David Wright, Travis d’Arnaud, and quality of contact

The Mets’ offense, as a whole, has sputtered out of the gate. That’s no secret, and it’s been frustrating for fans as well as, apparently, Terry Collins. The poor performance has been a team effort, mostly, with a general failure to execute despite some pretty good individual starts to the season. In fact, the differences from the good starts to the poor starts are quite stark. More than half of the players with 10 or more plate appearances, an obviously ridiculously small sample (hey, it’s early), are hitting below average according to wRC+.

Two players on opposite ends of that spectrum in the Mets’ lineup are David Wright and Travis d’Arnaud. Why these two players? Well, because d’Arnaud was seen as an immensely important piece to the success of the 2016 team whereas the general feeling on Wright was “please don’t kill the team” and anything productive you may be able to get out of him was gravy. The other reason is that they’ve been performing at the ends of the spectrum that most probably weren’t expecting.

Through the first nine games of the season, Wright is slashing .276/.432./.379 with an OPS of .812 and a wRC+ of 132. That is fantastic, especially with all of the concerns about his health and limited playing time during Spring Training. You’d like to see more power there, sure, but he’s showing that he can still hang with the big guys. Then there’s poor d’Arnaud. He’s slashing .087/.222/.087 with an OPS of .309 and a wRC+ of 4. That’s a four, there, in case you feel like you misread that. Obviously averages don’t mean all that much this early on, but the overall production numbers for d’Arnaud and, really, the eye test, show a player who appears completely lost at the plate.

If we dig a little deeper we see some of the trouble signs that start to get at what is going wrong for the backstop in the early going. First, let’s take a quick look at the quality of contact stats so far for both players.

You can clearly see the very substantial differences in the quality of contact that these two players have been having so far this season. Note specifically how high d’Arnaud’s soft contact rate is not only compared to Wright, but to his career rate of 19.5%. We obviously need to be cautious here with the small sample and understand that these numbers themselves don’t tell the whole story. However, taking some other stats into account may aid us in understanding what exactly is happening, to an extent.

You may think that d’Arnaud is just swinging more at garbage pitches. Perhaps you think that he’s just simply missing a lot on swings to start the season. Those are not outlandish assumptions, but they’re wrong. He’s swinging at pitches outside of the zone at a rate (19.3%) much lower than his career average (26%), and his overall contact rate (83.3%) is higher than his career average (81%). Of course, his contact rate on those pitches outside the zone (72.7%) is a good bit higher than his career average (63.5%) as well, and making so much contact on those is probably not helping his situation.

Next, let’s zero in on the BABIP numbers for both of these guys. Wright has been abnormally “lucky,” with a BABIP of .421. Conversely, d’Arnaud has a BABIP at what seems to be an impossibly low .118. On the surface we can shrug and assume that the hits will just start falling in for d’Arnaud at some point. Bad luck is bad luck, right? Sure, sometimes, but in this case there appears to be an underlying issue contributing to what seems to be his hard luck.

Quality of contact itself doesn’t appear to have too much direct correlation with BABIP rates. Line drive rates, however, certainly do. While Wright has been rocking a 42.1% LD%, d’Arnaud sits at a paltry 17.6%. While d’Arnaud’s career LD% isn’t that much higher at 19.9%, the lower rate in combination with a higher than normal (for him) groundball rate and his quality of contact stats perhaps help us understand that incredibly low BABIP rate and, as a result, his tremendously poor results so far despite what appears to be a solid approach.

All this is to say that something is not right, obviously, but it’s not just simply a matter of him not seeing the ball well. His strikeout rate is a higher than his norm, sure, but he’s also walking at a much higher rate than he usually does as well. Keith Hernandez made an observation during last night’s game that d’Arnaud’s swing appears to be getting too long. If it truly is a mechanical issue, then hopefully it’s something that can be somewhat easily fixed. The team is going to need d’Arnaud to get back to 2015 levels if they hope to defend their NL East crown and, ultimately, finish what they started last season.