If you ask most National League lefty batters which southpaw they hate to face in the late innings, undoubtedly most would say Aroldis Chapman of the Reds, who has limited LHB to a .367 OPS while recording an 8.67 K/BB ratio. But the Mets have quite a weapon of their own to neutralize big lefty batters late in the game in Tim Byrdak. Last year Byrdak limited lefties to a .604 OPS but this year he’s been much, much better.
In 52 PA versus lefties, Byrdak has a .116/.200/.186 line for a .386 OPS. Only one lefty – Todd Helton – has an extra-base hit against him this season. He has notched 19 Ks against LHB this year for a 36.5 K%. Like last year, Terry Collins is finessing things so that the vast majority of Byrdak’s PA come against lefties. So far, 66 percent of Byrdak’s work has come versus LHP.
It’s hard to imagine Byrdak pitching any better than he has in 2012. As always, the question becomes if his need to be micro-managed outweighs his dominance when he does pitch. A team with a deep bullpen would be thrilled to have Byrdak. But right now the 2012 Mets are not that team.
Everyone agrees that Manny Acosta was horrible in 2012. But what if Acosta was used like Byrdak, where he only faced a couple of batters per game? In April, opposing batters hit .311 and had a .984 OPS against Acosta, who finished the month with a 9.00 ERA. But if we made it so that he never pitched to more than four batters in an appearance, opposing batters would have gone 5-24 (.208 AVG). Depending how the relievers that followed him did, he could have ended the month with a 0.00 ERA. And that’s without trying to make sure he had the platoon advantage 2/3 of the time.
Byrdak has been absolutely terrific in his role. But his role is so tiny, and so strictly defined, that even a pitcher that passed through waivers unclaimed like Acosta would perform well if micro-managed to a remotely similar level. Hopefully the rest of the bullpen can improve going forward so that the Mets can afford to carry Byrdak.
TORRES WALKS IT OUT – Coming into the season, Mets fans had no idea what to expect offensively from Andres Torres. Would he be the guy who posted an .823 OPS in 2010 or the one who recorded a .643 mark in 2011? Unfortunately it’s been the latter. The one encouraging thing has been his ability to take a walk. Torres has a career-high 15.1 BB%. Hopefully he can maintain that output while increasing his BABIP, which currently sits at .265, 37 points beneath his career average.
DICKEY THE INNINGS EATER – So much has been said about the terrific season of R.A. Dickey that one thing is getting lost in the shuffle. According to ESPN, Dickey is on pace to finish the season with 221.0 IP. That would be the most by a Mets pitcher since Johan Santana hurled 234.0 IP in 2008 and the sixth-most since 1990. Frank Viola threw a league-leading 249.2 IP in 1990 for the top mark for the Mets in the past 22 years.
QUIT JOSHING ME – In Wednesday’s blowout win over the Cubs, Josh Thole stroked a double, breaking a streak of 33 PA without an extra-base hit. Since returning from his concussion, Thole has just 2 XBH in 80 PA. Before the injury, he had 5 XBH in 92 PA.
CHECKING IN ON THE OLD RUN DIFFERENTIAL – Fueled by Wednesday’s blowout win, the Mets now have scored 13 more runs than they have given up. Their Pythagorean Record now sits at 40-37, just one game off their actual mark of 41-36. Yesterday’s one-run win gives the Mets an 11-10 record in the closest games. More importantly, they are now 14-12 in blowouts, which is much more indicative of a team’s true talent level. Since May 25th, the Mets are 10-2 in games decided by five or more runs.
STARTERS HAVE BEEN TERRIFIC – While everyone focuses on how bad the bullpen is, what flies under the radar a bit is how good the rotation has been. And if we look at defense independent numbers, the starters have been even better. Among qualified starters in MLB, the Mets have four of the top 41 pitchers by xFIP. Dickey is third with a 2.86 xFIP, Jonathon Niese ranks 14th (3.37), Dillon Gee is closely behind in 18th (3.41) while Santana is 41st (3.77). Chris Young has a strong ERA (3.30) but his xFIP checks in at 5.31 thanks to an extremely low 1.8 HR/FB rate.
WRIGHT’S RECORD-SETTING NIGHT – In Thursday’s win over the Dodgers, David Wright became the franchise’s all-time leader in walks when he drew his 581st base on balls. Wright moved passed Darryl Strawberry, who drew 580 BB in 4,549 PA. Wright has 150 more PA than Strawberry did for the Mets. Wright also homered in last night’s game, moving him into a tie with Howard Johnson for third place on the team’s all-time HR list with 192. Wright is 60 homers behind Strawberry for the franchise lead in HR.
Brian, that’s an interesting thought on micro-managing. I am assuming that the traditional thinking on micro-managing a lefty is that most teams have more right-handed batters, thus you save your southpaw for the few left-handed hitters. It would be more difficult to micro-manage a righty because of the supposedly larger number of right-handed bats.
Micro-managing your bullpen becomes more important as the over all quality of your relievers is not very good. Thus……Tim Byrdak!
I dunno. With more RHB, it should be *easier* to manipulate the matchups to get your righty reliever to face RHB.
As for micro-managing becoming more important when the relievers are poor, I could see that. But I’m not sure why it’s important for one guy (Byrdak) and no one else. Every other reliever on the team is expected to go 1.0 IP (or more) each time out.
Maybe, by micro-managing your only (for most of the season) southpaw you are able to use him almost every day. If he pitched to more batters each appearance he wouldn’t be as available when you needed a lefty.
We saw Collins do exactly that earlier in the year and then back away from it. Not sure how many appearances – somewhere around a dozen – where Byrdak was used every day for exactly one batter. But recently he’s been used for 2 or 3 batters and not as often.
Everything’s a trade-off, I guess.
I’ve never been a fan of Collin’s bullpen usage. Recently, he hasn’t been using Byrdak because he wants to “save” him for later innings.
He is probably responsible for Acosta being so bad(leaving in him too long).
The only positive i can say about him is sticking with Franky frank as the closer all season.
The bullpen is in desperate straits with only Parnell and Byrdak the only relievers with above avg ERA. Byrdak does need to start pitching the whole 8th while Parnell closes because his OPS vs righties is .598 which is the same as Rauch,better than Batista at .733 and a little worse than Ramirez .574. In regard to Wright, hopefully he will beat Kid Kranepool for the most games played. The RH bat that is on the trade deadline wish list should be a catcher since Thole/Nickeas is pretty much a platoon. Maldonado or LuCroy in Milwaulkee would be a start.
Byrdak has done well against RHB this year but I have no doubt that’s a small sample size issue. Collins needs to continue to have Brydak face lefties the majority of the time or else his numbers will plummet.
I still see Ramon Ramirez returning to form being a key to the bullpen’s success.