Needing to essentially rebuild an entirely new bullpen that lacks a closer, the New York Mets reached an agreement Monday night with high-leverage reliever Devin Williams on a three-year deal worth $51 million, league sources told The Athletic.
The deal includes a $6 million bonus prorated equally over the three years. In total, $15 million is deferred; $5 million each year.
Reliever Devin Williams and the Mets are in agreement on a three-year deal, league source tells The Athletic.
— Will Sammon (@WillSammon) December 2, 2025
The move reunites Williams with Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns, who previously guided the Milwaukee Brewers. With the Brewers, Williams was a dominant closer.
However, the agreement does not preclude the Mets from reuniting with star closer Edwin Díaz, a free agent.
Though there’s no guarantee that they will, it remains possible that the Mets can still end up with him, league sources said. Díaz, however, has attracted interest from other contenders. Williams is said to be open to pitching in different roles, people familiar with the Mets’ conversations with him said.
Williams, the No. 19 free agent on The Athletic’s Big Board who was projected to receive a one-year, $18 million contract by Tim Britton, had a frustrating 2025 season for the New York Yankees, his lone year with the club after getting traded last offseason by the Milwaukee Brewers. He posted a career-worst 4.79 ERA for the Yankees and was removed from the closer’s role in early August.
He eventually settled in after David Bednar took over the ninth inning for the Yankees. From Aug. 10 through the end of the season, Williams had a 2.50 ERA (0.36 FIP) in 19 games, striking out 34 of 70 batters faced over 18 innings.
Even though Williams had the 12th-worst ERA among all relief pitchers, there’s reason to believe he can return to being one of the most dominant closers in the sport. His 37.7 percent whiff rate ranked in the 99th percentile, and both his chase rate and strikeout rate ranked in the 97th percentile. Williams also had the highest differential between his ERA and FIP, a more predictive stat for relievers. That would suggest Williams was a bit unlucky with his results this season.
“The statistics ended up the way they were because I had four or five blow-up games,” Williams said earlier this offseason. “They ended up scoring three or ended up scoring four. I just wasn’t able to get out of it after one run. That contributed to why my ERA looks the way that it did. It wasn’t necessarily like I was bad in every game. It’s just when I had a bad game, it was terrible.”
Williams quickly became the source of Yankees fans’ ridicule before he even threw a pitch. He was a catalyst for the franchise changing its longstanding facial hair policy, which did not come with a 100 percent approval rating. He showed up to spring training with a full beard and made it clear that he was unhappy about having to shave. He also said that if the policy was still in place by the time he became a free agent, it would have impacted his interest in returning to the Yankees. Some fans associated the team’s policy change with catering to Williams, and it didn’t help that he struggled mightily in April, posting a 9.00 ERA in the first month of the season.
The Yankees had concerns early in the season about whether Williams would ever be able to get comfortable going from the smallest-market team in the Brewers to the biggest-market team in New York. By the end of the season, Williams found his groove and became a reliable reliever.
“It’s just hard to believe that the guy who was arguably the best closer in the game for the last four years wasn’t gonna figure it out at some point over the course of 162 (games),” Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake said in September. “I just felt like, at some point, Devin Williams was gonna show up here because he’s done it for too long to not have it surface if he’s healthy.”
In his six years with the Brewers, Williams posted a 1.83 ERA. The Mets hope he can replicate those results and turn back into one of MLB’s best pitchers.