Back in August of 2013, after he made his 10th start of the season, we ran a comparison of Zack Wheeler to what Matt Harvey had done in his first 10 starts in 2012. For fun, let’s throw Jacob deGrom into the mix and see how his numbers stack up to his more heralded teammates. [...]
The most interesting players are the ones where smart people can disagree. Perhaps no player on the current Mets fits this bill better than Zack Wheeler. On one hand, you have people who wonder what the fuss is since he consistently wields high pitch counts and has shown almost no ability to complete seven innings. [...]
Last August, the Mets began to play Matt den Dekker and Wilmer Flores on a regular basis. den Dekker had the larger part of a platoon in left while Flores essentially played every day, seeing time at shortstop and second base. The duo was more productive than anyone else the club trotted out during the [...]
To the chagrin of many, the Mets re-upped their Player Development Contract with Las Vegas, ensuring that their Triple-A team would remain in the Pacific Coast League city 2,524 miles away. While some fret about the distance between the two, the real reason so many are upset about this arrangement is that Cashman field is [...]
Heading into the offseason, the chorus that’s been beaten to death by pundits, fans, and pretty much everyone, is that the Mets need to upgrade at both shortstop and left field going into 2015 if they want to compete. The consensus seems to be that what the Mets got out of those two positions in [...]
Everyone’s an expert (or critic) after the fact. That’s why preseason projections are such a nice thing to have. Before the season started, the official Mets360 projection for Zack Wheeler was for a 3.48 ERA and a 3.68 FIP. Currently, he has numbers that are almost perfectly reversed, as he sports a 3.64 ERA and [...]
Throught the first 100 games of the season, the Mets pitching staff has a nearly identical Fielding Independent Pitching (3.77) as it did last year (3.79), but it's ERA has greatly improved (3.53 vs. 3.78). So with peripherals that indicate similar outcomes, the results have been much better this year. That 0.25 difference translates to [...]
The list of adjectives to describe outfielder Chris Young’s 2014 season is endless: awful; disappointing; miserable; painful; rage-inducing and sad. Underperforming expectations is more likely the phrase Mets ownership would use, and yet somehow it’s far too merciful. But negativity aside, what exactly is Young doing as a Met? The numbers expose some interesting trends [...]
Prior to the 2012 Draft, MLB instituted a new policy in how it handled the signing of amateur players selected in the June affair. With these new rules in place, it was hard to determine what the best strategy to employ was going to be. My preference would be to go above the slot recommendation [...]
There has been a lot of unrest by the fans towards Zack Wheeler so far here in 2014. Wheeler had the misfortune of being the Mets’ top prospect to follow directly after Matt Harvey and inevitably his production gets compared to Harvey’s and comes up short. Of course, even in a vacuum, Wheeler’s 4.31 ERA [...]
Two years ago, I wrote a piece about the Mets' 2011-12 offseason. If you've mentally blocked that offseason, it's the one that saw an historic nominal payroll reduction, with something in the neighborhood of $50M net coming off the books. The goal of that piece was to put that immense payroll decrease into perspective by [...]
Matt Harvey’s incredible leap forward last season have left Mets fans with perhaps an unrealistic bar with which to judge other pitching prospects by, namely Zack Wheeler, Noah Syndergaard and Rafael Montero. This, of course is not to say that this young trio of right-handed flamethrowers can’t develop into dominant starters in the near future. [...]