Late Bloomers: Whit Wyatt

Picture, if you will, Chris Flexen.

If you don’t know who that is, I will remind you that he’s a current pitcher for the White Sox, his fourth team in the last seven years, and that he owns a career major league record of 30-49 with a 4.95 ERA that is 17% worse than the leagues in which he’s pitched. He’s been worth 3.0 WAR in those seven years combined, spread out over 647.2 innings.

Flexen was pretty awful when he first came up to the big leagues with the Mets, going 3-11 in parts of three seasons with an ERA of 8.07. They released him, which came as no surprise, and he sat out the COVID season before managing to latch on with the Mariners. There he had a bit of surprising success, going 22-15 over the next two seasons with a sold 3.66 ERA that was a bit better than average. He appeared to maybe have a career in front of him.

Then the bottom fell out.