Around 2021, after several years of failing to produce a homegrown starter, the New York Mets made an important philosophical change and shifted how they looked at pitchers in the amateur draft.

According to conversations with a handful of key Mets personnel, the organization began focusing less on projection and leaned more toward “now” stuff. They placed a higher value on metrics. They started to better align their priorities with what the player development staff could help shape.

It’s working.

Christian Scott, a reliever in college who developed into the Mets’ best starting pitcher prospect, will debut on Saturday in what the Mets hope signals the beginning of a much-needed era of successful pitching development.

After selecting Matt Harvey (2010) and Steven Matz (2009) in the first rounds of back-to-back drafts, the Mets’ only homegrown starters of any value from any round of any year since then have been David Peterson and Tylor Megill. And while Peterson and Megill have flashed at times, they’ve batted injuries and inconsistent performances. Also, neither of their debuts carried the kind of buzz that is accompanying Scott, a top-100 prospect.

Christian Scott says he’s “pumped up” to make his MLB debut in his home state of Florida tomorrow.

His dad is taking care of the tickets for family and friends 😂 pic.twitter.com/dWxgvgv3Fp

— SNY (@SNYtv) May 3, 2024

When Scott toes the Tropicana Field rubber on Saturday evening, he’ll be the first top-100 pitching prospect to debut for the Mets since Matz in 2016. At that time, Matz was the sixth top-100 pitching prospect to debut for the Mets in a seven-year stretch that started with Jenrry Mejia in 2010 and included Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Rafael Montero and Noah Syndergaard. (The expectations for Jacob deGrom, naturally, had been lower.)

New York hopes that Scott’s promotion this weekend starts a similar wave of talent that can lift the club to sustained contention. That the Mets’ next big pitching prospect came from their draft class of 2021 is no real surprise. That it’s Scott? That’s an industry shocker — to almost everyone except the Mets.

“Opportunity,” Jon Updike said through a cell phone that had been blowing up all day Thursday, “is an amazing thing.”

Updike was the Mets area scout responsible for signing Scott after the 2021 draft. He’s the one who first saw Scott as a high school senior in Fort Lauderdale when he wanted to check in on this commit to the University of Florida and get a baseline for how he might evolve over the next three years.

While with the Gators, Scott did not check the traditional boxes for a future frontline starting pitching prospect. Chiefly, he was not a starting pitcher — not on Friday night, not on Saturday night, not midweek in the non-con. He wasn’t even a closer who pumped 98 and made you think he could be more.

“He was more of a Swiss army knife,” Updike said.

Still, when Scott would come in and toss three innings in a blowout or get five outs to bridge the gap to the closer in a tight game, Updike took notice. He loved how Scott competed in dirty situations, entering the game with runners on base. He loved how, without a 98 mph heater, he didn’t just rely on stuff for outs. He loved how he commanded the movement on his pitches, how he threw strikes.

“I had an absolute belief that in professional baseball, he has the strikes and the stuff to be a starter,” said Updike, who tried to convince the Mets to give Scott the opportunity to start for them.

It helped that Updike wasn’t alone. Scout Ron Hopkins, regional crosschecker Mike Ledna and internal scouting director Steve Barmingham all watched Scott. They all performed a lot of work on Scott. They all liked Scott. So did Marc Tramuta, then the amateur scouting director and the guy ultimately responsible for making the decision. Tramuta felt there were enough people convicted with the pick.

“Our job as scouts is to identify what he is, what’s valuable about him, and then paint a picture of what you think could happen,” said Barningham. “And then you try to convince the guys to pull the card, to see your vision with you.”

Plus, Tramuta saw an “opportunity,” as he put it, with Scott because he threw strikes, had good pitches, a solid delivery and athleticism. The Mets had taken a similar gamble three years earlier in the eighth round on Tylor Megill, and Megill had just joined their big-league rotation.

“The success of Megill in a way,” Tramuta, “helped me take Christian Scott.”

But even Scott’s most ardent proponents did not expect this much this soon. Devoted Mets fans can be forgiven for not knowing who Scott was this time last year; he wasn’t considered a top-20 prospect in the organization by The Athletic, FanGraphs or Baseball Prospectus.

Scott’s rise is a credit to himself and the Mets’ player development staff, led by pitching vice president Eric Jagers. In 2023, Scott mastered a changeup to complement his fastball and slider, and he walked almost nobody across three levels. He showed up to big-league camp this spring brandishing a new sweeper and a burgeoning confidence. He lowered his release, changed the angle in which his fastball reached the plate and increased the extension on his fastball by nearly a foot. And he hasn’t lost the ability to work a lineup and get himself out of the rare spot of trouble, to outsmart as well as outstuff the opposition.

“He’s got a little bit of a chip on his shoulder, too,” Updike said. “He wants to prove that he’s good. He wants to prove that he belongs.”

Baseball’s best organizations feature alignment within their departments. In a top-tier organization, the amateur scouting group, the player development team and the president of baseball operations’ inner circle all share some of the same values. While agreement isn’t universal, they share beliefs and work to complement each other well. So, for instance, if player development shows itself capable of improving a pitcher’s breaking ball? Then be mindful of that when acquiring or drafting pitchers.

For too long, such alignment was unattainable for the Mets. How can you align departments when the people running them change each season?

Tramuta, now in the Toronto Blue Jays’ front office, worked as the Mets’ scouting director for six years. During that time, the Mets had four different general managers, multiple farm directors and multiple pitching coordinators. Without knowing where player development excelled, the Mets couldn’t tailor their draft picks to any one strength. Consequently, when it came to drafting pitchers, they had several misses.

Although there’d be more turnover to come, some parts of the organization became more settled around 2021 when the Mets’ leaders of the amateur draft decided to change how they looked at pitching.

“I would criticize myself — I was scouting director — in previous years in the type of pitcher that we drafted,” Tramuta said. “Coming out of 2021, 2022, we just did a better job of drafting them and then lining it up with player development. That was a key starting in ‘21.”

There was another important change.

Back ahead of the 2018 draft, Drew Toussaint had studied how players drafted in rounds three through six had done in the major leagues. His conclusion? A Mets organization that had been praised for its early-round picks needed to do a better job capitalizing later in the draft.

A shift in strategy didn’t happen right away, not when the Mets built their 2019 draft around Matt Allan and saw the 2020 draft truncated to five rounds. Toussaint, now the Mets’ scouting director, continued to harp on that idea, though, especially in the meetings ahead of the 2021 draft. Given their fallow period of pitching development, the 2021 draft board offered ample opportunity.

“Certain drafts take on their own identity,” Tommy Tanous said. “That year in particular, after we set up the board, boy, there’s a lot of pitching here. And there was starting pitching in the college ranks that as the draft progressed stayed on that board.”

To outsiders, the 2021 draft for the Mets has long had a very specific identity: It’s the Kumar Rocker draft. It’s the draft that felt like a coup and turned into a catastrophe. Rocker, as well-known a college baseball pitcher as there’d been in years, somehow fell to the Mets at No. 10, and the Mets were ecstatic to take him. Until, that is, they saw his medical reports.

New York didn’t sign Rocker, losing the chance to use the money earmarked for him in the process. It was enough to overshadow the pitchers they’d actually landed — the pitchers who are giving the 2021 draft a different identity for the Mets these days.

Because that draft is when the Mets snagged Scott in the fifth round out of Florida, when they selected Calvin Ziegler in the second, Dallas Baptist’s Dom Hamel in the third, Virginia’s Mike Vasil in the eighth and Nate Lavender in the 14th. All of those pitchers have generated buzz in the Mets’ farm system. New York also turned later-round picks into major leaguers via trade: Keyshawn Askew went to Tampa Bay for Brooks Raley while Carson Seymour and Nick Zwack filled out the package to San Francisco for Darin Ruf.

That draft is when the Mets commenced the revival of their pitching pipeline.

“I’ll never forget that draft being like, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s still available in the second round? This guy’s in the third, this guy’s in the fourth?’” Tanous said. “It just fell that way.”

“Obviously,” Barningham said, “ that class has risen to the occasion.”

As much as the huge trades from last summer’s selloff brought headliners into the farm system, the drafts from 2021 and 2022 have supplied the Mets some depth in terms of prospects, providing a solid floor, particularly in terms of pitchers.

In 2022, the Mets drafted pitchers Blade Tidwell (second round) and Tyler Stuart (sixth round), and both are turning heads in Double A. Also in 2022, the Mets drafted Jonah Tong in the seventh round, and he’s yet to allow an earned run in 23 2/3 innings across both levels of Class A.

“I’m excited about what we’re building in this farm system,” owner Steve Cohen said in spring training. “We hadn’t developed pitching in a long time, and for the first time it looks like we have depth down there. To me, that’s exciting. Because pitching is so freaking expensive in baseball today.”

When Scott throws his first major-league pitch on Saturday, Updike, the scout who first saw him as a high schooler, will be in the crowd.

“There will probably be more people in the stands cheering for him than for Tampa Bay,” he quipped about the Florida native.

While neither he nor Tramuta work for the Mets anymore, they chatted on Thursday about the shared achievement of scouting and drafting Scott. Every major-league debut is a success story, and it’s a collective one shared by so many in an organization.

Presented with their recent failures three summers ago, the Mets focused on the opportunity then in front of them by a pitching-heavy draft. Their success that July has resonated into more opportunity. A more homegrown staff can change the way the Mets operate in free agency and where they spend their money. It can change the club’s path toward contending year after year. It can change the on-field results, here and now.

It starts with Scott on Saturday.

Opportunity is an amazing thing.

(Photo of Christian Scott from 2023: Gordon Donovan / NurPhoto via Associated Press)