Things are going pretty good for the Mets in the early going in 2022. Despite two starting pitchers being on the injured list, including Jacob deGrom, and now two starting outfielders being out under Covid concerns, the Mets are 6-3 and with a win later today, they’ll have taken the series against their first three opponents. That’s the goal.
But while things for the most part are going well, there is one issue that’s reared its ugly head. It’s an incredibly easy issue to fix, assuming you recognize that it’s a problem.
For years, we’ve talked about matchup masturbation. That’s an issue where managers bend over backwards to find situations to get their lefty reliever into the game. It doesn’t have to be just for lefties – it could easily be for righty relievers, too. But the overwhelming amount of time, the issue is trying to find ways to get your lefty reliever up to a non-embarrassing number of innings. Your starter is cruising or the game’s not remotely close yet the manager inserts himself into the action to bring in a reliever to get the platoon advantage. That’s matchup masturbation.
Most of you know the reliever rule that was introduced a couple of years ago as a pace of play measure, designed to eliminate the Terry Collins special of using three or more relievers in an inning. A reliever has to face a minimum of three batters, unless he finishes an inning. For the most part, this eliminates bringing in a reliever for just one batter and forcing multiple mid-inning pitching changes. My preference would be for the game to find its own equilibrium. Several teams were abandoning the LOOGY gambit before the rule was put in place. Now LOOGY usage has severely been curtailed and the rule has made the game better, at least in my opinion.
But what we have here in 2022 is a different situation. Yes, it revolves around getting relievers the platoon advantage. But this time, our reliever is already in the game and our manager is unnecessarily keeping him in the game longer to get yet another platoon advantage. This is the Perverse Platoon Ploy and this particular gambit has bitten the Mets at least four times so far this season, including in each of their three losses.
1. Chasen Shreve was brought into the game on 4/10 in the sixth inning and retired a lefty to end the inning. He did not need to come back in the game. But Buck Showalter brought him back out in the seventh and that inning ended with a lefty at bat after a runner was thrown out trying to steal second. Because the lefty came back to start the eighth inning, Showalter kept Shreve in the game. You may be imaging our lefty as a dangerous hitter, a Freddie Freeman or Bryce Harper or Juan Soto. Nope, it was Yadiel Hernandez. Shreve gave up a hit, was removed and the Nats went on to score three runs that turned a deficit into a win.
2. A day later on 4/11, Showalter brings back Trevor May in the eighth inning after he’s already pitched the seventh. May gives up a walk to the righty batter that leads off the frame and Showalter removes him, bringing on Joely Rodriguez with the platoon advantage. The Phillies score five runs in the inning and turn a 4-0 deficit into a lead and ultimately a win.
3. On 4/13, the Mets hold an 8-1 lead in the sixth inning. Sean Reid-Foley enters the game and things fall apart. He gives up two runs and leaves with a runner on third base. Rodriguez comes in to face Kyle Schwarber and Rodriguez strikes him out to end the inning. Rodriguez does not have to come out for the next inning but he does because Harper is batting second in the frame. Rodriguez walks the leadoff batter and then walks Harper, too. Showalter removes Rodriguez but both runners he put on base end up scoring.
4. On 4/16, Rodriguez starts the sixth inning because two of the first three batters are lefties. Rodriguez strikes out the two lefties and has a 1-2-3 inning. The first batter in the seventh is also a lefty, so Showalter brings Rodriguez back out. But this lefty gets a hit, Showalter goes to the pen and the Diamondbacks go on to score three runs in the inning, breaking up a scoreless tie. The Mets rally with two runs in the eighth but fall short, 3-2.
The Mets have given up 25 runs in nine games so far in 2022. Over half of those runs – 13 to be exact – have come in four innings when Showalter did his Perverse Platoon Ploy. In his zest to keep a reliever in a game longer than he needed to, just to get the platoon advantage, Showalter has turned two leads into deficits and watched a scoreless tie turn into a three-run lead for the other team. Um, that’s not good.
It’s generally understood that relievers perform better when asked to start an inning, rather than coming in after the inning has started, regardless if there are men on base or not. It’s not a huge edge but it’s an edge nonetheless.
Back after the 2015 season at SB Nation site Royals Review, they did an examination of the “Clean Inning Theory.” They used five years’ worth of data, comparing the Royals to the league average of all 30 teams. The Royals in this time span began to emphasize giving their relievers a clean inning whenever possible.
At the start of the five-year period, the Royals used a reliever in the middle of an inning 164 times. The next year that number ballooned to 226. But by the final year of the study, the Royals utilized a reliever mid-inning just 127 times. In the year of the study with 226 mid-inning changes, a batter reached base (yes, that’s what the study examined) in a mid-inning change 35.1% of the time. By the end of the study, that number was down to 28.7%.
For the league as a whole, the number of batters who reached base in a mid-inning pitching change for the five-year period was 33.5% and 34.1% in the year when the Royals had a 28.7% mark.
On the other side of the coin, the Royals had 270 times when a reliever started with a clean inning in 2011. By 2015 that number jumped to 377. A runner reached base against the Royals in these situations 33.3% of the time in 2011 and that number was cut to 29.2% in 2015. The league as a whole had a 32.0% mark over the five years of the study.
You look for advantages whenever you can get them, preferably without jumping thru too many hoops along the way. No doubt that’s what Buck Showalter thinks he’s doing with the Perverse Platoon Ploy. But so far, it’s been a dismal failure. For years, the Mets had a belief that the key to bullpen success was to bend over backwards to make things as advantageous as possible for their lefty relievers. It was a fine theory. But the point where the Mets screwed up was never objectively looking at the results of the theory. If they had, they never would have pursued the LOOGY gambit to the lengths that they did.
It will never cease to make me smile that the one year the Mets didn’t have a LOOGY for the great majority of the time in the 2010s is the year they went to the World Series. They started out 2015 with Jerry Blevins as their LOOGY but he got hurt early and missed the rest of the season. At the end of the year, they tried Eric O’Flaherty but he was so bad he didn’t make the postseason roster.
Maybe you can’t judge the Perverse Platoon Ploy after just nine games. When a player has success (or failure) against a certain pitcher, we generally don’t put too much stock into small sample sizes. The exception is when the results are just overwhelming. When Howard Johnson hits 4 HR in 13 ABs against Todd Worrell, one of the top closers of the day, that means something. Or when Tony Gwynn bats .441 in 62 PA against Ron Darling, maybe that’s more meaningful than a typical hitter/pitcher split.
Perhaps one will argue that the Mets’ early results this year with the Perverse Platoon Ploy is nothing but a small-sample fluke. It just seems to me when the results are this bad, I wouldn’t rush out to test that particular theory any further, especially for non-elite hitters. Just like a manager shouldn’t rush out to put Worrell into the game when Johnson was due to bat in the inning, Showalter shouldn’t rush out to use a reliever longer than he has to just to get the platoon advantage for your run-of-the-mill lefty hitter.
It’s one thing to ask converted starter Trevor Williams to go multiple innings as a reliever. It’s another thing to ask Shreve, Rodriguez or May to come back for an inning/batter they don’t have to. And it’s not just the relievers who are coming back who are affected. Here are Seth Lugo’s numbers this year when he comes on at the start of the frame versus when he comes on mid inning:
Clean – 3 G, 3 IP, 0 ER, 1 H, 1 BB, 4 Ks
Mid – 2 G, 1.1 IP, 4 ER, 4 H, 2 BB, 3 Ks
Yes, Captain Obvious, these are small samples. But when just about everything else is going great, why not address the one main area where things are lousy? The platoon advantage is real. But so, too, is the advantage to pitching at the start of the frame rather than coming on mid inning. Showalter thinks the first advantage always trumps the second advantage. In all three losses this season, that advantage has not paid out. And chasing it with the Perverse Platoon Ploy has led to losses. It’s likely if Showalter had opted for the current traditional reliever usage of one clean inning pitched that at least one of those losses would have been averted. And it’s possible all three would have been wins, instead.
I thought you wanted, and preached, getting more length out of relievers? The two-inning outing, etc?
It didn’t take long for people to step up and show how much smarter they are than Buck Showalter. I though he might be given two weeks, though.
I can’t believe I have to explain this but ok.
Yes, I think the way to a better bullpen is to carry and use guys capable of going 3 innings at a time. My bullpen would feature three of those guys. But not every reliever is capable of doing that. Trevor Williams, David Peterson and a healthy Seth Lugo were my choices for this role before the season started. Obviously, Peterson is in the rotation now and Lugo may not be capable at this point.
At no point in time were the choices to go long Chasen Shreve, Joely Rodriguez and Trevor May. And you can add Edwin Diaz to that list, too.
There’s more than one way to get things done. If Showalter’s plan to use the lefties and a one-inning righty in longer roles had, you know, worked – then I would have praised him for it. I already wrote an article that was extremely complimentary of the new manager. I want nothing more than for Showalter’s moves to be successful. But when he does something that blows up in his face four times in nine games, I’m not going to pretend that everything is fine and dandy.
I’m a analytics guy so generally I want a lefty-lefty or righty-righty matchup because the analytics support it. When they don’t support it then don’t make a change. I thought that Buck doing the right thing and also saving that bullpen. This amazing article, with the Royals Analytics and even the Mets small sample , has changed my mind.
I’m in a bind. On the one hand, I want to trust Buck’s gut reaction that his extending pitchers into the next innings might be a good practice for his pen. On the other hand, I don’t want to lose anymore games to find out its validity.
I will point out that JRod walking a batter or Shrive giving up a hit alone is not a catastrophe. The RH reliever that would have thrown those pitches might have fared worse. At least part of the time this is likely.
Given the small sample size, I feel it needs more testing. Buck hates to lose probably more than we do (if that is possible), so his patience must be very short, even with his own experiments. I’m sticking with him, biting my tongue when things backfire, and hoping that things will settle down over the 162, and the best team will emerge.
Most of us wanted Buck, including me, but as we all know, even hall of fame managers make debatable moves and have bad habits. I’ll give Buck a mulligan at this point, not that I want him to treat April as spring training, but that he is still feeling out what he has. And, what it looks like early is that he has diminished Lugo, low quality lefties, and a better shot letting relievers star innings cleanly.