The Rockaway Wave
Originally Published July 18, 2025
Today, Jonathan Santucci is known for being a fireballing lefty who is emerging as one of the top pitching prospects in the New York Mets organization. However, just a few years ago, he was a slick-fielding outfielder with a “no-fly zone” in center field who rarely ever even stepped foot on the mound.
“I only threw like seven innings all of high school,” Santucci said. “I always had pitching in my back pocket and never really put too much effort into it, and just kind of went out there and tried to throw as hard as I can when I did.”
Kevin Graber, Santucci’s coach at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, said Santucci only throwing seven innings in high school is true, but a bit misleading. His entire junior season and a chunk of his senior season were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so there just weren’t many opportunities for him to pitch in the back half of his high school career.
Santucci was so valuable to the team in center field and in the middle of the lineup, Graber said, and he played on a deep team that included Thomas White, a left-handed pitcher who is the current No. 27 prospect in baseball and No. 1 prospect in the Marlins organization on MLB Pipeline. Graber simply didn’t need him to pitch, so he didn’t.
He said Santucci was one of the best center fielders and left-handed hitters in the region. He’d catch everything hit his way, getting to balls on the run that many other outfielders would need to dive for.
“We had an amazing center fielder that came after Jonathan, and this kid was making diving plays everywhere on the field,” Graber said. “I would say to our assistant coach, ‘Santucci catches that in his back pocket, doesn’t even have to run for it.’”
His bat was very, very real, too. One moment from Santucci’s senior year stands out to him the most.
“The school was building a new field house beyond our right field wall, and it was an open construction site,” Graber said. “It was far. It wasn’t like right behind the fence, it was over a street, and man, Jonathan hit one over the fence in right field, over the street, into the construction site.”
Santucci said he always thought of himself as more of a hitter than a pitcher, even when he first got to college.
He appeared in games as a position player in both his freshman and sophomore years at Duke. He had 23 at-bats for the Blue Devils over those first two seasons, hitting .217/.250/.435/.685.
He hit his one and only NCAA home run as a sophomore. He played the field, too, appearing in one game in center field and three in right field.
As a left-handed pitcher who can hit the upper-90s on the radar gun, though, Santucci became such a commodity on the mound that he completely dropped hitting by his junior year.
“After I got hurt my sophomore year, I think that was when I kind of was able to sit down and know and think really deeply about, pitching is where my future is, and I want to put all my effort into that to become the best pitcher possible,” Santucci said.
Between the innings he’s thrown in the minor leagues this season, the innings he threw in college, the innings he threw in two collegiate summer league stints, and his approximation of seven high school innings, Santucci has just 235 and 2⁄3 innings under his belt.
That’s it. From high school through today, Santucci has thrown under 250 total innings. That’s the inning total of someone who is, in reality, still very new to pitching.
“There’s so much more that he can learn,” Cyclones manager Gilbert Gómez said. “I feel like that’s one of the things that played out at the beginning of the year, he needed the reps of going out there every five days and really making those adjustments. But I just think the more reps that he gets, the more comfortable he’s gonna stay on the mound.”
Gómez said it’s something the organization is very excited about, that he’s able to manipulate the baseball the way he can despite his relative inexperience as a pitcher.
It’s exciting for Santucci, too.
“Pitching’s still kind of new to me, so that’s the exciting part, going from there and always learning every single time I go out there,” Santucci said.
The Mets’ second-round pick in the 2024 MLB Draft, Santucci began his pro career with the Brooklyn Cyclones this season and got off to a rough start. Through his first four starts, Santucci gave up 12 earned runs in 12 innings — good for a 9.00 ERA. Through his first six starts and 21 innings, his ERA was 8.14.
Santucci said he was dealing with some issues with his mechanics at the beginning of the year, which is what led to the poor results. He’s always had a fastball that gets good induced vertical break (IVB), but his mechanical issues started to cause it to decline. After ironing them out and tweaking his grip, his IVB has returned.
“Now it’s back to where it’s always been and where it’s at its best,” Santucci said.
Aside from the fastball, Santucci throws a good slider, which has always been his go-to breaking pitch. He has also added a new curveball this season, and it’s showing some good early returns.
“It’s a big one, man,” Gómez said. “It gets a lot of drop. It’s something that plays well with his ride-and-cut fastball. He tunnels it pretty well, where, fastball can be up in the zone, and then he drops a hammer at the same eye level, and then you swing at it, and it’s in the dirt. It’s just another layer that he can use to put guys away.”
He’s gained confidence in the pitch as the season has progressed, and said he feels like he’s been throwing it more every week.
“Just addressing what the Mets thought would add to my repertoire nicely,” Santucci said. “Thought maybe making my slider a little harder, and then differentiating the speeds, cause I kind of throw everything really hard, so adding something softer to throw off the timing a little bit better. … I feel like I’m at a point where I can throw it in any count, steal a strike, or even strike people out with a swing and miss and chase and things like that.”
The curveball is now Santucci’s clear third pitch, but he also has a changeup, which he described as a pretty generic circle change. He’s still trying to find consistency with the pitch, but thinks it can be a big weapon for him down the road.
“It’s not a pitch that I want to throw a lot, but something that I know can be valuable for me,” Santucci said.
In Santucci’s final nine games with Brooklyn before his promotion, he posted a 1.35 ERA and 0.94 WHIP with 54 strikeouts in 46 and 2⁄3 innings pitched. His strikeout rate, which was at 20.8% through his first six games, was up to 29.5% in his final nine, and he brought his ERA down from 8.14 to 3.46.
His walk rate was good all season, even when he was struggling, and finished at 8.1% with the Cyclones. It’s a huge improvement from college, where his walk rate climbed from 11.2% as a freshman to 12.5% as a sophomore to 14% as a junior.
“The Mets, they just constantly talk about attacking hitters,” Santucci said. “Just thinking about that every time I go out there, and just knowing that my stuff, more times than not, it’s gonna beat the hitter.”
Hitting’s hard enough, Santucci knows that firsthand.
“I think that mindset, and them preaching that basically every single time we go out there, I think that really helped me to have more confidence in everything and just attack hitters with my best stuff every single pitch,” Santucci said.
On July 7, Santucci was promoted to Double-A Binghamton. In his first start four days later, he threw six innings of two-run ball with eight strikeouts and just three baserunners allowed.
The Mets have had many breakout pitching prospects over the past two seasons, and Santucci is well-positioned to become the next one.
“There’s a saying in professional baseball, I’m paraphrasing perhaps, but it’s, ‘Oh, that’s what it looks like,’” Graber, who spent 13 years as a part-time scout for the New York Yankees and two seasons recently as a minor league coach for the Chicago Cubs, said. “It’s a way of describing a player whose physicality, their build, their arm action, the way they move on the mound, their mound presence, the way their stuff plays — Jonathan’s what they look like.”
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