Williams not sweating early miscue as he develops new pitches

JUPITER, Fla. -- Devin Williams will try to flush his first pitch as a Met and remember all the rest instead.

Making his Mets debut in the team’s 14-3 win over the Cardinals on Friday, Williams served up a first-pitch homer to JJ Wetherholt on what manager Carlos Mendoza called a “cutter that didn’t cut much.” That’s notable for Williams, who is working on adding a cutter and slider to his arsenal after spending the first seven years of his career almost exclusively as a fastball-changeup artist.

But Williams also isn’t going to sweat a single cutter gone awry.

“That one specifically, I was just trying to throw a strike and he jumped on it,” Williams said. “I kind of babied it, trying to just throw it over the plate. He wasn’t giving me strike one.”

Although Williams has toyed with variations of a cutter and a slider for years, he has thrown his fastball and changeup more than 96.5 percent of the time every season. This spring, Williams is making more of a concerted effort to develop the cutter and slider into weapons he can use more consistently to jam left-handed hitters or get righties to chase.

“I think it’s more of a luxury,” Mendoza said. “He’s been pretty elite with the fastball-changeup combo. And now adding that cutter/slider, it’s going to get hitters away from sitting on just one particular pitch. That changeup’s elite, but something that goes into lefties, away from righties, and not so much up and down, is important.”

After Wetherholt’s homer, Williams retired the next three batters on just eight pitches, throwing one additional cutter along the way. He’ll have plenty more chances to test the pitch as the Grapefruit League season progresses.

“This being my first [outing], it was kind of just fill up the strike zone with everything,” Williams said, “and not really worry about results.”

Williams, who is set to replace Edwin Díaz as the Mets’ closer, came to the team this offseason on a three-year, $51 million free-agent contract.