The Mets’ offense is worse than you think

With the addition of Pete Alonso and Tommy Hunter to the injured list, the Mets’ walking wounded count is now up to seventeen (!) players. Not only are seven of the team’s nine opening day starters currently out with various ailments, the backups and backups to the backups are dropping like flies as well. Cameron Maybin is now a Met and has started the last two games. Someone named Johneshwy Fargas has started the last four. The current iteration of the Mets best lineup (according to Luis Rojas) has Maybin hitting third for goodness’ sake. The team’s below-average wRC+ of 91 places them in the bottom third of the league, and yet the Mets have managed to keep their grip on their place at the top of an NL East that has been surprisingly underwhelming to open the 2021 season.

There are two major contributing factors for this. First, teams like the Nationals and Braves have so far underperformed compared to their preseason projections. It was expected that the NL East would spend the season beating up on each other, and so far that’s mostly been the case. The Mets have been doing most of the beating, though, which largely accounts for their position atop the division despite having the lowest winning percentage of any of baseball’s division leaders. Second, their pitching staff has been as good as advertised even with the early losses of Seth Lugo and Carlos Carrasco. Brian Joura wrote an excellent piece on the Mets’ pitching performance that won’t be rehashed here, but the fact that the staff leads all of baseball with an xFIP- of 84 goes most of the way in explaining how this team has remained competitive.

The offense remains a huge concern, however. Even acknowledging the aforementioned slew of injuries the team has sustained, their 130 runs scored this season are the fewest in baseball and more than 100 fewer (!) than the league-leading Astros. They’re last in hits, 29th in homeruns, and (thus unsurprisingly) last in RBIs. Basically, they’re not doing so well in most major offense categories beyond their walk rate, which is likely doing the heavy lifting on the offensive side to keep them afloat. It should be noted that these kinds of counting stats come with the caveat that the Mets have played the fewest number of games of any team this season, but the results are poor nonetheless.

When diving a little further into the lineup’s performance, a couple of things jump out. First, their swinging strike percentage of 12% puts them into the top ten in the league, as does their total swing percentage of 48.4%. Put simply, they’re swinging at pitches more than most of the league and missing when they do. The team as a whole has a total of 880 batted balls, which is dead last in baseball (though again, in the fewest games). Second, their quality of contact when they do manage to get the barrel on the ball is poor. They’re in the top ten of the league in soft and medium contact and 29th in hard contact. Their average exit velocity of 88.1 is bottom five in the league. It should come as no surprise, then, that they’re in the top ten in ground ball rate and in the bottom third in fly ball rate. In a league where shifting is now the norm (and the Mets are second to only the Dodgers in the number shifts they’ve seen), ground balls are even less of a productive outcome than they were during days past. Their 21.1% line drive rate is a bit surprising, but is a soft liner to an infielder all that valuable?

My expectation was that this sounds like a team seeing a steady diet of off-speed and breaking balls to which they were failing to adjust. That expectation was shockingly off the mark. The Mets have seen the most fastballs in baseball this season and are in the bottom half of the league in curveballs, cutters, and sliders faced. They’re also in the top ten in changeups, which makes sense as a setup pitch for the fastballs they’re failing to barrel up. They’re in the bottom half of the league in their performance against all pitch types, but they’re exceptionally bad against cutters and curveballs when they do see them.

In short, Mets hitters are failing utterly and completely with a bat in their hands. When they’re not flailing, they’re hitting the ball with so little authority that it’s a wonder they’ve won as many games as they have to this point. Despite a below average BABIP on the season, and even considering the number of injuries, this hasn’t been an unlucky team. It’s a poorly performing offense that’s seemingly failed to adjust to how their opponents are approaching them. In the context of expectations heading into the season, it’s quite a spectacular display of abject awfulness up and down the lineup.

The simplest solution is obviously to get their best hitters back on the field and for them to remember that they’re supposed to be good at baseball. Even so, it’s almost a miracle that this team is in first place at the end of May. It’s a testament to how dominate their pitching has truly been, and a completely untenable situation considering the pitching can’t maintain this pace all season. If the offense doesn’t pick it up, things will get very ugly, very quickly, and likely very soon.