Mets pitchers get a bigger boost than normal this year in Citi Field

Conventional wisdom says that a good team will play .500 on the road and win two-thirds of their home games. If a team did that, it would win around 40 road games and around 54 home contests for a strong 94-win season. Currently, the Mets have a .422 road winning percentage and a .694 mark at home. If they kept those two percentages up over 162 games, they would finish the season with 34 road wins and 56 home victories for a total of 90 wins.

So, why are the Mets worse on the road and a little better at home than we would expect? Traditionally, Citi Field has been a pitcher’s park. When it first opened, it was an extreme pitcher’s park but the fences have been moved in twice since then, so while it’s still a pitcher’s park, it’s a much more moderate one. Still, we’re used to seeing pitchers perform better at home and batters do better on the road.

Here in 2021, offense has been a major problem for the Mets. But if we break it down by home/road numbers, the Mets average 3.4 runs per game at home and 3.9 rpg on the road. Meanwhile, those same numbers for the pitchers are 2.2 at home and 4.8 on the road. The batters are half a run better on the road but the pitchers allow 2.6 more rpg when they don’t perform at Citi Field.

Without going back and doing a year-by-year comparison, the first thought is that pitching performance is a huge outlier. We can see yearly ERA splits by Stathead in a quick view by team. In 2021, the Mets have a 4.39 road ERA compared to a 2.08 mark at home. Coming into 2021, the biggest difference in H/R ERA since Citi Field opened was the 1.24 difference established in 2010 and tied in 2017. So, if these rates would continue throughout the season, it would obliterate the current mark for biggest split. In other words, yes, this is a huge outlier.

Let’s take a look at every pitcher this season on the club who has pitched at least five innings in Citi Field and compare their home and road marks. The following chart is sorted by home IP:

The highest ERA for these 17 pitchers at home belongs to Barnes, who had an otherwise respectable 3.86 at Citi Field. Meanwhile, nine pitchers had a mark higher than 3.86 on the road. So much gets made over Diaz’ ERA in save situations versus non-save situations. But you never hear anything about his H/R differences, one that was even starker before he allowed a run yesterday while pitching at home, his first appearance in six days.

It gives us a new way to look at pitchers for the club this season. Lucchesi’s tough start to the season, where he had a 9.19 ERA after six games, can be explained by the fact that five of those appearances were road games. His lone game at Citi Field in this stretch saw him go 3.1 IP with 0 ER.

Those back-to-back starts where Peterson gave up a combined 9 ER in 3 IP, ones that had us wondering if he was going to survive as a SP in this league? Yep, you guessed it – road starts. Then he rebounded with three average or better outings. Two of those were at home and the lowest Game Score of the three was a road contest. And his last game before winding up on the IL, the one where he allowed 6 ER in 3 IP, was an away game.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to anoint Megill as a future member of the rotation, as his 5.40 road ERA is not the thing from which dreams are made. Oswalt looked good in his first two relief appearances and then in his first start, he gave up 3 ER in 4 IP. Was he the victim of bad calls or was his tough go of it due to it being a road game?

Even Stroman and Walker are not immune to this. Stroman’s ERA is 58 points better at home and Walker goes from solid pitcher on the road to an ace at Citi Field, with an ERA nearly two full runs better at home. Of course, as we’ve come to expect, normal rules for pitchers don’t apply to deGrom, who has actually been better on the road than at home this season.

Through games of Monday, the Mets have played nine more games on the road than they have at Citi Field. The next six games are all home contests, which will bring us to the All-Star break. The Mets will still have three more home games than road tilts in the second half of the season. But the 2021 regular season will finish with eight of the final 11 games away from Citi Field, including the final three of the year in Atlanta.