Diving into the Mets’ numbers when they score three or fewer runs

We all know that the Mets’ offense is struggling, seemingly more days than not. But are they struggling a little or a lot? Let’s look at some runs scored numbers, both for MLB as a whole and for the Mets, and see just how things are. Let’s start with MLB and see how often the teams in the league score three runs or fewer. To date, there have been 861 games played, meaning there are 1,722 decisions.

3: 78-150 (.342)
2: 57-166 (.256)
1: 19-151 (.112)
0: 0-124 (.000)

So, in 1,722 team games in MLB, a club has scored three runs or fewer 745 times, which works out to 43% of the time. Their combined record is 154-591 (.207) in these games. On average, a team scores runs at the following games rates:

3 – 7.6
2 – 7.4
1 – 5.7
0 – 4.1

Now that we have our baseline, let’s look at the Mets. To date, they’ve played 58 games and here’s how they do when scoring three runs or fewer:

3: 3-1 (.750)
2: 3-6 (.333)
1: 1-3 (.250)
0: 0-8 (.000)

They’ve scored three runs or fewer 25 times or 43% of the time or exactly league average! How many of you saw that coming? Not me, that’s for sure. In these games, the Mets are 7-18, for a .280 winning percentage, which is better than league average. The problem comes from games like Friday night, when they get shut out. The Mets have been blanked nearly twice as often as the average MLB team.

We can see that the Mets are 4-17 when they score two runs are fewer, meaning that when they put at least three runs on the board, they have a 26-11 record, good for a .703 winning percentage. Compare that to all of the league. When an MLB team scores three or more runs, they’ve gone 600-420, for a .589 winning percentage. Let’s put that on a 162-game scale, to make it easier to understand.

Mets score 3 or more runs: 114-48
MLB scores 3 or more runs: 95-67

Of course, this is looking at things just from the hitters’ side of things. If the Mets scored exactly three runs in the 21 games they failed to reach that threshold, they would not maintain that .703 winning percentage noted above. Instead, they would improve from 4-17 to 6-15.

In other words, there’s a lot of blame to go around.