A dive into the Mets’ daily runs scored results

By now you’ve heard how good the Mets are when they score at least four runs. There seems to be some confusion by some of you out there what their record is, though. After a 4-2 win in the second game of Thursday’s doubleheader, the Mets are now 18-4 in games where they surpass three runs scored. Which, of course, means that they are 6-16 when they score three runs or fewer. Three of those low-scoring wins have come in their last 10 games played.

We’ve talked nearly every day about the reasons. Everyone knows about the poor start the hitters got off to in 2021 and then everyone and their brother starting getting injured. Right now, five of the eight starters are on the IL and another is playing while clearly hurt. Meanwhile, the pitching has been good many more times than not, which was sort of expected from the starters but not the bullpen. Perhaps the reason least discussed is how many teams below .500 the Mets have played. To date, the Mets are 24-20 and 32 of their 44 games have come against teams with a losing record.

That’s a touch misleading, because right now 20 games have come against division foes and the other four teams in the NL East all sit with losing records. The Mets are 12-12 outside of their division. But they are 2-10 against the four teams they’ve played – Cardinals, Cubs, Rays and Red Sox – that have a winning percentage of .550 and above, while they are 10-2 against the D’Backs, Orioles and Rockies – teams with winning percentages of .373 or worse.

Again, that’s not all what it seems. The Mets lost two games against the Red Sox where they gave up a combined three runs. One of the losses to the Cubs was a 3-1 setback and another was a 4-3 loss in 10 innings. Only the Rays have really taken the Mets behind the woodshed. And while the wins against the D’Backs now look like ones gotten by beating up on a cellar dweller, they were 15-16 when they arrived in New York. Meanwhile, the Rockies are 16-12 in Coors Field and the Mets took two out of three when they were in Denver.

Let’s move away from strength of schedule talk and instead focus on actual runs scored. Here is a breakdown of each of the 44 games by the final score, including the Mets’ record in those games:

This is grouped by the total number of runs scored in the game. We see the Mets are 17-11 when the total number of runs scored in a game is seven or fewer. When six runs are scored in the game, the Mets are 5-1. We can also see that of their four losses when they score at least four runs, two of them came in blowouts where the other team combined to score 28 runs.

If you hadn’t watched the games, you would be surprised to look at a stretch of 44 consecutive games by a squad over .500 where the team did not score more than eight runs. And the Mets have scored eight runs just twice. The 18-34 D’Backs have eclipsed eight runs five times already. The 20-31 Tigers have exceeded eight runs twice.

With the lineup the Mets are trotting out there these days, it doesn’t seem likely they’ll top eight runs in a game any time soon. While it would be fun to see nine or more runs, at this point we’ll be thrilled if they produce our magic number of four. That’s a number they’ve reached just four times in their last 11 games.

The Mets’ struggles to score runs is why they have a negative run differential despite being four games above .500 on the year. They have a Pythagorean Record of 21-23. However, they haven’t been super lucky in one-run games, with an 11-8 record. To be sure, a .579 record in one-run games is good. But it’s not like the .766 mark of the 2016 Rangers.

It will be curious to see what happens going forward. Will they continue to struggle to score runs yet continue to win more games than they lose? Or will the losses start to mount if the offense doesn’t pick things up? And will the Mets ever get their full squad – or a reasonable facsimile – healthy? And will a healthy lineup result in the runs scored totals we dreamed of in the offseason? These are some of the major story lines to follow in the weeks ahead.