Seven starts into his 2025 season, Tylor Megill is looking better than ever before. Among starting pitchers who have thrown at least 30 innings, he ranks 20th out of 124 with a 2.50 ERA, one spot behind rotation-mate Griffin Canning and one spot ahead of former Mets ace Jacob deGrom.
Early-season success is nothing new to Megill, of course. In regular season games in March and April, Megill has a career 2.31 ERA, but he’s typically seen his ERA go up significantly from that point through the end of a season. Despite those strong starts, though, Megill had a cumulative 4.72 ERA over the 263.1 innings he threw in the big leagues between 2021 and 2023.
Last year, however, was different, as Megill didn’t fade as the season went on. He didn’t pitch all that much at the major league level early in the year, but after bouncing between the Mets and Triple-A Syracuse in the first half, he put together one of the most impressive stretches of his career to finish the season. Over his final eight starts, Megill had a 3.00 ERA and a solid-if-unspectacular 3.76 FIP.
Since the beginning of that eight-start stretch on July 27 last year, Megill has been one of the very best pitchers in baseball. It’s an extremely arbitrary point to use for the comparison since it’s centered on him, but among the 104 pitchers who’ve thrown at least 70 innings since then, Megill ranks thirteenth with a 2.76 ERA. If there’s a knock on him, it’s been the relative brevity of his outings as a starter. Megill’s innings totals don’t quite have him qualified to be listed among league leaders either this year or over the stretch that dates back to his call-up in late July of last season.
The longer stretch of success is certainly encouraging, though, and ERA estimators suggest that what he’s doing right now isn’t a massive fluke. Megill has a 2.81 FIP and a 3.27 xFIP according to FanGraphs, and Statcast has him at a 3.07 xERA. Baseball Prospectus isn’t as kind with a 3.80 DRA, but even if Megill were to end up seeing his ERA finish around there, that wouldn’t be a bad outcome by any means.
Megill’s past couple of starts haven’t been his best this year, and if there’s a slight cause for concern, it might be that he’s surrendered his first and second home runs of the year in each of those starts, respectively. Still, Megill’s strikeout and home run rates are the best of his career thus far, and with the continued absences of Sean Manaea, Frankie Montas, and Paul Blackburn, he’ll continue to get opportunities to prove that he belongs at the big league level.