Baseball America pencils in former top NY Mets prospect as the team's future closer

Poll every New York Mets fan and nearly 100% will say the team needs to re-sign Edwin Diaz. The star closer should be one of the club’s offseason priorities. He won’t be around forever, though. Baseball America is already looking toward the future with a prediction about who’ll be closing games for the team in 2029.

The thing to know about these projections by Baseball America is it doesn’t include any trades or free agent signings. Therefore, it’s absolutely wrong. But in the short-term, their projected Mets closer a few years from now isn’t completely outlandish with Christian Scott etched in there as the man for the job.

How does this happen? Scott’s history tells the story.

Christian Scott might be a better high-leverage reliever than starter after all

Scott started 5 games in college and made another 50 relief appearances. It’s a significant difference yet forgettable because of how good he was in 2023 and 2024 on the farm for the Mets working as a starter. Tommy John surgery claimed him in early 2024 after 9 big league starts. Set to return in 2026, the expectation should be for Scott to get eased back into action.

In his career, including college, Scott has never thrown more than 90 innings. He fell just shy in 2023 and 2024. Durability is absolutely a question. He turns 27 next summer and with the coming season likely to have limitations, the result of whatever he does next year could have him shifting into a relief role sooner than later.

Big strikeout numbers and fantastic control thus far in his professional career, he has all of the right stuff to be a viable closer candidate in the future. It’s a matter of holding him back from becoming a starter that’ll put him on this trajectory. What the Mets do this offseason with some of their young pitchers will tell us a lot more about what could lie ahead for Scott. He, undoubtedly, will begin the year in the minors. For the sake of letting him adjust, he shouldn’t pitch extensively.

Scott won’t be someone to jump into the Mets closer role on Opening Day in a worst-case scenario with Diaz present. Within a few years, maybe so if we’re lucky.

The Mets farm system is loaded with pitching. We can’t expect them to stack five homegrown players in the rotation and it turns out successful. Players like Scott will inevitably fall into a different role. If it’s a closer he becomes, the satisfaction level would be much higher than if he was a back-end starter.