How the Rays fixed Freddy Peralta after Mets mess: Everything changed

This version of Freddy Peralta, the one masterfully pitching for the third time in the ALCS on Monday night to secure the Rays’ World Series berth and earn MVP honors, is the one the Mets rarely saw this season.Peralta has looked every part of an ace for the Rays this postseason, with his 5 ⅓ innings of one-run ball in Monday’s 7-3 win over the Guardians giving him a 1.08 ERA this postseason.That dominance is a stark contrast to the back-end starter he portrayed with the Mets, posting a 4.99 ERA with the team and playing a sizable role in why the team flopped this season.Peralta’s respective success and failure with the teams can be viewed as a representation of each squad’s season and added another successful entry to the Rays’ strong history of pitching development.“Everything changed when I got traded,” Peralta told ESPN.“I said it before that I’ve been treated here as a king, and I feel really good about it.

They’re working me really well here.”Tampa Bay is known throughout baseball for its ability to build pitchers and, in this case, they rebuilt Peralta back into the top-end starter he portrayed in Milwaukee prior to his Mets trade.Peralta, 30, posted a 3.79 ERA across eight seasons with Milwaukee, including a career-best 2.70 ERA in 2025 that landed him in fifth place in the NL Cy Young race.The Mets acquired him hoping he could replicate that success, but he instead allowed more hits than innings pitched and saw his strikeouts per nine innings dip from 11.1 in 2025 to 8.9 with the team.Tampa Bay took a shot on Peralta at the deadline in its quest to hold off the Yankees and Red Sox in the AL East and got to work on helping him return to his old self.One notable change the franchise made was having him pitch out of the stretch again, like he had done with Milwaukee but abandoned with the Mets.“He said, ‘I always feel comfortable pitching out of the stretch,'” Rays bullpen coach Jorge Moncada told ESPN.“So we were like, ‘Go ...