Two for Dorsia and Triple Digits: Meet Ryan Lambert the Mets’ Most Cinematic Reliever

There are certain moments in spring training when you stumble across a story you weren’t expecting. Maybe it’s a kid throwing 97 free and easy like he found it in the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, or maybe it’s just wandering past a locker when a glove catches your eye, covered in pop culture references that would make a film studies professor spill his latte.. That’s how I wound up talking pitching and psychological satire with Mets prospect Ryan Lambert, which is how you know baseball is back because only in February can a conversation drift from spin rate to cinema without anyone blinking.

Lambert, if you haven’t been keeping track, has been quietly carving(more on that later) through the minors like a man late for a meeting. Since turning pro, his ERA has lived in that rare neighborhood south of 1.80, and his strikeout to walk dominance has followed him at every stop. In 2025 he split time between Brooklyn and Binghamton, logging a combined 1.62 ERA across 50 innings with 81 strikeouts. In High A he punched out 17 in eight innings before heading up the ladder, and in Double A he held his own, finishing with a 1.71 mark in 39 appearances. Over his brief minor league career he’s posted a 1.53 ERA with 85 strikeouts in 53 innings, which is the kind of stat line that makes pitching coaches smile and opposing hitters consider alternative hobbies.

Ask him why it’s worked and he doesn’t start quoting biomechanics textbooks. He boils it down to mindset. “I attribute it to my professional mindset of just going one pitch at a time. Skip Johnson, my college coach who helped me out a lot, he instilled that in me and it keeps the laser focus on what’s the goal and that is one pitch at a time.”

Lambert’s path here wasn’t exactly a straight line. The Minnesota native bounced from junior college to Missouri State to Oklahoma, polished things off in the MLB Draft League, and the Mets grabbed him in the eighth round in 2024. The scouting card says fastball 70, slider 55, control 40, overall 40. The radar gun says something louder. His four seamer sits mid to upper 90s, occasionally flirting with triple digits, and it carries through the zone in a way that leaves hitters wondering if gravity took the day off.

When I mentioned the chatter about his so called rising fastball, he explained it with refreshing simplicity. “I think that’s just my high arm slot. I think I can spin the ball very well and I’ve always thrown hard as a kid and just being able to get on top of the baseball really, really helps get that vertical break, that ride.”

His secondary pitch is a slider thrown with authority and evolving shape. “Yeah, I think this offseason I refined it a lot by keeping a curveball mentality with it to get a more up and down type of shape with it. The velocity, yeah, just I like to think to throw it like a fastball and what’s really helping me is keeping it below the zone, kind of keep it middle down, that helps.”

Like most young relievers with power stuff, the strike zone sometimes demands negotiation. Lambert knows it. “I think if I just throw strikes too, that’ll help a lot. I think I got good stuff and if I just have confidence to put it in the zone, I’ll be good.” He’s working on adding a changeup and soaking up advice wherever he can. “Brooks Raley, he’s helped out a lot. He’s given me some good insight. He’s just a really personable guy, good dude to bounce some ideas off of. He’s given me some great advice.”

Up to this point, it’s the profile of a promising late inning arm. Then we get to the glove, which deserves its own press credential. Inside Lambert’s mitt are references to American Psycho, the cult classic directed by Mary Harron and starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman. The film, adapted from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, blends satire and dark comedy in ways that likely never crossed anyone’s mind when 44 Pro Gloves began making customizable mitts designed to show off personal style instead of cinematic homicidal symbolism.

What first caught my eye wasn’t subtle. Stitched into the glove was the phrase Two for Dorsia, a nod to Bateman’s obsession with exclusive reservations, along with a decidedly theatrical bloody knife graphic. This is not your standard motivational quote about grinding and believing. This is a cinematic Easter egg hunt.

Lambert embraces the connection with the enthusiasm of a guy who could easily host a viral movie podcast between appearances. “I watched the movie and I couldn’t quite figure out what everything meant, so I watched it again and again and again, and I was just fascinated by it. And I just, there were some funny moments in that movie. It’s, there’s a lot of dark humor and my college teammate Michael Snyder, we’d make a bunch of jokes about like when they’re handing out their business cards and they’re just like sweating bullets, like nervous who’s got the best one. So I don’t know, there’s a lot of funny references in that movie and we were always like, where’s Paul Allen?”

He even sees a competitive parallel between Bateman’s hyper focused mentality and pitching. “I guess his mentality is kind of killer like and I share that killer mentality on the mound.”

Naturally, I had to ask the philosophical question that has fueled dorm room debates for decades. Is Paul Allen alive ? His answer came quickly. “I personally think he is alive. I think Bateman was in an illusion, kind of. I think, well, it honestly depends on how you viewed the movie. That’s what’s awesome about it.”

Let me pause here to editorialize, which at my age is less a choice and more a reflex. I’m already a huge fan of Lambert’s arm, but after spending time talking movies with him I’m convinced the kid should start a podcast breaking down films. He’s a natural conversationalist, he’s got enthusiasm that could power a small city, and frankly I’d subscribe yesterday just to hear him debate ambiguous endings between bullpen sessions.

Looking ahead, his goals remain grounded. “Just being a good teammate and refining my third pitch with a changeup.” And as camp rolls on he’s focused on building forward. “Yeah, I think a lot of it’s just kind of rolling what I had last year from a pitch perspective.”

That’s really the joy of spring training. It’s the time of year when you can step away from the spreadsheets, spin rates, and projection models long enough to actually meet the people behind the numbers. Over the course of a season we can drown in analytics and scouting grades and forget that personalities are what make this game worth covering in the first place. Camp gives you the chance to wander past a locker, strike up a conversation, and discover that the kid lighting up radar guns also has a sense of humor, a curiosity, and a perspective you never would’ve pulled out of a stat line.

Lambert brings a blazing fastball, a developing arsenal, an analytical curiosity about his craft, and a glove that tips its cap to satirical horror cinema. Somewhere between the strikeouts and the satire is a reliever with legitimate late inning upside and a personality that reminds you baseball clubhouses remain gloriously unpredictable ecosystems. One minute you’re talking vertical break and command, the next you’re debating movie interpretations and dinner reservations at fictional restaurants. That’s spring training at its best. It’s not just evaluation season. It’s discovery season.

If he keeps pitching like this, Mets fans may soon discover the only real horror scenario is being the hitter digging in against him. And if he ever launches that movie podcast, make it Two for Dorsia, because I’ll already have my reservation. Who knows, maybe one day he’ll jog in from the bullpen to the unmistakable beat of Hip to Be Square by Huey Lewis & The News, the same track immortalized in that infamous scene from American Psycho. At that point, hitters might consider asking for the check before the first pitch is even thrown.

Watch full interview here