Despite getting off to a bit of an uneven start in his Mets tenure, Joey Lucchesi was starting to settle in nicely as a member of the Mets rotation. He emerged as a solid end-of-rotation option and was pitching some of the best baseball of his career before it was revealed he would need Tommy John surgery that ended his year on the mound.
He finished the abbreviated season with a 4.46 ERA, which is a bit misleading since most of the damage came early in the year. In his last five starts of the 2021 season he gave up a total of three earned runs, with the caveat that then-manager Luis Rojas was very careful limiting his innings.