When we see a player’s line at the end of the year, we get to see how he did over the largest possible sample size. And that’s good, even if it can be a bit misleading. There’s no better example of that than 2022 Eduardo Escobar, who was lousy the first five months of the season and then who hit like gangbusters in the final month of the year. His overall line was that of a slightly above-average hitter. The day-to-day or week-to-week or month-to-month for Escobar was a different story.
Anyone who’s watched baseball for more than a couple of years should realize this at least to some extent. But sometimes it seems like even the die-hards don’t have a complete understanding of how much variability a player has during a full season. Let’s look at that in a few different ways. First, let’s examine the dozen Mets with the most PA here in 2023, with their OPS broken down on a monthly basis. September stats are thru 9/29:
| April | May | June | July | August | September | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tommy Pham | .631 | .790 | 1.027 | .684 | NA | NA |
| Pete Alonso | .890 | .882 | .586 | .833 | .911 | .808 |
| Francisco Lindor | .762 | .685 | .816 | .923 | .818 | .848 |
| DJ Stewart | NA | NA | NA | .720 | 1.106 | .655 |
| Brandon Nimmo | .892 | .748 | .860 | .626 | .820 | 1.020 |
| Francisco Alvarez | .494 | 1.029 | .534 | .974 | .456 | .610 |
| Mark Canha | .675 | .754 | .718 | .771 | NA | NA |
| Jeff McNeil | .831 | .620 | .550 | .620 | .771 | .857 |
| Daniel Vogelbach | .792 | .582 | .651 | .791 | .890 | .733 |
| Mark Vientos | NA | .530 | .385 | .963 | .453 | .778 |
| Brett Baty | .861 | .642 | .659 | .552 | .217 | .540 |
| Starling Marte | .618 | .629 | .651 | .700 | .000 | NA |
Ten of the 12 players on this list saw massive swings in their monthly OPS totals, with swings of at least 200 points between their low and high marks. The two exceptions were Canha and Marte. Canha performed within 100 points, which is really good. Except he only had four months with the Mets. If we look at his time in Milwaukee, we see he has an .869 OPS in September, which is nearly 200 points better than his April production.
The other player is Marte, assuming we ignore his 0-8 in August. Some may think there’s great value in consistency. But not if that consistency is of the mediocre variety. Regardless, that’s consistency over four months and not six. We saw what happened when we looked at Canha over an entire six months. Of course, an injury prevented Marte from having a full season, to say nothing of how it impacted his results while he did play.
Next, let’s not limit ourselves to the fixed dates of a calendar month. Instead, let’s look at the best streak of at least 100 PA, in terms of OPS, for the same 12 hitters. Two things to keep in mind, both for this table and the next one. First, the idea was to maximize OPS, not PA. So, 125 PA at a .970 OPS is chosen over 250 PA at a .960 OPS, even if the latter is more valuable. Second, these lists were done manually, while waiting for the emergency vet to get back to me with results for my cat. A mistake is certainly possible.
| Name | Dates | PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | OPS | BABIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tommy Pham | 5/28-7/2 | 109 | .378 | .431 | .694 | 1.125 | .456 |
| Pete Alonso | 7/21-8/20 | 124 | .286 | .387 | .733 | 1.120 | .262 |
| Francisco Lindor | 6/6-7/7 | 118 | .302 | .407 | .677 | 1.084 | .274 |
| DJ Stewart | 8/15-9/18 | 105 | .305 | .365 | .684 | 1.050 | .365 |
| Brandon Nimmo | 8/28-9/27 | 117 | .340 | .402 | .642 | 1.043 | .375 |
| Francisco Alvarez | 4/23-6/08 | 114 | .279 | .342 | .654 | .996 | .273 |
| Mark Canha | 5/27-7/18 | 101 | .266 | .416 | .456 | .872 | .300 |
| Jeff McNeil | 8/5-9/21 | 188 | .316 | .358 | .512 | .870 | .320 |
| Daniel Vogelbach | 6/16-8/30 | 151 | .250 | .325 | .507 | .832 | .264 |
| Mark Vientos | 8/11-9/21 | 100 | .255 | .300 | .479 | .779 | .316 |
| Brett Baty | 4/17-5/21 | 102 | .256 | .343 | .433 | .776 | .292 |
| Starling Marte | 5/12-6/17 | 118 | .309 | .350 | .400 | .750 | .381 |
We see five players with a six-week hot streak with an OPS of four digits. Of course, Alonso, Lindor and Nimmo have done this before for the Mets. It’s certainly possible that Pham did this with another club previously. Stewart has never done anything like this before. And it’s important to note that Stewart didn’t reach 100 PA with his hot streak. We had to add three games, which he went 1-10 with a walk, to get him to triple digits. Since 9/19, Stewart is 3-31, which includes his results from Saturday’s doubleheader. And all three hits are singles. We probably shouldn’t mark him down as a starter on the 2024 team.
It’s disappointing that the hot streaks for three players didn’t even reach an .800 OPS. Marte’s in particular is a weird one to wrap your head around. He had a .381 BABIP and could only manage a .750 OPS. That’s what few homers and a bunch of strikeouts will do to you. In terms of this group of 12 players, McNeil had a below-average OPS in his hot streak. But he also had the largest sample size, with 37 more PA than the second-most in the group. That’s worth something.
Now let’s look at the cold streaks for these players. Neither Vientos nor Stewart have enough PA outside of their hot stretch to reach our threshold. Pham didn’t either, but with 98 PA before his hot streak, he’s included here.
| Name | Dates | PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | OPS | BABIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Francisco Alvarez | 8/4-9/28 | 136 | .143 | .243 | .235 | .478 | .181 |
| Starling Marte | 4/2-5/11 | 123 | .189 | .262 | .243 | .506 | .233 |
| Brett Baty | 5/6-9/12 | 293 | .187 | .260 | .275 | .534 | .254 |
| Jeff McNeil | 5/3-6/28 | 198 | .228 | .281 | .256 | .536 | .258 |
| Pete Alonso | 5/30-7/20 | 140 | .139 | .243 | .312 | .554 | .128 |
| Mark Canha | 4/3-5/9 | 111 | .204 | .270 | .327 | .597 | .231 |
| Francisco Lindor | 4/21-6/4 | 172 | .204 | .244 | .358 | .602 | .229 |
| Brandon Nimmo | 4/23-5/19 | 108 | .237 | .296 | .320 | .616 | .319 |
| Daniel Vogelbach | 4/1-6/7 | 140 | .198 | .336 | .285 | .620 | .273 |
| Tommy Pham | 3/30-5/26 | 98 | .200 | .286 | .341 | .627 | .226 |
It seems like we all knew that Alvarez was struggling before his big game Saturday but with him splitting time with Omar Narvaez, it’s likely most of us didn’t know the depths that he had fallen. Worse than Marte – yuck! And Baty’s bad stretch is bad enough by itself and then you consider he had 293 PA of this type of failure. Double yuck!
It’s curious how the bad stretches for Canha and Marte overlap almost identically. Yet somehow it was Canha and not Marte who got benched for Pham. My expectation was that Lindor’s poor stretch would have been closer to Alonso’s but all of those extra-base hits he was getting early kept him from completely bottoming out.
And viewed in the context of other poor stretches by his teammates, what Vogelbach did early in the year wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was made out to be.
We hope that by using full-season numbers that our sample size will be big enough so that the hot streaks and cold streaks even out. This may be nothing more than wishful thinking on our part. McNeil was bad for roughly 2/3 of the year and good for the other 1/3 or so. It doesn’t balance out in his case. Oddly enough, it might come closest to balancing out with Vogelbach, who was fairly close in the PA of his good stretch and bad stretch.
You can probably find a dozen more interesting things if you dive into these numbers more thoroughly. Perhaps my favorite one of all is the .456 BABIP that Pham had in his hot streak. He had really good power numbers when he was hot but the hits were falling in at a tremendous rate, too.
Another great article Brian. You always find great data and have great insight. It seems like you have a better grasp on what is going on than the Mets brass.
What else can we infer from this? Baty needs to go back to AAA, even if he has a good spring. Stewart was fun to watch, but he will probably go back to being Stewart.
Nimmo and Alvarez both had a good bad good bad monthly pattern. Especially for Alvarez being a catcher, maybe AI could tell us when he should have days off and when he should be the DH.
Very interesting stuff, thanks! Marte is the biggest enigma here for me, his ability to hit and field fell off the table, and for the streak you itemize above he decided to go Denny Doyle style. Yet, he went 24 of 28 in stolen based, and even though the basepaths are shorter that’s not easy, especially with a groin issue. In 2022, I was at a game that Blake Snell blew him away with multiple fastballs that he was a day behind. Add to that his many swings and misses at sliders 1-2 feet outside, his age, and his “Cano-like” history, I suspect his bat speed may be gone and he knows it. Hopefully Stearns’ plans do not include significant AB for Marte in 2024-5, regardless of pay…this is Jason Bay-ish territory.
The problem with Baty is that he has killed AAA pitching but looks lost in the bigs. There is still time, but that is textbook AAAA.
Perhaps McNeil with push hard for a Pham reunion.
Thanks to you and Mike for the kind words!
You made me smile with the Denny Doyle reference.
You may be right with the Marte/Bay comparison, which doesn’t make the offseason any easier. It would be nice if the front office could go in with the plan of one of Marte and Stewart being able to hold down RF. But that just might be a pipe dream at this point.
FWIW, Baty only has 147 PA at Triple-A.
Buck got the ax. That was quick.
Well done as usual, Bri.
I do have a question related to Alonso. Even the most generous evaluation I read here at Mets360 was only marginally generous to him as a player who deserves “elite” status.
When I look at his BABIP, I see that in the “best” table, his .262 was the lowest
In the “worst” table, his .128 BABIP is by extremely far the worst, with only 1 of the other 11 coming within .098 of this terrible mark.
My understanding is that, even though BABIP isn’t 100% luck related, it is more luck than not. And these tables apparently confirm what I noted in watching Mets games this year¹: Alonso hit plenty of scorchers – more than any other Met – right into fielders’ gloves
What am I missing?
1. I should point out that I viewed more Mets games live this year in any season probably going back to 1988
Alonso was very good this year, but not elite. His OPS was 4th among NL first basemen including Olsen and Freeman, but above Goldschmidt. He was 19th overall.
There’s not another free agent power bat available at 1B in 2025, so he’s a must-sign unless the Mets sign Rhys Hoskins in ’24.
Thanks for your reply
My question was more about BABIP than the Mets360 member opinions about Alonso specifically. All such Alonso arguments posted here seemed quite reasonable and well-thought out
Is it reasonable to expect Alonso’s BABIP numbers to jump to a much higher level next year?
In the “best” table, there are 4 BABIP values ranging from .365 to .456. If Alonso’s BABIP jumped up to this level – with all else equal – then I surmise he’d have a monster season
There’s certainly an element of luck in BABIP. But when a player consistently over-performs or under-performs, well, that’s not luck.
Alonso has a lifetime .260 BABIP, so we shouldn’t expect him to just put up .300 marks going forward. Now, with a .208 mark this year, there was some bad luck involved. But at some point, it’s more about his pitch recognition and swing decisions than it is about bad luck. It would be nice to see him not consistently lunging at pitches out of the strike zone and making weak contact.