After an impressive 4-1 win over the Phillies Friday night with the aid of 15 strikeouts from the pitching staff, the Mets have now won three games straight. A tumultuous home stand cost batting coach Dave Hudgens his job and the fans, media, and more importantly the front office are starting to question the Mets’ direction. Although the offense has sputtered despite the recent win streak, the law of averages say this team will score more runs…if you believe in the kind of stuff.
Entering last night’s game, the Mets offense ranked eighth in the National League in Runs and OBP, twelfth in BA and SOs, and last in SLG. As discouraging as those stats may be, the Mets lead the NL in walks, a statistic valued by the front office and many subscribers to the organizational model. The Mets’ lack of power thus far has sabotaged those theoretical run strategies prompting many stalled scoring chances.
Granted, everyone knew this team was built around pitching, but the offense has still been frustrating beyond expectations. The team consistently mounts “rallies” by getting multiple runners on base only to fail in situational hitting tasked with driving those runners in. The most glaring statistic is their home BA, a putrid .212. This team just cannot score runs at home and it’s been a disturbing trend since they moved into Citi Field. So why should we believe this offense can succeed despite these failures?
If this team continues to reach base at this rate via the walk, sooner or later the hits will come to aid in more runs. That’s the creed the organization is preaching on each level with the hope of maximizing the value of an at-bat. Though the run totals are middle of the pack in respect to the rest of the league, there are signs this lineup will perk up in the coming weeks.
Daniel Murphy and David Wright were the tied for second in the NL league in hits going into last night’s game and the rest of the lineup is trending towards breaking out. Juan Lagares has solidified the leadoff spot by consistently hitting to go along with his stellar defense. Curtis Granderson despite his .202 BA is batting .273 in May with a .890 OPS. The lineup has also been getting encouraging contributions from Bobby Abreu and Eric Campbell off the bench in spot starts. The offense has left an alarming amount of men on base recently, but if they continue to work good at bats, the results should come,theoretically at least. The way the starting staff has thrived andwith the new found mojo of the bullpen led by Jenrry Mejia, the offense just needs to cash in on opportunities situationally. They are now 6-47 with the bases loaded for the year, and their ability to get runners home from third with less than 2 outs has been lacking. An upswing is imminent, even the most pessimistic fan could sense it. The Mets have a .333 SLG at Citi Field, an anemic number; it’s unfathomable to think that number will notrise? It has to! Right? The Law of Averages says it should, at least in respect to MLB caliber batters.
Ruben Tejada, Lucas Duda, and Travis d’Arnaud will be the keys going forward if this lineup is going to show depth and threaten to score more runs to support their upstart pitchingstaff. Duda has shown power but inconsistency thus far and d’Arnaud just hasn’t gotten into a hitting groove yet, even before his concussion occurred. Tejada has shown signs lately, but Wilmer Flores is threatening him for playing time. Perhaps competition will bring out the best in both shortstops giving the Mets a much needed lift.
With Murphy, Wright, Granderson, and Lagares showing consistency, the supporting cast needs to pitch in when situational hitting dictates it. The San Francisco Giants won two titles in 2010 and 2012 based on starting pitching, defense, and situational hitting: a recipe for success. The Mets can match that model, but they will have to hit better in the clutch and fast. They are currently 6-13 in one run games which is unacceptable if this team will entertain the notion of competing. As the rest of the NL East continues to teeter around mediocrity, it’s crazy to think that a few extra clutch hits on this last homestand could’ve had the Mets in first place as early as this weekend. If they keep drawing those walks, stay the approach, and start driving the ball at home..Who’s to say first place is such a far off destination.
The statistic you gave are interesting but very misleading. It’s like how politicians manipulate stats, to prove a false point. In sports the only real statistic that counts is the won/lost record. Statistics can be used to show how we get results. I watched last night’s game, was happy the Mets won. The 15 strikeout by the pitching staff was inspiring. Yet there were signs of the same, illness, that has plagued this team for the past 4 years of Alderson’s tenure as GM. Leaving runners on base. Seeing Lucas Duda strike out with the bases load on two awful pitches. Why was Chris Young playing even though he finally got, two hits, including a 3 run homer. Where has Matt denDeckker? Why bring him up if your still going to start Chris Young? Chris Youngs offensive stats are awful, and reflect his play. He defense is sloppy, and I’m not sure are are reflected in his stat’s. Good bye, Hudgens, your history. Hopefully the Mets start giving there pitchers the offensive support they deserve for their terrific performances.
“In sports the only real statistic that counts is won/lost record.”
I couldn’t disagree more. All won/lost record tells you is how the team performed in the past. It tells you absolutely nothing about what you can expect the team to do the rest of the way.
Wow. Truly bizarre. First, ALL stats only tell you what happened in the past.
And it’s emblematic of what was wrong with Hudgens, and the vaunted “approach”. They seem to lack the ability to actually judge talent, relying on numbers, not their eyes.
A perfect example is the absurdity surrounding Ike Davis. No self respecting organization would have allowed a young player to go through that many stances and it showed a shocking lack of ability to understand the mechanics of a swing.
And yes, the ONLY stats that ulitmately matter is W-L despite the bizarre comment.
I’ve noticed a change in how guys are approaching at-bats under Lamar. Not just first pitch swinging, but in a looser attitude. Maybe it’s just something I want to see and isn’t really there. But the Mets keep putting men on base, and as Sean points out, the law of averages, not wishful thinking, dictates the Mets can’t keep failing at driving those numbers in. That doesn’t seem like data manipulation to me, but instead trusting the numbers to equalize for the season. It happens all the time for teams when they get hot. I doubt Chris Young will keep starting if he’s hitting under .200 by mid-June. Shortstop will either solve itself, or we’ll get good production from both, warranting the committee. The Mets are making painfully slow positive progress, but it’s progress.
I would be careful about a law of averages approach about Mets batters driving in runners. That in and of itself is not a guarantee. If the hitters aren’t good, then the runs won’t just appear. There is obviously a break down with bases loaded. We are now at something like 0/10 (excluding the Grandy walk). You’d think we already would have reached a law of averages working by now!
How bout this for the law of averages. ..pitchers start out, what, 0-64, and since degrom came up they are like 9-30.
The author makes the comparison to a team stocked with starting pitching, defense and timely hitting.
Unfortunately, we fail at two of the three. Our defense at SS is less than league average and simply will not improve. Same at catcher, and it appears as if we will continue to give appearances in the OF to Bobby Abreu. Daniel Murphy tries hard, but he’s average. Lucas Duda – if anyone watched the two error game by David Wright – realizes that man is butcher.
Situational hitting starts with having pretty fair to good hitters to begin with. We start sub par hitters at SS, C, 1B (for position), and right now believe or not at 3B. Typically we have a horrible LFer.
I’m not prone to getting excited about the next dozen games or so, just like I understood a series against CO and NYY didn’t mean that our hitting was improving (see: Young, Chris) or that our pitching (see: Colon, Bartolo) tanked.
David Wright back to his normal self and is raking in May.
.339/.377/.496
So which is more important …
his first month (.262/.314/.318)
his last five games (.200/.273/.350)
Watching David’s at bats, I don’t see an 873 OPS guy … mostly because I don’t think he can sustain a .409 BABIP.
That said, I agree – he is considerably better in May and I gave him less than he deserved. He should continue to fatten up his numbers over the next two weeks.
While his BABIP is uber high and likely to regress, he does have one area which he can still improve statistically this year and that is his walks. He is having an astonishingly low walk rate this year. His career walk rate is 11.1% and currently he has a 5.8% rate this year.
I’m not sure why. The “protection argument” doesn’t work because he had 7 walks in April when Granny was an automatic out and still just 7 walks in May when Granny has been hitting well. I guess because he’s still not hitting for much power overall pitchers aren’t respecting him? Hopefully he can figure it out because it’s doubtful his high avg/babip can sustain him all year. He’s going to need to rediscover walking again if he wants to keep to get to an 800+ OPS.
Granderson upticking for a month is not “protection”. Just go back and look at Wright when he was backed up by Beltran/Delgado. THAT’s what happens when you see a steady diet of strikes.
In addition, since his beaning, D Wright has bee susceptible to anything in.
The “protection argument” doesn’t work because it doesn’t exist.
From JC Bradbury:
“Using Retrosheet event files we were able to estimate the impact of every on-deck hitter on the current hitter from 1984-1992. The play-by-play data allowed us to control for the game situation during every plate appearance.
snip
“The results lead us to not only reject the protection hypothesis, but also we find evidence that good on-deck hitters actually harm the hit and power probabilities of the current batter. This is consistent with the effort hypothesis. However, the magnitude of the spillover is tiny and for all practical purposes the effect is zero.”
http://www.sabernomics.com/sabernomics/index.php/2004/09/the-protection-externality-it-doesnt-exist/
I’ll agree with most of what you said, but aside from the 2 error game the other night (errors on Wright, by the way), Duda has passed the eye test as far as defense at first. We have no gold glovers on the team aside from Lagares, that’s for sure. I also don’t know how you can lump Wright in with the other sub-par hitters when he’s 2nd in the league in hits, batting nearly .500 vs lefties, and has looked much better of late in regards to laying off the outside slider. He’s started slow, but is now striking out much less, taking some more walks, and will likely finish the year at his career averages.
Here’s hoping our record gets healthier against the Phils and Cubs, and then confidence and delusion takes over in San Francisco.
Did you see the game? Duda should have easily picked up both those balls. Easily – a high school first baseman scoops up those throws.
And in fact, both balls were in time to get the runner.
I did, and I agree. But as I said – aside from those two – he has passed the eye test in you know….all the other games he’s played. His offense, now that is a different story.
I love how people continue to think that the SP has been good. It hasn’t.
SP is 9th in the NL in ERA, and when adjusted for park factors, they are probably lower.
Stop buying the hype, wake up and stop blaming the offense. Even though this team is “built” on pitching, it hasn’t even come close to living up to its billing yet and is the main reason for the teams non-success.
I believe I saw this stat yesterday – it may be off by a game or two, but when we score 4 runs or more we are 22-8. 3 runs or less and we are 3-20.
Seems to me the starting pitching has been mostly good, but the high era is a result of a few REALLY bad games (Colorado, Colon in Anaheim), and a few starts by Meija ruined by 1 REALLY bad inning. Wheeler’s FIP is almost a full run lower than his ERA. And the bullpen has pitched around a 2.50 ERA over their last 70 innings, and the primary culprit (Valverde) is now gone. Scott Rice still has a terrible looking ERA but most of that happened the first weekend of the season, and when he only pitches a third of an inning per game, it will take a while to come down. Otherwise, Niese, Gee, Colon in 70 percent of his starts, Dice K, Torres, and recently Wheeler, Meija, Familia, and Edgin have all performed very well. Degrom has looked terrific. I will agree though, that they have not been as dominant as needed to cover the offensive shortfalls. But when you look at our normal lineup and see no one over .240 after Wright, you can’t blame it on pitching.
Those stats you cite actually work in favor of my argument.
Mets score 4+ 60.4% of the time. NL average scores 4+ 51.1% of the time.
Mets score <4 39.6% of the time. NL average scores <4 49% of the time.
Mets are 23-9(71.9%) when scoring 4+ runs.
NL average is 311-97(76.3%) when scoring 4+ runs.
Mets are 3-20(13%) when scoring <4 runs.
NL average is 84-306(21.5%) when scoring <4 runs.
So the Mets are scoring more 4+ more than the average team, yet are winning less of those games. That must mean the pitching is not doing its job.
I'm not saying that the offense has been great or even good (in truth they've been average), but the overall pitching has been bad to not good at best. FIP isn't very useful when we're talking about ~10 game sample sizes.
Not sure about this. The first 10 games of the season, we scored 4 or more four times (including scoring 7 on opening day). We won 2 and lost 2. Yet we scored 3 or fewer 6 times and went 2-4 in those games. Meaning in games we scored runs, often the pitching was weak, and in games the pitching was strong, we often didn’t score. I would take this to mean that it takes both offense and pitching or at least situational offense and good pitching to be working together for successful baseball.
But as with a lot of things in Baseball – the eye test is simply that the offense has been behind the pitching, for the most part – and especially of late since the pitching has vastly improved over even the last week.
You’re right that the offense and pitching don’t ever mesh at the same time. The offense is terrible at home and really good away while the pitching is OK at home and bad on the road. That has led to a lot of the close game losses.
“the eye test is simply that the offense has been behind the pitching, for the most part”
This is not the eye test, but rather our selective memory that prevents us from seeing the truth. It is one of the biggest human flaws.
Case in point, yesterday in the Game Chatters, someone said that Daniel Murphy was struggling, when in fact Daniel Murphy was 10 for his last 24 and had a 6 game hitting streak. Selective memory at its finest.
Go with the stats every time over your brain, they don’t deceive.
Yeah, regression to a mean is a beautiful thing. The main problem with the Mets hitting woes is their lineup is just not very good. Something about the ownership not loosening up the purse strings.
Tend to agree with Name on this one. FIP/xFIP – depending on the IP filter – shows us as having somewhere between 1 and 3 of the top 30 pitchers in the NL. Mostly, that’s because of the last two starts by Wheeler and Colon, otherwise it would be only Niese.
(Dillon Gee, btw, is exposed for what I believe he will turn out to be – a relatively average pitcher. Honestly. Since 2013, he pitches to a 4+ FIP/xFIP. As soon as the guy is tradeable, you’ve got to pull that cord).
Like so many things (Wright, for example), this will have to wait and see.
Pipe dream to think Mets will make playoffs. I have been Met fan since 1962. But u can’t win with a triple a catcher. Starting players 200 avg or less granderson d Arnoud young Tehada. Lucas duda inconsistent they could have Nelson Cruz. Kept marlin Byrd. Hawkins Aron Harang.