{"id":397026,"date":"2025-10-24T03:07:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T03:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/397026\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T03:07:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T03:07:11","slug":"player-review-jose-butto-mccovey-chronicles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/397026\/","title":{"rendered":"Player review: Jos\u00e9 Butt\u00f3 | McCovey Chronicles"},"content":{"rendered":"

2025 stats:<\/a> 67 IP, 55 G, 3.90 ERA \/ 3.70 FIP, 1.40 WHIP, 20.4 K%, 11.3 BB%, 0.5 fWAR<\/p>\n

After a mini breakout in 2024, Jos\u00e9 Butt\u00f3 looked like he might be a reliable dude in the Mets\u2019 grand plan. He pitched 74 innings (the first 38 of which came as a starter) and was about as valuable (1.0 fWAR) as Luke Weaver and Josh Hader. His Statcast page looked exciting, too:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

According to fellow SB Nation site Amazin\u2019 Avenue, he\u2019d pitched himself into Mets manager Carlos Mendoza\u2019s \u201ccircle of trust<\/a>\u201d when it came to relief arms.<\/p>\n

What a difference a year makes.<\/p>\n

He was predicted to be in the mix for a late inning role, \u201cright behind Edwin D\u00edaz on the bullpen depth chart and [\u2026] alongside Reed Garrett and A.J. Minter,\u201d but that didn\u2019t wind up happening and his performance was down enough from 2024 to compel the Mets to seek an upgrade elsewhere. He was, essentially, a throw-in component of the Giants\u2019 massive Tyler Rogers trade with the Mets at this year\u2019s deadline<\/a>. That was in part because Butt\u00f3 is out of options but mainly because New York didn\u2019t have the time to see if he could regain some of his lost form.<\/p>\n

This is the trouble with relievers. They\u2019re fungible and mostly unpredictable. Usually, we\u2019d see a 27-year old with declining peripherals and chalk it up to a latent injury about to assert itself. If Blade Tidwell and Drew Gilbert were better than replacement-level players the next few years, the trade\u2019s a win and Butt\u00f3 an afterthought. Only, Butt\u00f3\u2018s been good enough across four seasons that he\u2019s the type of arm you don\u2019t necessarily through away because of a bad couple of months. And, to be clear, Butt\u00f3 was pretty much awful over the final two months of the season. To the point that the Giants might simply non-tender him?<\/p>\n

He hit the IL on the Fourth of July with an unspecified illness, however. Up to that point, he\u2019d pitched 43.2 IP with a 2.47 ERA (3.39 FIP) for the Mets. After his activation on the 23rd, with both the Mets and Giants, he pitched 23.1 IP with a 6.56 ERA (4.29 FIP). That alone suggests an offseason of rest might go a long way towards righting the ship \u2014 depending on the nature of the illness, of course. Under the hood suggests that the declining peripherals could be explained by this illness, too.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the matter of his peripherals. Despite the results\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2026 they weren\u2019t all that decline-y.<\/p>\n

2024: 26.9 K%, 12.9 BB% (bottom 3%), 94.2 mph 4FB, .319 xwOBACON (top 6%), 3.44 xERA, 88.7 avg exit velo
2025: 20.4 K%, 11.3 BB% (bottom 9%), 95.2 mph 4FB, .379 xwOBACON, 4.51 xERA, 90.1 avg exit velocity<\/p>\n

The uptick in velocity could be explained by pitching all innings out of the bullpen instead of being a starter, which isn\u2019t necessarily a point in favor of \u201ceverything\u2019s going to be okay,\u201d but an interesting couple of supporting items do point in that direction: (1) he had a career-best 48.1% groundball rate (41.5%, 42.2% previous two years), and the batting average on balls in play shot up from a two-year average of .231 to .309. A decision was made to switch up his pitch usage. Last year, he was a four-seam, sinker, changeup guy, and this season he was a four-seam, slider, sinker guy.<\/p>\n

Butt\u00f3 has the stuff to get swing and miss, but he at least for this season he wasn\u2019t able to put hitters away with any consistency. This was a problem for the Giants as, according to FanGraphs, his leverage index in the orange and black (that is, the average pressure he saw coming into a game) was 1.32 (46th out of 131 relievers with a minimum of 20 IP from August 1st onward). His Win Probability Added was -0.08 (98th out 131). He was the worst Giant outside of Ryan Walker, whose -0.88 WPA in just 17.2 IP from August 1st to the end of the season was 15th worse (once you drop the threshold to a minimum of 10 relief innings).<\/p>\n

Two of his top 5 highest leverage moments came with the Giants and those wound up being a blown win against the Cardinals on September 24th and the blown save he had against the Mets in his Giants debut.<\/p>\n

Now, he still has five years of team control, which does matter in terms of roster construction. The Giants do have some flexibility there \u2014 only Matt Gage, J.T. Brubaker, and possibly Joey Lucchesi lack options \u2014 and having 3-4 relievers without them wouldn\u2019t work against any sort of planning. At least in 2025, Buster Posey continued the tradition of acquiring relievers wih 95+ mph fastballs and 2,500+ rpm slider relievers. Unless there\u2019s a philosophical change in the offseason, I don\u2019t see Butt\u00f3 being removed from the plan. He might not wind up being a 7th inning or greater guy, but as another multi-inning arm, his value is pretty clear.<\/p>\n

The most excited Giants fans got about Butt\u00f3 in 2025 was the trade package he was a part of, which means he\u2019ll need to pitch his way back into the fans\u2019 hearts and minds. That\u2019s pretty much the life of a reliever, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2025 stats: 67 IP, 55 G, 3.90 ERA \/ 3.70 FIP, 1.40 WHIP, 20.4 K%, 11.3 BB%, 0.5…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2408],"tags":[5,162,4,1830,378,66,4343,4340,4344,4341,4342],"class_list":{"0":"post-397026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco-giants","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-giants","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-roster","12":"tag-san-francisco","13":"tag-san-francisco-giants","14":"tag-sanfrancisco","15":"tag-sanfranciscogiants","16":"tag-sf","17":"tag-sf-giants","18":"tag-sfgiants"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115426941031533503","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}