Carson Wiggins went No. 27 overall to the Mets out of Arkansas, and on paper that's the kind of pick that makes scouts drool and accountants nervous. He's 6-foot-5, he sits high-90s, he's touched 102, and his slider reportedly makes hitters look silly. The catch: he hasn't pitched an inning since tearing his UCL as a freshman and going under the knife for internal brace surgery, which means the Mets just wrote a franchise-record-for-the-pick check for a guy who's spent the entire 2026 season in a sling instead of a bullpen.
Jim Callis broke the signing details, framing Wiggins as the best pure arm talent in the entire draft class.
According to Jim Callis, the deal is full slot value at $3,466,500 for pick 27, no discount, no games played over signability. That's notable because teams routinely nickel-and-dime injured or rehabbing prospects to save bonus pool money for later rounds. The Mets didn't blink.
The injury track record here is real and well-documented. Wiggins tore his elbow as a true freshman at Arkansas in 2025, needed Tommy John with an internal brace, and never took the mound in 2026 while he rehabbed. Before it happened, he'd flashed serious stuff out of the Razorbacks' bullpen: 14 innings, 20 strikeouts, and a fastball that averaged around 99 mph and topped out at 102. That track record, brief as it was, is basically the entire case for the pick.
There's also a pedigree angle worth knowing: Wiggins' older brother Jaxon is a Top 100 prospect in the Cubs system who himself sits triple digits, so hard-throwing bloodlines run in the family. The Mets clearly banked on the arm talent translating even with the medical file attached, and they got enough in-person conviction to hand over full slot instead of negotiating a hometown discount.
The fact that Wiggins was able to throw at the pre-draft Combine at all was apparently enough to settle nerves. It's a small sample against a huge injury risk, but for a franchise trying to restock a pitching pipeline that's been thin on true power arms, betting on upside now and waiting on results later is a defensible trade-off. New York won't get a look at what they actually bought until 2027 at the earliest, and the whole equation hinges on the elbow holding up.
For now this is a pure development story, not a big-league one. Wiggins won't sniff a mound in a Mets uniform this year, and the organization will spend all of 2026 just getting him built back up in extended spring and instructs. But if the arm comes back the way it looked before the surgery, this ends up looking like one of the best value grabs of the whole draft rather than a reach on a rehab project.