News flash: the Mets are eleven games under the .500 mark. A lot has been written and a number of fingers have been pointed as to why. We can look at the failures of Ike Davis, Ruben Tejada and any one of about five or six minor-league outfielders to develop. We can blame a porous bullpen. We can blame a lack of focus on defense. We can blame poor roster construction on the part of Sandy Alderson and in-game gaffes on the part of Terry Collins. We can blame a dearth of baseball smarts in general.
One aspect which should emerge unscathed, generally, is the starting rotation. There really isn’t any way to lay blame for this benighted season at their feet. Matt Harvey, of course, has been the bright spot for the season, his last start notwithstanding. Jonathon Niese, despite his recent shoulder scare, is reestablishing himself as a Quality Start machine. Jeremy Hefner and Dillon Gee have been opening eyes with the quality of their work and making a difficult decision out of “who should go to the bullpen,” when Zack Wheeler arrives in the next couple of weeks. Finally Shaun Marcum has repeated exemplified how useless a stat wins are for a pitcher, seeing as he has none, but has a serviceable WHIP of 1.366 and a nearly four-to-one strikeout to walk ratio. The starting pitching has been as advertised. The problem is that for all their good work, they’re getting no support from either the bullpen or the offense. Especially the offense.
For a veteran Met-watcher such as your intrepid columnist, the view is eerily familiar. This is same bugaboo that doomed the mid-70’s Mets to several lifetimes of mediocrity. There are even a couple of parallels pitcher-for-pitcher. Harvey is taking the Tom Seaver comparisons right down to the passel of no-decisions he’s received from having just enough offensive support to take him off the hook in most games. The lefty Niese slots nicely into the Jerry Koosman role, with just about the same assortment of off-speed stuff to keep an opposing offense off-balance. The comparisons for the rest of the group are a little sketchy – no one in the present rotation can compare to prime-time Jon Matlack, for example – but the frustrating results have more than tinge of “Big Hair And Plastic Grass” to them. Let’s take a prime year, right in the middle: 1975.
’75 was the year Seaver won his well-deserved third Cy Young Award: 22 wins, a 2.38 ERA, a 1.088 WHIP and an ERA+ of 146. Matlack backed him up with a 3.38 ERA and a 1.233 WHIP. Koosman, in an admittedly off-year, sported a 3.42 ERA and a 1.385 WHIP. The rest of the staff – consisting of Hank Webb, Randy Tate and an occasional George Stone – held their own, sort of, posting an ERA of 4.42. So why did the Mets go 82-80? The team had a barely-replacement level OPS+ of 99. Yes, Rusty Staub set a then-club-record with 105 RBI and Dave Kingman hit 36 homers, but that was it. Their team OPS was an eighth-in-the-NL .681 – the only teams worse being the pathetic Padres, Expos, Astros & Braves, each of whom posted 87 or more losses.
Look familiar?
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1975, where Seaver, Koosman and Matlack went a combined 52-34 and no other pitcher won more than seven games. If only George Stone hadn’t gotten hurt or if Craig Swan had been ready how different things might have been. If nothing else the Mets wouldn’t have looked to solidify the back of the rotation by trading for Mickey Lolich…
1975 was the year I clocked in. I didn’t know that much about baseball, but even I could tell this team couldn’t hit. Kong set the HR record and Staub the RBI mark–so they trade Rusty for yet more pitching (actually it was because Rusty was going to be a 10-and-5 man and could veto any trade). If you look at the ’76 Mets, they had arguably the best staff in baseball but never competed because they couldn’t hit. But it ’76 looked like brigadoon when ’77 rolled around and sucked the color out of the picture.