Handicapping the Offense

Morning Dose: Monday, June 23

☀️ GOOD MORNING:

There was a time when the Mets had four starters with an ERA below 3.00 over a third into the season for the first time since the days of Gooden, Darling, El Sid and Ed Lynch.

That felt like a dream, because it was a dream. Eventually the rotation was going to wake up and realize they aren’t Doc and Ronnie, but Griffin Canning and Tylor Megill. And when you aren’t pitching like the best team in baseball, with a streaky lineup and inconsistent defense, you aren’t going to win like the best team in baseball. We knew this roster wasn’t designed to win over 100 games, I kept telling you a regression was coming, but I never expected it to come all at once.

Yet, here we are. The Mets are 1–5 in this current 10-game stretch against division rivals, they have lost eight of nine, including the unthinkable, losing a game when Francisco Lindor homers, and if you sat through ESPN’s Sunday Night Telecast, which can be taxing enough on its own, it’s hard to wake up this morning and feel hopeful about a team that suddenly can’t hit, pitch or catch.

🗣️ Mark from Philly sums up the fan sentiment perfectly from the chat:

I am so tired of hearing so called experts tell us that things will turn around and that this is a good team that is just going through a bad stretch. They’re not good. The “talented” players are too streaky and the rest of the lineup is made up of guys who simply can’t hit major league pitching. The starting pitching is a mess and the bullpen is not dependable. I’m sorry but I don’t see this getting better without major changes.

We have talked about several of these points in the newsletter, breaking down trade deadline targets last week. The rotation is in survival mode while they wait for Frankie Montas to remember how to pitch and for Sean Manaea and eventually Kodai Senta to rejoin the group. David Stearns will have to decide if something extra is needed to stabilize the starters, something more than a resurgence from the likes of Canning and Blackburn.

The offense is a bit trickier to handicap. We will talk about that today. My biggest concern is the number of “undefined” players. We know Lindor, Juan Soto, Pete Alonso, even Brandon Nimmo will probably hit. The problem is there are too many players in the lineup who haven’t defined the back of their baseball cards. We don’t know if they will end up figuring things out, or not. That creates a wider variance for where the offense can land at a time when both the rotation and bullpen are struggling.

💊 A CURE? While a four-game set against the Braves feels like cruel and unjust punishment at the moment, it’s also an opportunity. The Amazins made the Braves look like world beaters last week, and a peek at their rotation and roster makes you believe it. But something isn’t quite right in Atlanta this season. They followed up their sweep of the Mets by dropping two of three to the last-place Miami, while losing Chris Sale to a fractured rib cage. The opportunity is there for Carlos Mendoza’s group to flex the home-field muscle they have hardened since the end of last season and right the ship before WFAN turns into New York’s de facto emergency line.

☕️ Grab your coffee for your morning dose of Mets Fix!

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The offense has picked the worst possible time to go cold. After the pitching staff carried the team through the middle of June, it would be nice for the lineup to pick up the slack. If you think about how the Dodgers have survived a litany of arm injuries, it’s by winning many games 8–7.

Putting aside Saturday’s outburst, the Mets have scored 17 runs over their past eight losses, while hitting .218 as a team.

We are learning that if Pete Alonso doesn’t hit like Aaron Judge Jr., the offense struggles. You can map the team’s record pretty closely to Alonso’s 7-game rolling wOBA below. Those two dips correspond to the two worst losing stretches of the season.

Entering play this weekend, Alonso was 8-for-his-last-36 (.222) with 11 strikeouts and only 3 walks and 3 RBIs. He joined the hit brigade on Saturday, before going a quiet 0-for-4 with two strikeouts on Sunday.

That lost production is devastating to a lineup that features more hitters content on getting on base via walks or singles than slugging their way to runs scored. The Mets’ 12 extra base hits during their seven-game losing streak was the second fewest in that span to the Pirates. People complain about hitting with runners in scoring position; herein lies the problem — it’s hard to score runs when you have to piece together several singles in a row, versus capitalizing on a big swing.