Citi Field is stifling offense more than usual this season

Oh what a difference a month (give or take) can make. When my byline last hit the Mets360 front page, the Mets were in the midst of a 6-15 skid in May with optimism for a reversal of fortune close to its nadir. Since then they’ve gone 15-9 and won 12 of their last 15 games. Talk about a turnaround, particularly as the team laughs at their regularly scheduled “June swoon” to the tune of a 12-5 record so far this month.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a single factor or set of factors to point to that would explain why the team’s offense has turned into a murderers’ row after being relatively average or worse through the opening months of the season. The players and coaches certainly can’t put their finger on it, though there’s been an acknowledgment of the noteworthy uptick in batted ball luck.

Still, a topic that’s come up in an effort to explain what’s changed for this Mets team over the last month is a discussion regarding the team’s performance at home. More specifically, the team has seemingly performed better at the plate at home over their current hot streak than they had been through the end of May. This is an interesting data point since park factors for a given ballpark should in theory have an outsized impact on the home team since they obviously play half their games in their own park.

So what’s been going on at Citi Field so far this season? According to Statcast, not a whole lot of offense. As the screenshot from Baseball Savant below makes clear, Citi Field is second only to T-Mobile park this year in suppressing offense. Note that a value of 100 is average, and that this table includes international stadiums so the rankings go to 33.

This is surprisingly not generally where Citi Field ends up most years, though it certainly is almost always near the top of the league in terms of being a pitchers park. This season has seen the worst suppression of offense at Citi Field since 2018, as you can see in the Baseball Savant screenshot below.

If you search for articles and news snippets regarding the Mets’ offense from 2018, you’ll find lovely descriptors such as “worst in baseball” and “disgusting” used liberally. It’s an interesting tidbit considering the discussion at hand, though if we’re being honest it feels like we’re complaining about the team’s offense almost every year (which, when viewing historical park factors for Citi Field, makes a lot of sense).

According to the ballpark splits available at Baseball Reference, the Mets are actually performing slightly better than their opponents at Citi Field at the plate this season. The team currently has a .661 OPS at home, while the rest of the league has done slightly worse when visiting to the tune of a .654 OPS. Interestingly, and while the Mets and their opponents have both fared better from the right side of the plate than the left at Citi Field, the difference for the Mets is significantly more pronounced (.742 OPS for righties vs .552 OPS for lefties).

On the pitching side, the Mets have also slightly outperformed visiting teams by allowing an OPS of .648 versus the aforementioned .654 for visiting teams. Unsurprisingly given the offensive numbers, left-handed pitchers have fared much worse than right-handers for both the Mets and their opponents at Citi Field this year.

While in the very recent past the team’s offense was legitimately mediocre, the general uptick in park factor suppression could explain why a lineup that should be very good has looked anything but until just recently. Of course, it doesn’t explain why this year has been especially tough to hit at Citi Field compared to years past. Perhaps it has to do with weather patterns, temperatures, and humidity. Perhaps it can be blamed on the quality of their opponents and their tough schedule to open the season. Perhaps the alignment of the planets this year has conjured some negative cosmic mojo.

There’s an excellent chance that Citi Field’s park factor ends up more in line with a typical year by the end of the season, and by August we’ll all be lamenting the fact that their terrible starting pitching is ruining the hard work of their lineup and bullpen.

At least there’s a decent chance things remain interesting. That’s something, isn’t it?