by The Mets organization is loaded with pitching talent at every level, and Brooklyn is no exception.
Many have drawn the attention of fans, but one who has flown under the radar is 2024 10th-round pick Brendan Girton, who owns one of the highest strikeout rates in the entire system.
The secret to his success?
Getting nasty.
“Getting to 0-2, and then getting nasty,” Girton said about how he’s been able to miss bats so consistently. “Just trying to get ahead of them as quick as possible, and then get nasty.”
Getting nasty really just means making a really good pitch, Girton said, whether it’s spotting the slider down in the zone or the fastball up.
“Just attacking the zone more. At the beginning of the year he was somewhat inconsistent throwing strikes,” Cyclones manager Gilbert Gómez said. “He’ll have one great inning, and then the next one he’ll throw like seven straight balls in a row. The fact that he’s able to understand the tempo and the pace that he needs to pitch with in order for him to be more in the zone. He’s pitching with a quicker tempo now, which we love. He’s attacking hitters. That’s the main thing, just getting ahead, and allowing the stuff that he has to put guys away.”
His 27.7% strikeout rate is the ninth-highest of all Mets minor leaguers with at least 30 innings pitched, and the best at High-A Brooklyn. He can sometimes have control issues, but for the most part, it’s been kept in a manageable range.
Girton averaged 17.5 inches of induced vertical break on his four-seam fastball in Single-A last season, the most recent time there is publicly available data on his pitches. Compared to big league pitchers this season, that would put him well into the top third. He sits in the mid-90s and can run it up into the upper 90s on occasion.
It will always likely be Girton’s bread and butter, but that doesn’t mean he can’t scale back how often he throws it.
“I feel like at OU I had a probably 70% fastball rate, which is entirely too high,” Girton said. “It was a lot because I wasn’t landing my slider enough, or my cutter enough — slider cutter is what I call my 86 to 88 mph pitch — I wasn’t landing it much, so I had to throw a lot more heaters. I would say that’s what’s been the difference, is just landing more offspeed pitches and just trusting in the Mets that they got it for me.”
The trust in the Mets organization is something that Girton mentioned a few times, especially when it came to the changes he’s making to his arsenal.
“The Mets are awesome as far as developing pitches,” Girton said. “I’m in the process of developing two more pitches, and they’re going to be good whenever I can get confidence to use them in-game.”
One of the pitches is a sinker, which he said he’s thrown a few times in a game. Not often, and not every time out, but when he has thrown it, it’s been a really good pitch. The sinker is to give him more options against right-hand hitters, getting it to play off his four-seam fastball to give hitters a different look.
“Whenever I get more comfortable with it, I think it could be an early-in-count, ground ball pitch, just to change things up to righties,” Girton said.
He’s also working on a splitter, a popular pitch in the Mets’ pitching development system, and he’s optimistic about the movement he can get on it.
“I believe whenever I get where I want to be, I think it’s gonna be a really good pitch that I can throw to lefties and righties for put-away pitches,” Girton said.
The slider too, which he said he wasn’t landing enough in college, is new and revamped as well.
“I feel like the delivery has a ton of deception,” Gómez said. “I think the slider has a ton of movement. And I just feel like the way that he throws the ball, it’s an aggressive delivery going at you, which I think, you pair that with the movement that he creates, and he’s gonna induce a lot of swing and miss.”
Girton said he worked on it in between the college season and the MLB Draft at PithcingWRX, a facility in his home state of Oklahoma. He broke it out in his professional baseball debut in August of 2024.
In that debut, @mjd_analysis on X pointed out that he threw four sliders in one inning that had over 15 inches of sweep. In college, he threw one.
“I’ve always been able to make everything go left, make everything go glove-side pretty well, so it was a no-brainer to get that pitch in there,” Girton said.
At Texas Tech and Oklahoma, Girton was a fastball-dominant pitcher with inconsistent breaking pitches. In his first year with the Mets, Girton has paired that fastball with a much better slider, and soon, a splitter and sinker as well.
It’s a lot of changes to his arsenal, but Girton said he trusts the Mets organization to steer him in the right direction.
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