Many of the Mets360 readers participate in Fantasy Baseball Leagues. Others like yours truly are active in Strat-O-Matic. And then there’s Sandy Alderson and his subordinates who are running the New York Mets. What we all have in common in building our respective teams is the knowledge that a team has its strengths and its weaknesses. The key to success is to have the strengths be more numerous and influential than the weaknesses.
It is bad enough to have a team’s weaknesses bring it down. It is worse still when the team’s strengths become a weakness.
Before the 2016 season began it was pretty clear that the Mets had as its number one strength young talented starting pitching. Its secondary strength was its dominant hitter, free agent acquisition Yoenis Cespedes. The team also looked strong at catcher where Travis d’Arnaud looked to have all the tools necessary to be an above average receiver. And even his Achilles Heel (pun not intended but somewhat appropriate) was his propensity for being injured. But even that could be handled since young catcher Kevin Plawecki looked like he could satisfactorily handle the job if d’Arnaud needed his annual visits to the disabled list.
So now we’re about 100 games into the 162 game season and the wheels seem to be falling off.
Here’s a short clip from an article this writer wrote this past March entitled “What could go wrong?”:
The Mets though are in a situation where there are five or six guys who are critical to their success. While perhaps being able to cover for one of them is feasible it probably will be fatal to lose more than one.
Four of them are the young starters Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, and Steven Matz. It is quite probable that if they combine for 110 or more starts the club will be on track to go to the playoffs and quite possibly as repeat NL champs. But the club lost Harvey for all of 2014 and lost Zack Wheeler for all of 2015. Pitchers get hurt. That’s an absolute truism in baseball.
We all realize that some vicious swing by David Wright could end his season, perhaps his career.
We have already seen Matt Harvey go down for the season. Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz are pitching well despite bone spurs in their pitching elbow. Zach Wheeler has had some setbacks in his rehab. Yes, pitchers get hurt. The 2016 Mets were going to live or die on the health and talent of their starting pitching and so it is coming to pass.
It’s risky to make pitching the cornerstone of a team. We just saw Mike Piazza go into the Hall of Fame and have his number retired by the Mets. We haven’t seen and never will see any members of Generation K go to Cooperstown. Bill Pulsipher, Jason Isringhausen, and Paul Wilson were going to make the Mets of the mid 1990s something special They didn’t and the team wasn’t. Only Izzie had a decent major league career and that was done after he became a reliever.
On December 17th, 2012 Travis d’Arnaud became a Met and immediately was dubbed the “Mets catcher of the future” as part of the deal sending R.A. Dickey to Toronto. He was a can’t miss prospect with adequate catching skills and a vibrant bat.
Jump ahead to the present and d’Arnaud headed into the Yankees series with a .239 batting average (.290 OBP, .321 slug%) and 611 OPS. He was supposedly offered straight up to Milwaukee for Jonathan Lucroy. The Brewers response was “ptooey.” Then the Mets (according to the rumor mill) added Brandon Nimmo and likely a prospect to the offer and the Brewers still passed.
It is safe to say that Travis d’Arnaud can no longer be considered the undisputed Mets catcher of the future, let alone the present.
The reason this Mets team will likely be on the outside looking in when the playoffs roll around is because the weaknesses remained weak (defense, team speed, fundamentals) while the strengths did not come close to covering for them.
I still like d’Arnaud and consider him an asset.
Catching is a tough position, a grind, and it takes a toll on a player’s offensive output. Guys like Piazza are such outliers.
Yes, Travis has struggled in uneven playing time, due to his injuries. And yes, that’s a real concern. Also, he’s the kind of hitter who loses his swing for periods at a time. That’s just the way he is, another streaky hitter.
Terry Collins has buried Travis in the 8-hole for much of his games, and he is simply not suited to that role. He’s a grip-it-and-rip-it type hitter. The disturbing thing to me is that it seems to demonstrate that Collins doesn’t understand the player, and because of that fails to put him in optimal spots for best performance. To my eyes, it’s clear that he’s a hitter. There’s talent there, bat speed, power.
A healthy Travis d’Arnaud is not a weakness by any stretch of the imagination.
However, this is his slash from last season: .265/.340/485 for an OPS of .825.
I believe that hitter is still there, and there’s a hot streak to come. At the same time, I’m glad that he’s paired with a strong defensive catcher at backup. Together, it adds up to a positional strength. Catchers need consistent rest.
The point about Harvey, I don’t know what to say. A great (great) pitcher got hurt. What’s the takeaway?
The promise of d’Arnaud is now a concern, on that there can be no doubt. He will complete his age 27 season having played >100 games one time, and that was 108 games. Even if he caught every remaining game he will not play 100 games. If we go to Sal Perez, his peer across the diamond in the WS, you see a player this year who will complete his age 26 season this year has averaged 140 games per year once he became a full timer in the past 3 years, and will do so again. Im not comparing stats by the way, other than games played. There is no fulfillment of whatever promise he has from Port St Lucie.
His offensive output can only be called inconsistent. Its dreamy to hope he is the .800+ OPS guy we saw in his (only) 67 games last year, yet this year he has already played in 60% of the games relative to last season and only has 25% of the HR (at 3 HR he is in Ruben Tejada country). So he will enter his *age 28* season next year as an arb eligible player who baseline stat is DL. I find it hard to imagine he is really more than a platoon catcher (by default he is). It makes the loss of Lucroy pretty disappointing to me.
Is he a right handed option to platoon at 1B? Wilson Ramos and Matt Wieters lead the catching FA class, but I would expect them to cost plenty of $.
And while it was completely predictable, yet hard to plan for, 3B is a serious on-going weakness, especially with no one in the system to handle it. I think Frazier still needs to be looked at as a trade candidate, with Prado and our old friend RedTurn2 the best FA options. Its hard to imagine Turner coming back though.
Consider that every year he is injured and that sometimes it’s more than just bad luck.