During this 20-7 run, the Mets have gotten zero innings from Matt Harvey or Steven Matz, and just 9 2/3 ineffective innings from Jacob deGrom, who allowed eight runs in the two starts he made, with the team losing both games he started. This isn’t the same group that steamrolled through last October, but even without any contribution from those guys, the Mets have allowed the fewest runs in baseball. And the main reason? They’ve been fantastic at stranding runners.
The Mets have an 82% LOB% over the last month, easily the best in baseball. Their ability to get out of jams has been huge for them, and has saved them about 20 runs during the course of the last month. This isn’t the kind of thing you should expect to continue, of course, but we’re not really trying to figure out if this Mets team is a great one — it’s pretty clearly inferior to what they’d have if they were healthy — but simply diagnose how the Mets backups and fallback plans have managed to go on this kind of run. And runner stranding has had a lot to do with it.
Noah Syndergaard has been pitching like an ace, but he’s been doing that most of the year; the difference over the last month is that Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman have managed to give the team 64 innings of work with a combined 2.39 ERA. They aren’t going to keep doing that, as Lugo and Gsellman are no Harvey, Matz, or deGrom, but they’ve done a good enough impression of them when they needed to get out of trouble lately.
Nice to see the team get this positive press. Not a lot new in here for those of us who are watching regularly but points for coming up with “Jofery Blevsmokas.”
Source: FanGraphs
Good for them. It makes up for the rotten luck the Mets hitters had with RISP earlier in the year.
We just gotta hope the inevitable regression doesn’t come in the next 2 weeks