It’s Wild Card eve for the Mets and here are notes on a dozen players to get you ready for Wednesday’s game against the Giants.
Jay Bruce – He has a six-game hitting streak and since Sept. 1 he has a higher OPS (.846 to .675) than Yoenis Cespedes.
Asdrubal Cabrera – Since returning from the DL on 8/19, he has a .345/.406/.635 line in 165 PA.
Cespedes – Finished with a 133 OPS+, the same mark that David Wright did in 2006.
Bartolo Colon – He has 500 lifetime starts in his career, the seventh-most in MLB since 1980.
Jeurys Familia – It may seem he had always pitched in three of the past four games but his IP total was indistinguishable from previous seasons. He had 77.2 IP this year, compared to 78.0 a season ago and 77.1 in 2014.
Curtis Granderson – In 251 innings in CF, he had a 0 UZR and a +1 DRS. In 495.1 innings in CF, Cespedes had a (-10.5) UZR and a (-7) DRS.
Robert Gsellman – Finished second on the team with a 54.2 GB% behind only Familia and his remarkable 63.3 rate.
Seth Lugo – Finished two points behind Noah Syndergaard for the top AVG among club pitchers with his .188 mark.
Jose Reyes – His 9 SB led the team and he was thrown out just twice.
Rene Rivera – He threw out 18 of the 61 baserunner who tried to steal against him. That’s a 30% success rate, compared to a league average mark of 27%.
T.J. Rivera – His .333 AVG is the second-highest in team history for a rookie with at least 100 PA. Rico Brogna holds the top spot with a .351 mark in 138 PA in 1994.
Syndergaard – His 6.5 fWAR tied 2013 Matt Harvey and 1991 David Cone for the 10th-best mark among pitchers in franchise history. Tom Seaver in his underrated 1971 season had a 9.1 fWAR for the club record.
And now for a team factoid. There will be at least seven different players on the postseason roster compared to the Opening Day roster and that number could be as high as 11, depending on decisions with Eric Campbell, Jim Henderson, Kevin Plawecki and Logan Verrett.
Addison Reed – has pitched in 77.2 innings, is third in appearences with 80, is sixth in WAR for relief pitchers, and is #1 in Holds with 40 (the next closest has only 29 !)
Cue the music,
Addison – I know your aim is true.
Met sense- Gotta send that one to Al Dukes.
Brian – your last point is really amazing about how different our WC roster is compared to the opening day roster. When we adjust the roster to include more starters for the 5 game NLDS, it will be even more pronounced.
” and is #1 in Holds with 40 (the next closest has only 29 !”
This point is pretty easy to explain.
For one to accrue a lot of holds you need
1. A closer that doesn’t struggle at all throughout the year
2. A closer that stays healthy or isn’t traded
Otherwise, your setup guy becomes your closer and stops getting holds.
For example, at the end of the trade deadline, Reed had 26 holds while Betances had 27 saves. But the 2 guys ahead of Betances were traded so he became closer and had just 1 more hold the rest of the way.
I am missing the Granderson point, are we saying he’s a better overall defender starting in CF?
At the time Cespedes announced he wasn’t going to play CF anymore, it was spun as a big blow to the Mets from a defensive standpoint, that they were going to be forced to play guys out of position. Yet in a small sample, Granderson has been better than Cespedes. Now, it may not hold up over a full season’s worth of play but it’s not like Cespedes had a full season, either.
Not to quibble, but, well, to quibble:
It was not “spun” that way, which implies a level of deceit, a twisting of the facts.
It was a widely-shared perception. A move from CF to LF that would have a ripple effect which could likely be negative — either defensively or offensively, depending upon how management responded to the problem.
When Cespedes moved off CF, the Mets talked about Conforto in CF. And in moving Curtis there, the concern was that his legs would wear down and it might effect his overall performance. I think Lagares was still around — not sure about this one — but it seemed a blow to the offense. Suddenly Ruggiano was out there. Who?! Not ideal.
But to the main point, yes, to my eye Curtis has done a solid job in CF, comparable to Cespedes, but with nothing close to the arm (which matters, but probably not reflected in those highly-dubious defensive stats).
Fair enough on “spun.”
But while Cespedes’ arm is miles better than Granderson’s it’s erroneous to say that it is not reflected in either DRS or UZR.
Here’s the arm component of DRS:
rARM – Outfield Arms Runs Saved evaluates an outfielder’s throwing arm based on how often runner advance on base hits and are thrown out trying to take extra bases.
And here’s the arm component of UZR:
Outfield Arm Runs (ARM) – The amount of runs above average an outfielder saves with their arm by preventing runners from advancing.
As for the arm factor, I think it doesn’t matter, because he was in RF before the change. As every single runner was going first to third when he was in RF it might have helped, even Grandy can usually stop that from happening on a single to CF. He belongs in LF, but Cespedes won’t play RF, and you take the bad with the good with Cespedes, and take it every time.
Yes.
At the time all of this was going down, I suggested that a swap of Conforto and Cespedes had the possibility to make the OF defense better, because Cespedes was poor in CF and was a deserved Gold Glove winner in LF in 2015. Conforto was going to have to be worse than Cespedes, and likely by a fair amount, for it not to be a net plus. Turns out that they preferred Granny there, instead, but the logic still held, even with different participants.
What’s your opinion on how the RF defense is now? Bruce clearly has a better arm but Granderson seems more fluid out there and my guess is that he would get to balls that Bruce wouldn’t.