How good are the Mets’ depth starters?
When you’re an economist like me, sometimes a random thought about your favorite baseball team can turn into 19 lines of code and several rows of data in an effort to try to explain your idea to normal people. For instance, yesterday I tweeted:
But rather than just let my thought exist in the digital ether like a sane person, I found myself trying to figure out whether my tweet-as-you-think-it point could be proven by data. Obviously Jordan Yamamoto and Joey Lucchesi don’t have the pedigree of Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May, but how do the Mets’ surplus starters stack up relative to the rest of the league?
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To answer that question, I pulled the depth charts of every team and sorted their rotations by their projected start totals from FanGraphs. I then isolated the #6-8 starters from each club and made a few adjustments so an injured player, such as Luis Severino with the Yankees or Chris Sale with the Red Sox, wasn’t grouped as a depth starter. For the Mets, I put Noah Syndergaard in their Top-5 and considered David Peterson, Joey Lucchesi, and Jordan Yamamoto as their depth starters.
From there, I mapped each name to their 2021 projections using the mix of ZiPS and Steamer provided by the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections. I also pulled in some ranking data that we will get to in a minute.
This is what I get for tweeting.
So what did I find?
Let’s start by looking at which teams project to have the best group of depth starters this season.
Deciding which statistic to sort by is the tricky part. I didn’t want to use WAR because it is based on an innings pitched assumption and I was more interested in finding the best pitchers among this group, regardless of opportunity. To try to account for this, I created a WAR200 value, which put each player’s WAR projection on a 200-inning basis. Using this number, the Mets #6-8 starters collectively rank 6th best in baseball.
If we use traditional ERA, the Mets rank 3rd best. So pretty good! But what has proven to be somewhat consistent in predicting future performance (which is a difficult task for pitchers) is looking at strikeouts compared to walks, a rate that drops the Mets to 15th overall—which is still reasonably impressive, especially when you consider it along with everything else.
What the table above doesn’t show, precisely, are the teams who have the highest top-end depth. What if you have really good #6 and #7 starters, but terrible options after that?
I could have added weights to the statistics above to account for this, but instead I decided to use Eno Sarris’ 2021 starting pitching rankings to find which teams have the best depth arms. While his list is made for fantasy purposes, it is still illustrative of the pitchers who have the highest quality stuff, solid command, and low injury risk. He uses those three criterion to rank 202 starting pitchers. Or the 199 pitchers between Jacob DeGrom, who tops his list, and Yamamoto and Lucchesi, who bottom out his ranking.
The Mets are one of three teams who have all three of their #6-8 starters included on the list. However, it’s hard to give them too much credit for literally having the final two names: #201 (Yamamoto) and #202 (Lucchesi).
To find the teams with the best #6 and #7 guys, I filtered on the top two depth starters for clubs with at least that many pitchers included in Sarris’ ranking, and averaged their relative position on the list to get a team ranking and came up with the table below.
Once again, we find the Mets score fairly high. The #6 / #7 combo of David Peterson and Jordan Yamamoto places the Amazins with the 8th best average duo ranking among depth starters ranked by Sarris.
So while my original thought that the Mets’ depth starters lag behind the top teams in the league is true, they are actually projected to perform a bit better than I guessed before diving into this exercise. And if we compare their depth to last season, they are in a much better position.
Lesson learned: From now on, I will test all my ideas through hours of data analysis before tweeting them. That’s how it works on Twitter, right?