Ryan Clifford’s season has gone off the rails in Triple-A, but the Mets still aren’t ready to write off one of their top prospects.
The 21-year-old left-handed bat has been stuck in a brutal slide with Syracuse, where he’s hitting .176 with a .617 OPS across 105 games this year. The strikeouts have become the loudest part of the story. Clifford’s 38% strikeout rate is the highest of any hitter with 200-plus plate appearances in Triple-A this season.
That downturn reached its low point in mid-July, when the Mets put him on the development list after a five-strikeout game in Jacksonville. By then, he had managed just one hit in his previous 41 at-bats and piled up 26 strikeouts over an 11-game stretch. Go back to the start of June, and the numbers look even rougher: a .108 average and an 8 wRC+ over his previous 45 games.
For a player once viewed as one of the best position-player prospects in the organization, it’s been a stunning collapse. Clifford, a first baseman and corner outfielder, had looked like he was building real momentum last season. Over 139 games between Double-A Binghamton and Triple-A Syracuse in 2025, he posted a .826 OPS with 29 home runs, 12 more than any other minor leaguer in the Mets system.
Still, the organization isn’t changing its tune. Mets director of minor-league hitting Kevin Mahala said the struggles are part of the process and that the club believes Clifford can come back from them.
“Progress and development is not linear and it’s not uncommon for a kid who’s young and who’s at upper levels of minor league baseball to go through some struggles,” Mets director of minor-league hitting director Kevin Mahala told NJ.com recently. “When you encounter those times of struggle, it’s imperative to make some adjustments. We think he’s capable of making those adjustments and if he does, the sky is the limit.”
Thursday brought a small sign of life. In his first appearance after coming off the development list, Clifford drew two walks and then ripped a 100.7-mph RBI single up the middle. It was a tiny step, but it was also a reminder of the tools that made him so intriguing in the first place.
His underlying contact quality still looks strong, even if the box-score results have been ugly. The issue is that he simply isn’t putting enough balls in play.
“It’s no secret the contact has gone down quite a bit,” Mahala said. “Some of the plate discipline that he was known for has slipped. We’re really trying to get those back on track and get him back to that ’25 version, the best version of Ryan Clifford that we’ve seen.”
Mahala added: “Contact rates improve significantly, maintain the plate discipline, still have all that power. You add all those things up and it’s a really special hitter.
The Mets would have loved to see that version show up earlier. Clifford, acquired from the Astros in the Justin Verlander trade in 2023, entered this year with a path that seemed to point toward a summer promotion. He’d already gotten a taste of Triple-A in the second half of last season, and when the Mets needed offense in the middle of the order - especially at first base - his versatility could have made him an easy fit if the bat had been there.
Instead, the road ahead looks murkier. A spot on the 40-man roster later this year to protect him from the Rule 5 Draft now seems extremely unlikely, if not impossible, with a long list of Rule 5 eligible prospects ahead of him on the organizational depth chart.
That leaves Clifford with a narrow window in the final month of the regular season to start stacking better at-bats and carry something positive into the winter. Right now, the Mets are still talking about upside. The challenge is getting him back to a place where it actually shows up on the field.
“This game is really hard,” Mahala said. “This game is really humbling.
He’s certainly been tested this year and it hasn’t gone the way he has hoped the way or the way we have hoped, but all the potential - all the capability that we saw last year - is still in there. And so our goal is to get back to the best version of Ryan Clifford.”
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