Good Morning,
We made it! Spring Training has officially arrived. The Mets will have their first full workout today. And we are only 10 days away from the first Grapefruit League game against the Marlins on February 25, which will be broadcast on SNY, with Gary, Ron and Keith, fresh off his new contract.
The boss is headed down to Florida this weekend. It’s time to play some baseball!
Today, I will showcase a new metric to highlight how Edwin Díaz has turned into an elite closer.
But first, let’s catch you up on the latest news.
☀️ OPENING DAY STARTER: Pull up a stool. This makes for great sports-bar debate: Who should start on Opening Day, Scherzer or Verlander? While manager Buck Showalter was non-committal on the topic, he did note that he will likely start the season by splitting the two up in the rotation, so one can pitch the season opener in Miami, while the other can take the ball in the home opener.
“It’s a good problem — it’s not a problem. It’s a good challenge to have,” Showalter said of deciding who gets the ball on Day 1. “We might surprise you.”
⛑️ HEALTH: “So far so good.” That’s the latest word on Starling Marte, who had core muscle surgery during the offseason.
😎 EXPECTATIONS: After a headline-grabbing offseason, Buck is trying his best to manage expectations, while keeping his eye on the ultimate prize.
“We’re trying to be as good as we’re capable of being — that’s the precedent we’re trying to set here,” Showalter said. “What it is? I’m as curious as you are to find out what it is. One hundred games is hard. Is our season a failure if we win 90-whatever, whatever number you want to come up with? It’s about the endgame.”
📈 PROJECTIONS: Speaking of expectations, the latest PECOTA projections are out and they have the Mets winning around 96 games, five better than the Braves (six better than the Phillies). Only the Yankees and Dodgers are projected to win more games.
🇯🇵 SENGA WATCH: Pitching coach Jeremy Hefner is taking extra care to help Kodai Senga adjust to the major leagues.
“I’ve had Japanese pitchers, and it’s different,” Showalter told reporters on Tuesday. “The baseball’s different. The dirt’s different. Even the wind — a lot of their stadiums don’t have a wind issue at all. Their baseballs, not just the size but the grip.
Showalter added that they will try to “shorten up a lot of his workload by the workday he has in between” as one way to help him get acclimated.
🗓️ NEW SCHEDULE: Showalter is ready to see some new opponents this season. If you remember, besides all the on-field rule changes, teams will play a more “balanced” schedule that replaces several divisional games with interleague play. The Mets will play every team at least once this season.
“We’re still playing 52 times [in the division],” he said. “You get to see the Marlins as much as you want to see them in New York.”
📺 TV SCHEDULE: SNY and PIX11 will carry 14 exhibition games, starting on February 25. Mark your calendars using this handy graphic:
ESPN will broadcast two more games on February 27 against the Cardinals (1:00 pm) and February 28th versus the Astros (1:00 pm). Full details on the SNY telecasts can be found here.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. At least that’s what Edwin Díaz’s philosophy seems to be entering this spring:
And how can you blame him?! The man is coming off one of the best seasons we have ever seen from a closer.
The flame-throwing right-hander has been a two-pitch pony since he ditched his sinker back in 2017. What has changed and what has turned him into the game’s best ninth-inning stopper is how consistent he has become in executing on both of those pitches. We are used to seeing players take a leap by trying something different — i.e. figuring out a third or new pitch to set up the rest. With Diaz, his stuff has always been good. He simply needed to perfect his current offerings, which he has done to incredible success.
To highlight this point, I want to introduce everyone to a new metric by Pitcher List called Pitch Level Value (PLV). Released earlier this month, PLV aims to quantify each pitch with a grade, regardless of the context. This tells us how often a fastball turned into a meatball, or how often a slider devastatingly hit its mark.
Each pitch is graded on a 0–10 scale, with 5 being the average. Pitches can then be binned into Quality Pitches, or those with a PLV > 5.5; Bad Pitches, or those with a PLV < 4.5; and Average Pitches, everything in between.
When Díaz first arrived in New York and pundits were quick to declare they would “NEVER trust him in a big spot,” it was because there were too many instances when he faltered under pressure. No matter how many clean innings he had, everyone remembered the messy ones, even after he rebounded off his dreadful 2019 campaign.
What happened in these moments? Wasn’t Díaz throwing the same fastball/slider combination that he is so confidently talking about in Port St. Lucie? He was. He just wasn’t executing on those pitches. PLV allows us to better quantify this point.
Unfortunately, we don’t have PLV data from his rough 2019 season, but as you can see in the table above, the gap between “quality pitches” and “bad pitches” has steadily increased over the past three years. Put simply, several sliders that could have turned into damage in 2020 have become quality or at least average offerings of late. This is how a reliever who had a 1.75 ERA during the pandemic-shortened season was somehow even better last year.
The trend is the same with his fastball. In fact, there are few relievers who have as wide of a gap between quality and bad offerings as Díaz did with his heater in 2022.
🔻 How does it all add up? We don’t need complicated metrics to tell us Edwin Díaz is a dominant closer. But it’s interesting to see how the numbers match the eye test. We will return to Pitcher List’s new metric throughout the season. I wanted to at least introduce the concept today. The conclusion is simple: take a pitcher with two elite offerings that complement each other like peanut butter & jelly and boost the consistency of locating them in optimal spots, and you get someone who is going to strike a lot of people out.
◾️ MLB will be cracking down on balks to help create clear delivery starts for the pitch timer.
◾️ The bases are bigger! We have photo evidence:
🔗 Mets’ biggest Opening Day conundrum isn’t even a problem, by Jon Heyman, NY Post: “Welcome to that rare spring camp without controversy. Or even competition, really. The Mets’ first-day press conference debate here was whether incumbent superstar Max Scherzer or incoming superstar Justin Verlander will start Opening Day, and while it was left officially unsettled, who in the name of Roger Craig or Craig Swan gives a rip?”
🔗 How does the 2023 team stack up? Is a 6-man rotation coming? by Tim Britton, The Athletic ($): “If you’re setting the over/under for regular-season wins at 101, I am taking the under. The Mets were one of the oldest teams in baseball last season (third-oldest average age of hitters and oldest average age of pitchers, according to Baseball-Reference), and they have gotten older (both via outside additions and, like all of us, via the general passage of time). They were also remarkably healthy last year, especially within their position player group and the bullpen.”
And we close this one out with Buck Showalter’s full press conference from yesterday…
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Alex Cora is right; the new bases do look like pizza boxes. #LFGM
I was thrilled to see PECOTA thinks the Mets will easily better Atlanta and Philly this season. Until I read they think the Dodgers will do better than the Mets. The Dodgers are a shadow of last years squad. They have question marks all over. 2B, SS, CF, bench, bullpen (who’s their closer?) and starting rotation: Urias, Gonsolin, Kershaw, May, and Syndergaard. And no one behind them. Nothing.