MILWAUKEE — Sean Manaea will tell himself it is merely start 33 of his season.
The lefty will remind himself that he was generally solid to excellent in those first 32 and this one will be “just another game,” Manaea said Tuesday.
He knows, of course, that it is not just another game. But he is counting on the mindset to work.
“It is the playoffs. There’s obviously a lot of energy and buzz going around,” Manaea said before the Mets and Brewers opened their best-of-three wild-card series at American Family Field. “I’m trying to match that excitement and not try to fight it. But at the end of the day, all the stuff I’ve been able to do is kind of prepare myself for moments like these.
“It’s pitching.”
Manaea has been terrific at pitching this year and increasingly so as the season has gone along, but he has struggled in big spots in the past.
In his first eight major league seasons, Manaea pitched three times in the postseason and none went well. Twice with the A’s, he was knocked around, first in 2019 and then in 2020, before he allowed five runs in 1 ¹/₃ innings with the Padres in 2022.
For Game 2, Manaea will try to lower a postseason ERA of 15.26. He will have to do so against the Brewers, who halted his run of excellence by knocking him around in a five-run, 3 ²/₃-inning dud Friday.
“It’s just another game,” Manaea said, a phrase he used twice. “Just got to treat it like that and not try to make it too much bigger than it is.”
If there is more hope than the past, it is because Manaea is a different pitcher than he had been in the past.
Last offseason, the Mets signed Manaea to a pact that guaranteed him just $14.5 million this year, finding a bargain because he was coming off a poor campaign with the Giants, with whom he fell out of the rotation in May and did not start again until September.
Manaea was fine through his first 20 starts with the Mets in which he posted a 3.74 ERA. But beginning with a July 30 outing, he dropped his arm slot, became a near-sidearmer and watched uncertain swings pile up.
Over Manaea’s final 12 starts of the season, he logged more innings than anyone and pitched to a 3.09 ERA, emerging as the ace the Mets needed.
“If I can have confidence out there and throwing strikes with everything, all my pitches, I feel like good things can happen,” Manaea said. “Those kind of mechanical changes have helped me do that.”
Those mechanical changes have helped the 32-year-old put together arguably the best season of his career.
He will almost certainly decline his 2025 player option and hit free agency as a far more appealing pitcher than this time last year.
He has enjoyed his time in Queens but did not want to look ahead to the open market. He wants to show that he is a changed pitcher in October, too.
“Really proud of the work I’ve been able to do,” Manaea said of his season. “Stayed healthy for the whole season, and we made it this far, so I’m just really excited to pitch [Wednesday].
“Hopefully it’s not my last [with the Mets].”