Dissecting an intriguing comment on the state of the Mets from the Mayor of Panic City

Yesterday our friend ChrisF left a comment that was a good one, not necessarily because I agreed with it but rather because it made me think. Chris said:

The fact is this team is wildly imbalanced, way too old, and not staffed enough with really solid baseball players. As a result, its a patchwork of some genuine talent, young guys playing before they are ready, aging vets in key positions that cant get it done, and then a cast of AAA-AAAA players they should never be on a major league team (at least now). It’s a Franken-team bolted together with some OEM parts but then a lot of used bolted together things that dont belong. Maybe the Island of Misfit Toys catches lightning in a bottle, but mostly, square wheels dont roll well. Cohen has exhausted the buy me a title plan, and needs, as he is doing, to build it from the ground up, like Atlanta, Tampa, Dodgers etc. and buy a key piece or two as needed. They need to get players in their prime — not before or after.

Before delving into the specifics of what Chris wrote, it seems fair to point out that one of his monikers is that he’s the self-proclaimed Mayor of Panic City. It’s my opinion that Chris is in competition with someone to be the first one to declare something as a dumpster fire. But, in his defense, he’s been right more times than not. We had a conversation earlier – it might have been right before the season started or just a handful of games in – and Chris said that the Mets’ pitching was a disaster.

My opinion then was that this was just Chris being Chris. But he was right. Painfully right.

Anyway, because he was right about the pitching, it seems to me he’s earned the benefit of the doubt with his take on the current Mets. Ordinarily, my response would be to dismiss this as the typical bleatings of the Mayor. But now, it seems like it might be worthwhile to go thru his comments and see how valid they are. Let’s start with the very first thing he said:

This team is wildly imbalanced

Is it? What would a balanced team look like? Would it have equal contributions from hitters and pitchers, along with young guys, players in their prime and super veterans? Coming into Saturday, the Mets were 17th in the majors in runs per game and 20th in runs allowed per game. That seems pretty balanced. But what about by age? Baseball-Reference breaks down players by age in four different categories. Here they are, complete with how the Mets fare in these breakdowns:

25 and under: 456 PA for hitters, 94 PA for pitchers
26-30: 1387 PA for hitters, 1418 for pitchers
31-35: 1230 PA for hitters, 393 for pitchers
36 and up: 0 PA for hitters, 1180 for pitchers

It’s a tiny bit surprising that they don’t have more PA for young pitchers and more PA for old hitters. It’s not surprising but still very noteworthy how many PA the Mets have for old pitchers. You can make the claim that this makes them unbalanced. But two things occur to me: how does it compare to MLB as a whole and how productive have the older pitchers been?

Let’s answer that second question first. Here’s how productive the Mets have been by pitcher age:

25 and under: 2.08 ERA
26-30: 4.96 ERA
31-35: 4.37 ERA
36 and up: 4.35 ERA

The Mets may have proportionally more IP from older players, but those have been as good or better than the ones from the younger counterparts. So, it’s hard to see that lack of balance being a bad thing. Still, it would be illuminating to know the MLB numbers for these splits:

25 and under: 23025 PA for batters, 17013 PA for pitchers
26-30: 45175 PA for batters, 46333 PA for pitchers
31-35: 21931 PA for batters, 24741 PA for pitchers
36 and up: 2930 PA for batters, 4974 PA for pitchers

Now let’s compare the breakdowns by age for the Mets compared to MLB. Let’s start with the hitters:

25 and under: Mets, 14.8%; MLB, 24.7%
26-30: Mets, 45.1%; MLB, 48.5%
31-35: Mets, 40%; MLB, 23.6%
36 and up: Mets, 0%; MLB, 3.1%

Compared to MLB, the Mets have fewer PA by hitters under 26 and more in the 31-35 range. But this is something that should improve going forward, with Francisco Alvarez and Brett Baty getting more playing time. Now let’s look at the pitchers:

25 and under: Mets, 3%; MLB, 18.3%
26-30: Mets, 46%; MLB, 49.8%
31-35: Mets, 12.7%; MLB, 26.6%
36 and up: Mets, 38.2%; MLB, 5.3%

Compared to MLB, the Mets have fewer PA by pitchers 25 and under, as well as 31-35 and more in the 36 and up range. But, as we saw earlier, the Mets had greater success with their 36 and up pitchers than they did with their younger counterparts. Their gamble was that these pitchers would be more successful than they’ve actually been.

But as to Chris’ initial point, the Mets were indeed imbalanced by age, especially on the pitching side. But that by itself is not a crime. The real question was if the team’s strategy of chasing older pitchers was one they should have avoided. And it’s really hard to argue that there were better foreseeable options last offseason than the ones they chose. Nobody thought last December that Nathan Eovaldi was a significantly better option than the guys they did sign.

Next up from Chris is this: not staffed enough with really solid baseball players.

And to me this is the crux of the issue with the 2023 Mets. The results haven’t been there. But is it because there aren’t enough “really solid baseball players” or is it some combination of guys getting old overnight or having unforeseen down years? Let’s make a chart of guys on the team, what they produced last year, the average of what they gave in 2021-2022 (to make sure that we’re not looking at an extreme outlier season in ’22) and then finally double what they’ve given so far in 2023, since at 83 games, we’re just barely over half a season.

Name	2022 fWAR	AVG 21-22	2023 fWAR x 2
Brandon Nimmo	5.3	4.4	5.2
Francisco Lindor	6.8	5.6	5.0
Pete Alonso	4.0	3.7	3.0
Jeff McNeil	5.8	3.6	1.4
Mark Canha	2.8	3.0	0.6
Starling Marte	3.0	4.3	(-0.2)
Daniel Vogelbach	1.5	0.7	(-0.4)
Max Scherzer	4.4	4.9	2.4
Justin Verlander	6.1	3.6	2.2
David Peterson	1.4	0.9	0.6
Jose Quintana	4.0	2.2	0.0
Carlos Carrasco	2.4	1.3	(-1.2)
Total	47.5	38.2	18.6

These 12 players combined for 47.5 fWAR in 2022. To me, it’s impossible to say that these are not really solid baseball players. Now, that’s not to say that they should have been expected to produce at least that much value here in 2023. Surely, some age-related decline should have been built into their projections for this season.

But nobody should have expected these dozen players to have accumulated just 9.3 fWAR thru 83 games. We can have an honest discussion on what these players should have reasonably expected to produce. A decent starting point would be the 38.2 fWAR of the average of their past two seasons. And you could build in additional decline from that point, if you desire. If you assign each of the 12 players a 0.5 decline, that would be a 32.2 expected fWAR contribution this season. Instead, they’re on target for 18.6, as shown in the last column.

Back to Chris – It’s a Franken-team bolted together with some OEM parts but then a lot of used bolted together things that dont belong.

In previous versions of Mets teams, it was common to see guys play out of position in order to get their bat in the lineup. But that’s not really the case with the 2023 team. Lucas Duda isn’t playing the outfield and Wilmer Flores isn’t playing anywhere. They’re not playing over-the-hill guys at either SS or CF like they’ve done in the past. The closest thing you can say to a player being where he doesn’t belong is McNeil in the OF. But while he’s been a slight negative by all of the advanced defensive metrics at 2B this season, he’s been zero or a slight positive in both LF and RF by those same numbers this year. And UZR thinks he’s been very good in his very brief time in RF.

It’s certainly possible that Chris means something else by this sentence. But to me, it doesn’t pass the smell test with my interpretation of what he said. Here’s the next sentence to examine:

Cohen has exhausted the buy me a title plan.

Well, it certainly looks dead in the water here on July 2, at least for this season. The real interesting point to me is what this team will look like in August, once the trade deadline has passed. If either or both of Scherzer and Verlander have been dealt, then it seems like the “buy me a title” plan is over. But if both of those guys are still on the team, it seems the Mets are going to try to win again in 2024 with veterans who made their marks with other teams. You can say the writing is on the wall, which is likely what Chris is doing. But that seems like, at best, reasonable conjecture. But we’ll know one way or another in a month.

Finally, Chris suggests: They need to get players in their prime — not before or after.

And this is certainly true. It’s not easy to get those guys in free agency and it’s even harder to get them in trades if you’re not willing to empty out your farm system. Cohen tried to get Carlos Correa in free agency. He certainly would have been a guy in his late prime. To date, Correa has a 92 OPS+ and is on target for a 1.6 fWAR this season, compared to a 4.4 mark last year and an average of 5.3 the previous two seasons. He would have fit in perfectly with the under-performing players on the ’23 Mets.

It’s hard to imagine with how poorly this year has played out that the Mets will look to trade for a player in his prime during the season. And who knows if there will be the opportunity to do that before the start of 2024.

The Mets’ best hope is for Alvarez and Baty to develop into those impact players and turning in their best seasons for the Mets. And then being joined by others from the farm system down the road. No one doubts that this has been Cohen’s plan all along. Yet nobody can accelerate the time frame here. And you can make the case that the Mets, with their conservative placement (and to a lesser extent promotion) of prospects, are slowing down the process.

Cohen had to spend money – and a whole bunch of it – to buy time for the prospects while also fielding playoff-caliber teams. It hasn’t worked this year not because Cohen didn’t spend the money or that he and the front office assembled a band of misfit toys. Instead, it hasn’t worked because no one is enjoying a career year, only Nimmo is producing what he did last season and only Alvarez is providing a bigger boost than expected. And while the good news has been in extreme short supply, there’s been an abundance of under performance from all categories of the team.

Few thought this team was going to match or exceed last year’s 101-win squad. At the same time, the vast majority of fans expected at least 90 wins and it doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to think that 99.99% of fans before the season started thought that the floor would be 85 wins. Right now, a final win total in the 70s wouldn’t be shocking.

We can blame that on a dependency on older starting pitchers. But we also need to blame it on guys falling far short of what they did last year, whether that’s older players like Canha and Marte or guys in their prime like Alonso, Lindor, McNeil and Peterson.

*****

Thanks to Chris, both for the intriguing comment and for his ability not to lose his mind when I disagree with him. Also, for the record, the photo used in this piece was chosen for what a panicked mayor might look like – not any editorial on what Chris looks like in real life. It was either Mayor McCheese or the one of Rudy Giuliani with the hair dye running down his face.