The 2024 Mets might just be a collection of imperfect parts

We’ve arrived at a fairly standard juncture in a baseball season when fans and pundits opine on where the season is headed based on the results thus far. We’re roughly 30% into the 2024 campaign and, depending on your personal viewpoint, it’s either getting late early or we still need additional time to assess. The discussions have seemed to border on contentious at times, which more likely than not speaks mostly to the frustrations evoked by another iteration of a listless Mets team underperforming even tepid expectations. Being a Mets fan will do that to you sometimes.

The reality of the current postseason format means that teams will inevitably hold on longer than perhaps they should, where even the faintest glimmer of hope will ultimately lead to the regret of not having traded your best assets earlier for a larger return. The Mets find themselves teetering on the precipice of that situation, more or less, at 21-29 and already 15 games behind the first-place Phillies in the NL East. The team is somehow just four games out of playoff positioning, though, so it’s still just early enough that it might not quite make sense to sell off pieces that could otherwise help them nab that last wildcard spot. Maybe?

Still, the FanGraphs Depth Charts projections for the rest of the season peg the Mets at a final record of 76-86. Considering the team with the fewest wins to ever secure a wildcard spot (excluding 2020) was the 2005 Padres with 82 wins, the chances seem slim without a meaningful turnaround. Their normal June swoon appears to have arrived early this season as the team has put up a 6-15 record and -27 run differential in May, and their 2-8 record over the last 10 games certainly doesn’t give any indication of a team on the cusp of a breakout.

Throughout the rest of this season and beyond, no matter its outcome, you’ll continue to see pieces from me and others extolling the performances of some players while lamenting the failings of others. We might wax poetic about what could have been had this or that circumstance have gone differently. But the truth of the matter, at least in this moment and as carried over from the 2023 season, is that this group of players simply isn’t getting it done.

Before the season I wrote a piece with an optimistic slant wondering if the 2024 version of the Mets, for all of the hand-wringing about the lack of splashy moves, might actually be better than the sum of its parts. In fact, the Depth Charts prediction noted earlier had the team winning roughly 88 games with a 39.9 fWAR, which would in theory have given them a very strong chance at a wildcard spot. The current projections have the team’s fWAR at 27.7 with the biggest adjustment down coming from the starting pitching (11.3 vs 5.8), though the projected drop in offense is not far behind it.

The turmoil over the inconsistent offense will likely continue through the summer, but even now their 5.6 fWAR places them squarely in the middle of baseball, which is probably where most of us realistically expected them to land over the course of the 2024 season. Their starting pitching fWAR of 2.5 puts them in the bottom third of the league while their 1.8 reliever fWAR is fifth best in baseball. That sure sounds like a .500 team through-and-through, give or take a few streaks that either lift them above or drop them below that mark at points during the season.

I also wrote a preseason article wondering if the team had an “identity.” Some of the comments were wise in that they stated that we won’t know until the games are played, but can we say they’ve cultivated any kind of identity let alone consistency almost a third of the way through the season? Consider this: they’ve had 45 batting orders through 50 games. For comparison, the Phillies have had 35 and the Braves have had just 26 different lineups.

At this point the team resembles more a collection of parts, some of them broken or malfunctioning, that may simply be too imperfect a fit to put it all together. This collection of parts once again looks like a team that will likely be on the outside looking in come October. In a vacuum it may be a tad early to panic, but in the context of how this team currently looks it sure feels like a continuation of 2023 doesn’t it?

The key question that will need to be answered sooner rather than later is the obvious: where do they go from here? It’s shaping up to be another summer of tough decisions that David Stearns and company will need to make, and this time Steve Cohen may not wait as long to rip the band-aid off.