Justin Willard Hoping to Tap Into Mets Pitchers’ Superpowers
If Justin Willard’s vision becomes a reality, the 2026 Mets will have a staff full of pitchers making the most of their superpowers.
Willard, 35, was named the Mets’ new pitching coach on Wednesday, confirming the news on the Baseball Isn’t Boring podcast, where host Rob Bradford asked him about his coaching approach.
“First of all, understanding, like what makes them really, really good,” Willard said on the podcast. “What is the superpower they have because you have to have some sort of superpower to be in the major leagues, right?
“And then now can we multiply your effectiveness through that superpower? Right, like what makes Jonah (Tong) really, really good is you talk to hitters it’s like the ball’s coming out of his chest. Right, so it’s like OK, we don’t necessarily want to take that away, but we just want to make sure it doesn’t get too far down the rabbit hole that it’s affecting the quality of his pitches, his ability to locate those things.
“But like, hey, his superpower is this ball is coming from a really weird spot. Let’s make sure we maximize that.”
Willard comes to the Mets from the Red Sox, where he was the director of pitching, working under pitching coach Andrew Bailey, since November 2023. Boston traded for Garrett Crochet last offseason, and the lefty had the best year of his career with his new coaching staff. He went 18-5 with a 2.59 ERA and 1.03 WHIP, led the majors in strikeouts (255) and the American League in innings pitched (205 1/3) and strikeouts per nine innings (11.2). He was second in AL Cy Young voting.
“Like Crochet is a perfect example,” Willard said. “When we acquired him last year, we’re like OK this guy is really, really cross-body. There’s an aspect of his ‘cross-bodyness’ and his stride that makes him really good, but if it goes too far in one direction it’s going to really hurt the rest of his arsenal and the rest of the effect is going to mess up his pitches.”
Crochet wasn’t the only success story in Boston this past year. Brayan Bello‘s ERA dropped more than a run from 2024 to 3.35, Lucas Giolito returned from missing a year to UCL surgery to post a 3.41 ERA and ex-Met Justin Wilson had his best season since 2022 with 57 strikeouts in 48 1/3 innings. The Red Sox were fifth in MLB with a 3.70 team ERA. The Mets were 18th at 4.03.
New York will enter 2026 with lots of question marks on the pitching staff. Sean Manaea, Kodai Senga and David Peterson were varying degrees of poor in the second half. Tong and Brandon Sproat were inconsistent in brief big-league stints. The bullpen still needs to be built out.
Willard, a native of Brampton, Ontario, Canada, pitched for Division II Concord University in West Virginia from 2011-2013. He was an assistant coach at Division I Radford University from 2013-2017 before landing a spot in the Twins organization. He was an affiliate coach for Minnesota for three years before earning a promotion to minor-league pitching coordinator before the 2021 season.
He said in a December 2023 piece in The Athletic after the Red Sox hired him that he prefers a pitcher with a premium pitch and no command to one with mediocre stuff but excellent command. A pitcher relying only on command needs to be perfect, he said.
At both his previous stints, he was involved as organizations shifted to a focus on analytics.
“Coming from the Twins,” he said in the 2023 article, “when we made that move to a more analytically driven system, I kind of got to see the road map firsthand of what that looks like. So going through my own order of operations of how to build this out correctly, that’s what I’ll be planning to work through the next couple months.”
Now, Willard’s got three months to mull over the Mets before the club’s first spring training game on Feb. 21, 2026.
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