rewrite this content and keep HTML tags
Mike Vasil assumed he was going to once again be a Met.
Informed a few days before the season began that he was not going to make the Rays roster, the Rule 5 draft pick packed up his stuff and drove to Port St. Lucie.
The vast majority of the time, when a Rule 5 selection cannot stick with a team that has taken a chance on him, that player is offered back to his original club.
But he only gets offered back to the original club after a waiver period.
In a rarity, another team — the White Sox — put in a claim.
On March 23, Vasil sat in the Mets’ backyard and watched the NCAA Tournament when he received a phone call from a Florida phone number that he assumed would entail the Rays officially telling him he had been returned to the Mets.
Instead it was Tampa Bay president of baseball operations Erik Neander, who told him “to get on a plane to Chicago for Opening Day,” Vasil recalled from the visiting clubhouse Tuesday.
“And I was like: Wow, this is pretty crazy. … My head really just started spinning.”
Vasil, a former top pitching prospect for the Mets, has proven elusive since becoming a former Met.
Left unprotected in December’s draft, he was grabbed by the Phillies but then flipped to the Rays.
He allowed seven runs in 10 ²/₃ Grapefruit League innings with the Rays but showed enough that the White Sox believed they could find a role for the longtime starter in their bullpen.
They might be right. Vasil entered play Tuesday with a 2.30 ERA in his first 16 major league games, essentially filling the same role that Max Kranick has carved out in Queens.
Vasil has pitched three innings in a game five times and been a nice piece for a team that can use any help it can get.
This is not how the Mets had envisioned Vasil reaching the majors, but the Amazin’s had long envisioned he would reach the majors.
Vasil was an eighth-round pick in 2021 who climbed through their system, was rated as their 11th-best prospect by MLB Pipeline in 2023 and 2024, but stumbled last season with Triple-A Syracuse.
On the doorstep of a debut with the Mets, Vasil could not break through and pitched to a 6.04 ERA in 29 games last season.
This year, he said, he “would like to think [my stuff] is a little bit better.”
He has ditched his cutter and relied more on his slider, maybe the only reliever in the game with a six-pitch mix.
“Off to a good start,” Vasil said of an unexpected major league opportunity with the White Sox he twice called “awesome.”
“But I realistically just want to pitch well, especially coming off of last year. So that was kind of my main goal.”
If he regresses, the Mets would welcome him with open arms. Vasil has to survive the season on the active roster for the White Sox, who would have to offer him back to the Mets instead of optioning him.
He had not reached the major leagues with the Mets, yet he spent time this week catching up with player development folks around the team in his first big league visit to Citi Field.
“I think for me, for them being such a big organization, obviously, and being in New York, how personal they can make things for you and how you get to know everyone,” Vasil said, “I think is a really, really cool thing.”
