The Rockaway Wave
Originally Published May 15, 2026
Rice’s Garrett Stratton hadn’t taken a plate appearance since high school. Even then, it happened just once.
“Hitting’s just not really my forte,” he said.
On February 23, 2025, it happened again. Stratton stepped into the batter’s box.
Put into the game in the top of the 8th inning with two outs and the bases loaded, Stratton escaped the jam. He replaced Blaine Brown, a two-way player who started the game in right field. When Brown moved to the mound and then back to right field, Rice sacrificed the DH.
That left Stratton due up fifth in the bottom half of the inning. With a runner on second and two outs, the batter in front of him was intentionally walked. Stratton, slated to pitch the ninth inning as well, had to hit.
His pitching coach hated it. He did not want one of his best relief pitchers to hit.
“I knew he would be fine, it’s just I’m a very risk-averse guy,” Parker Bangs, Rice’s pitching coach for all three of Stratton’s seasons there, said. “Very probability driven, very percentage driven, and 0% risk of injury swinging a bat is infinitely better than 1% risk of injury swinging a bat.”
He understood why they needed to do it, and said that when he took off his pitching coach hat and watched it as a baseball fan, it became one of the coolest moments of the season.
Stratton had little intention of swinging. The initial plan was for him to bunt, but that wasn’t an option with two outs. The best chance he had, he decided, was to try to draw a walk.
“I probably would have swung if I’d gotten to like 0-2, 1-2, but I’m kind of a realist,” Stratton said. “I don’t think that ball is getting put in play.”
1-0. 2-0.
“And then I started kind of feeling myself,” he said. He starts doing the Soto shuffle. He’s bluffing a bunt.
“I knew I wasn’t going to be an uncomfortable AB because they were scared of throwing strikes, so I just wanted to make it hard,” he said. “Do anything I could to just try to get him out of the zone.”
Five pitches in, and he’s bat-flipping his walk and trotting down to first base. “I wasn’t surprised at all,” Bangs said. “That kid’s gonna find a way.”
Stratton ultimately didn’t advance past first base, but he still reached. For his college career, he sports a 1.000 on-base percentage. And Rice won the game.
“It’s a great memory, for sure,” Stratton said. “Probably one of my favorite baseball memories ever.”
The Mets selected Stratton with the third-to-last pick in the 2025 MLB Draft. It came down to the wire, close enough to the end that he was even having preliminary conversations with other teams about signing as a free agent before he was selected. He’s being developed strictly as a pitcher, not a two-way player.
He operates with a three-pitch mix: Four-seam, cutter and curveball. He says his cutter is his bread-and-butter offering.
“He throws a mean cutter with a lot of movement and a high velocity,” Cyclones pitching coach Luis Alvarado said.
His curveball is new. He threw a curveball in high school but ditched it when he got to Rice in favor of a slider. The curve was too inconsistent, Bangs said, and the slider was an attempt to get him a breaking ball that he could command better.
The Mets see a north-to-south pitcher in Stratton, which is why the switch from a slider to a curveball was made. Alvarado said it’s more of what is known today as the “death ball.”
“Something very aggressive, it doesn’t have to be as big,” Alvarado said. “He has a really good ability to spin the ball, and he has shown that he can throw that pitch 86/87 [mph] with a lot of movement. I think combining those three pitches, and making that curveball a bridge where, his bread and butter is a fastball and cutter, and if we get the hitters off those two with the curveball, he’s gonna be in a good spot.”
The ability to spin the ball is something that has been noted by scouts, and it’s something Alvarado said the Mets want to try to exploit. Stratton said spinning the ball is something that’s always come naturally to him, but he’s had to learn how to harness it the correct way.
“You’re trying to turn that into actually being an elite pitch, which is not just it spinning really fast, but it spinning the right way,” he said. “That has not been very natural for me … and the Mets have done a great job helping me learn to get it spinning around the right axis to get the shape we want. It’s always spun fast, but now it’s spinning the way we want it to spin.”
Diving into the nuts and bolts of pitching is something Stratton excels at. Bangs said he still gets texts from him about a new pitch grip, pitch design, or something else like that at least once a month.
“He’s the smartest guy in every room he’s ever been in,” Bangs said.
He recalled a bullpen from Stratton’s sophomore season, and said that is when he knew he was looking at a future professional baseball player.
“He started asking questions that were consistent with questions that pro guys would ask if they’re coming back for a bullpen,” Bangs said. “And being at Rice, with such an illustrious alumni list and tons of pro guys that want to come back and use the lab and use all the stuff and use all the tech that we had, they asked certain questions because they know certain things about it. Stratton’s asking the same type of questions. He approached his improvement, his development, like a pro.”
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