Here on the final day of the regular season, the Mets are 14th in the National League with a .676 OPS with RISP. The average NL team has a triple slash line of .256/.341/.415 while the Mets check in with a .225/.305/.372 line. It’s pretty amazing that they’ve made the playoffs with those numbers. But what those numbers hide is how well the club has been doing in these circumstances the last six weeks or so.
Here were numbers written about here earlier, prior to the game of August 14:
So much has been made of the Mets’ inability to produce with Runners in Scoring Position (RISP) this season – and rightly so. The Mets are last in the league in this split in PA (948), Runs (254), AVG (.204), OPS (.605) and BABIP (.245). They’re also last in other categories but you get the idea. The National League has a .297 BABIP in this split, with a .746 OPS. But, hey, at least they’ve moved ahead of the expansion San Diego Padres, who managed just a .201 AVG with RISP back in 1969. The Padres … won just 52 games that year.
Please note that August 13 was not when the Mets bottomed out in this category. Rather, it’s when we have numbers to compare.
I went back and compiled by hand from the Baseball-Reference boxscores the Mets’ numbers with RISP from 8/14 – 10/1. Here’s what I come up with for the team in this stretch:
102-373 with 26 2B, 1 3B, 16 HR, 155 RBIs, 55 BB, 6 HBP and 17 SF.
That works out to a triple slash line of .273/.361/.477 with RISP in 45 games since 8/14. And that includes the first six games of the period when the team hit .211 thanks to a 12-57 mark.
It’s no wonder that the Mets have gone 29-16 in this stretch. That .838 OPS with RISP, if the team had compiled it all season long, would be good for second in the National League, behind only the Rockies and their Coors Field-aided numbers.
Yes, without a doubt these numbers are being influenced by the weaker teams that the Mets closed their schedule out with here in September. But it’s not like all they played in the first five months were division winners. And this stretch includes four games against the Giants, three against the Cardinals, four against the Marlins while they were still relevant and six against the Nationals. Plus six games against the second-half Braves, who are 30-25 since August 1.
The Mets’ RISP numbers were worse against these five teams mentioned above than they were overall. The numbers against the Nationals were particularly bad. Against their division rival, who they split six games with in this stretch, the Mets were 2-32 with RISP, with 7 RBIs, mostly due to 4 SF.
The Mets don’t have to put up an .838 OPS with RISP to have success in the playoffs. But it sure would be nice if they hit better than .063 when guys were in scoring position, like they did against the Nats. That they went 3-3 in those games is a minor miracle with that type of production in key moments.
We’ve talked all year long about the Mets’ flaws and they’re obvious to everyone at this point. But if the Mets can hold their own with RISP then they’ll have a chance. Here’s what the pitchers for the five teams the Mets might face in the playoffs have done thru 161 games with RISP:
Cardinals – .744 OPS
Cubs – .663
Dodgers – .775
Giants – .743
Nationals – .704
The Cubs are great in this regard, the Nationals are good and the other three are more or less average. As the Mets head to the playoffs, here’s hoping that the club can continue doing what they’ve done the last 45 games with RISP. But I’ll be satisfied if they have just an average performance compared to what their opponent team’s pitchers usually allow.
Fascinating. RISP does matter!
…in its own peculiar way
Great job Brian. One thing that is of importance in RSIP situations, that was quite a problem, was actually having the little white sphere hit the wood. I bet that K% was way down.
Thanks Gus!
I only tracked what I needed to calculate OBP and SLG, so I can’t say for sure one way or another. It certainly sounds logical.
What a difference hitting with RISP can make, huh? I still feel like the low RISP performance was just a fluke on the season. Baseball being baseball.
Then again, with all the injuries to the lineup throughout the season perhaps it was just a matter of below average players not coming through.
You were astute very early on that the RISP player averages were well below what the players had produced through out their careers. The numbers were an anomaly that would normalize in the course of a season. It did and the result was an offensive juggernaut. Very good job at initially identifying the problem.
Many identified the problem to be lack of situational hitting and many failed to realize that the game has moved away from that concept. Todays players are being taught to pull and lift and the Mets hitting coach is one of the advocates of this style. The general manager embraced the style and sought players like that and built a powerful home run hitting team. Once the abnormal RISP began to normalize the hitting took off and home runs never had to be sacraficed to achieve the better RISP average.
Correlation is not causation.
I always see the RISP numbers as “effect” rather than “cause,” marred by sample size issues.
Mostly it’s linked to BA and normalizes over time.
Cabrera hit that slump where he was like 0-34 with RISP, got hurt, came back on fire, and hit over .400 with RISP. What does that mean?
I am reminded of the early days of Elias in the 80s, when they would print fat books (and I would buy them) filled with data about how teams did on night/day games, on Wednesday nights, etc. There are numbers there, but it would be ridiculous to conclude, “We’ve got to do better on Tuesday nights!” Though of course that would be nice.
Moving forward, I would never go out and search for players with high RISP numbers. I’d look for players, period. RISP will take care of itself. It’s an effect.
I realize that mine is the minority view. Just stating, respectfully, that I am never quite so bored, analytically, as when folks pound home the importance of RISP. It’s like saying “winning” is vitally important.
I don’t think it’s the minority opinion. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
There are stats that are predictive and there are stats that are descriptive. What a player hit with RISP is descriptive. With a descriptive stat, just because X happened in the past doesn’t mean that it’s likely to happen in the same manner in the future. And that’s okay. There’s still value in exploring what actually has happened in the games.
The reason that the Mets didn’t score a ton of runs early in the season was because of their dreadful results with RISP. The reason they’ve been doing so lately is because they have. We saw all sorts of articles in the blogosphere bemoaning the team’s fortunes with RISP around the All-Star break. But somehow the other half of the equation wasn’t discussed.
I would be surprised to hear a single stat that is predictive of an outcome of any situation for a game of chance with n dependent variables. Its all backward looking.
No, that’s not the definition of predictive. It’s a year-to-year thing, not a game-by-game thing.