcast. What’s more, he’s coming off a season in which he was limited to 13 starts by a stress fracture in his rib, caused by a benign lesion that required bone graft surgery. While he was healthy for all of 2024 and ranked third on the team with 170.1 innings, his 4.56 FIP was the highest among the Mets’ regular starters.

“He stopped nibbling and he started attacking,” said Mendoza when asked about Quintana’s turnaround. “You know, he was in the zone, trusting the stuff. And he’s gonna pitch, he’s going to move the ball around, he’s going to go in and out, up and down, change speeds and keep hitters of balance. And he went and did it… He [had been] getting behind, walking a lot of people, and he said, ‘Screw it, I’m going to go after people,’ and just went with it and fixed it.”

Quintana went after the Phillies on Wednesday night, holding them without a hit for the first three innings. He was particularly impressive in the first, when he sandwiched strikeouts of Kyle Schwarber (on a low-and-away slurve) and Bryce Harper (on a changeup in the dirt) around a Trea Turner fly out. He needed 17 pitches to do that, but he kept his pitch count in order by using just five pitches to record the first two outs of the second inning. After he walked J.T. Realmuto, he notched another strikeout by inducing Bryson Stott to chase a low sinker. He set the side down in order in the third, capped by another strikeout of Schwarber, this one chasing a low-and-away changeup.

The Phillies finally nicked Quintana in the fourth. With one out, he walked Harper, skirting the zone on all five of his pitches. Nick Castellanos then laced a 107-mph double over Brandon Nimmo‘s head and off the left field wall, though Nimmo played the carom well enough to hold Harper at third. Alec Bohm, mired in a 3-for-39 slump, hit a soft grounder to third base, where Mark Vientos bobbled the ball; Harper scored on the error with the other runners advancing as well. Realmuto flew out to shallow right, not nearly deep enough for Castellanos to score, and then Stott flew out too, holding the score at 1-0.

Quintana worked one more full frame, retiring Weston Wilson on a liner, striking out Brandon Marsh looking at a high sinker, hitting Schwarber with a pitch, and then fanning Turner on a curveball in the dirt. He returned to start the sixth, but after Harper greeted him with a ringing double, Mendoza brought in righty Reed Garrett, who struck out two and walked one before getting Stott to ground out to Pete Alonso to end the threat.

By the numbers, it didn’t look particularly pretty beyond the one run and six strikeouts, five of which came against lefties (two by Schwarber, with one each by Harper, Stott, and Marsh). Quintana threw just 37% of his pitches in the zone, well below his season average of 44%. He didn’t get quite as much chase (25% vs. a season average of 27.4%), though he did get ahead in the count to 13 of the 21 hitters he faced (62%, one point below his season mark). He got a modest 11 whiffs, with a 24% CSW rate. While the Phillies made hard contact against him, with a 93 mph average exit velocity and a 50% hard-hit rate, he kept the ball in the park, running his homerless streak to 48.1 innings; by comparison, before this stretch, he had allowed nine homers in his previous 36.1 innings.

When asked about Quintana back in August, Mendoza expressed confidence that he’d get back on track. “He’s going to find a way [to rebound], he’ll continue to watch film and work with his mechanics, sequencing, game planning, things like that.”

He did rebound and then some. Over the final five weeks of the season, covering six starts, Quintana led the majors with a 0.74 ERA, accompanied by a 2.48 FIP. Four of his six starts were scoreless, including those against the Padres on August 25 and the Phillies on September 13; in the other two, he allowed two runs apiece. His strikeout and walk rates (20.9% and 7.9%, respectively) were a bit better than before, but the real key was his avoidance of homers.

That success continued through his first October start. Taking the ball for the winner-take-all Game 3 of the Wild Card Series against the Brewers, he turned in six scoreless innings, striking out five and walking one while allowing just four hits. The game was still scoreless when he departed; the Mets fell behind 2-0 in the seventh after back-to-back homers by Jake Bauers and Sal Frelick, but Alonso’s chef’s kiss three-run homer in the ninth put the team back in the lead, and they advanced.

“The biggest adjustment was to control counts,” Quintana said during his Tuesday media session. “But more than that, I made a couple of adjustments on my mechanics. One of those is to get my angle a little bit up, give me a better chance for all the pitches to go in the same tunnel. That was the biggest adjustment I did during the season, getting more consistency.”

The data don’t exactly line up with Quintana’s description, in that his average arm angle actually decreased as the season went on (the all-pitch average dropped from 46.9 degrees in April to 43.2 in August and September), with his vertical release points mostly falling and his horizontal release points increasing. However, once you see a graph of the changing arm angles split by batter handedness, his comment makes more sense:

This is split by month rather than using the August 25 start as the point of inflection but I think it’s clear enough. I manually adjusted the plot for the left-handers to put it on the same scale as the one for righties. What we see here gets at his comment about tunneling, with more clustering and less separation between pitches, particularly for lefties, to whom he threw exactly two changeups and one curve in September; you can disregard those on that plot. In fact, because he has such a different selection depending upon batter handedness, it’s worth looking at the before-and-after breakdown in that light:

Against batters of either hand, Quintana went with a heavier diet of both fastballs, and he used more slurves against lefties. Meanwhile, his gains in movement were small — an extra inch of tail and a bit more rise on his four-seamer, a bit more drop on his curve, a bit of a different tilt on his slurve (more horizontal, less vertical) — and his velocity pretty stable, but the results, OMG:

With a more fastball-heavy approach, all of Quintana’s pitches save for his slurve — again, a pitch he throws almost exclusively to lefties — became more effective; even if they didn’t generate as many whiffs, they weren’t hit as hard, whether we’re talking average exit velocity, barrels, or hard-hit rates. In fact, not a single one of his secondary pitches was barreled over that six-start run, and hitters didn’t beat up on his two fastballs (note the low SLGs and xSLGs). The lone barrel he allowed in his Wild Card Series start, a Gary Sánchez double, was off a fastball.

Two years ago, the Mets won 101 games and sent a rotation headed by Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom into the playoffs, but they were bounced by the upstart Padres in the Wild Card Series. Last year’s rotation featured Scherzer and another future Hall of Famer, Justin Verlander, and yet the team was so mediocre both were sent packing at the trade deadline. This year’s rotation was supposed to be headlined by Kodai Senga, but injuries have limited him to one start in the regular season and one opener-length appearance in Game 1 against the Phillies. Between Luis Severino, Sean Manaea, Quintana, and Senga, the Mets don’t have anything that looks like a top-of-the-rotation starter, but unlike their immediate predecessors — and every other Mets team after 2015, for all the deGroms, Syndergaards and so on who have passed through — they’re going to the NLCS. It’s rather amazin’ when you think about it.