For most Mets fans, their goal for Carlos Beltran has been for him to prove he is healthy and then trade him at the deadline for prospects and salary relief. I did not like that idea in December and nothing I’ve seen the first three weeks of the season has changed my mind. Beltran has been hitting the ball with authority and has been a huge asset for the Mets as the team’s cleanup hitter in 2011.
While Terry Collins has been careful with Beltran, he has played in 19 of the team’s first 20 games. He appeared as a pinch-hitter in three of the four games he was not in the starting lineup. Beltran has been extremely productive and his .881 OPS is second on the team. He has hit for AVG versus RHP (.310) and power versus LHP (all three of his HR).
So, the question now is: Should the Mets expect Beltran to hit like this the rest of the season or is this merely a hot streak due to the careful usage pattern by Collins combined with a small sample size of 70 PA?
On the plus side, here are some slash lines and OPS marks for Beltran in recent seasons:
.286/.357/.524 — .881
.295/.369/.504 — .872
.295/.384/.470 — .854
.284/.376/.500 — .876
.276/.353/.525 — .878
The top line is his results from this season. The next line is from Beltran’s final 160 PA of 2010, once he shook off the rust. The .854 OPS line are the combined totals of 2009-10, when he essentially had a season’s worth of PAs (612). The final two lines are what he did in 2008 and 2007. Or, we can present it another way:
.286/.357/.524 — .881
.285/.371/.499 — .870
Here, the top line is this year while the bottom line are Beltran’s marks from 2007-2010. He’s hit for more power but has not gotten on base like he has in the recent past. But the overall results by OPS are right in line with what we would expect.
On the negative side, while these results seem to match up very well with latter-day Beltran, none of the projection systems on FanGraphs thought he would do this well over an entire season. The Bill James forecast, frequently considered to be the most “optimistic” one out there, had Beltran with a .274/.369/.478 line.
ZiPS was the most pessimistic, with an .801 OPS forecast while the James projection was the top, with an .847 mark. I asked ZiPS creator Dan Szymborski about the Beltran forecast and here’s what he said:
“Injuries are always an X factor for projection systems as they always throw a monkeywrench into the works. It’s a problem for people making non-statistical projections as well. With no two injuries being exactly the same and people healing at different rates, we’re likely to have pretty large error bars for injured players for the forseeable futures.”
So, given this information, we should not be surprised when a player returning from injury exceeds what all of the projection systems forecasted. Injured players are a known trouble spot for forecasters.
Taking into account all of the information we know, I feel like Beltran can continue to hit this well for the rest of the season, assuming he stays healthy.
Now I just hope he does it while wearing a Mets uniform.
Lets not get blinded with passion here. Has Beltran always been an awesome player, yup. Is he still an offensive threat, yup. But he’s slower, older and more injury-prone.
Keeping in mind we can’t offer him arbitration as per his contract, I see two situations playing out – all depending on how the team plays. If the mets are in contention for the division, they’ll probably hold onto him for as long as possible, maybe even for a waiver trade. If they’re clearly not in the running, we’ll probably see him go in July.
Who knows, maybe the mets sign him for a smaller deal in the off-season and he stays in Flushing…
Yeah, he’s older and slower. He’s not going to steal bases and he’s not going to put up a .982 OPS like he did in 2006. But he’s still a valuable commodity if he’s posting an .881 OPS like he currently has.
Let’s say he falls off his current pace but continues to stay healthy. Let’s give him an .850 OPS at the trading deadline. What do you have to get in return to make trading him away worthwhile? Plus, how much salary are you willing to assume in a trade? Are we angry if the Mets take an org filler type guy in return for Beltran and 50% salary relief?
Everyone keeps saying – trade him for prospects. But I think we need to be realistic in what we can expect from an old guy with bad knees, a monster contract and no draft pick compensation.
I didn’t say lets be fools about this though. If the best we’re going to get is 50 percent salary relief and a career minor leaguer for a Beltran that’s hitting .280 and on pace for 20 HR and 100 RBI, I would pass on that and look for something else. If he’s putting up those numbers though and the team is clearly out of it (tough to say after winning their third straight today), they should still consider trading him.
Trading him at the very end of the monster contract, if he’s putting up great offensive numbers and not expected to run could still be profitable for the team, if they do it right. Or… they could just make it easy and win the division 😉
So Mike, you are saying that is tough to say (that is, “believe”) the Mets will be out of it in September based on the fact that they’ve won the last three games?
I believe they won’t win all of their remaining games, just like I didn’t think they’ll lose all of their games when the slide was happening. I still think they’ll finish around .500 with at least 80 wins.