Good Morning,
After the GM offered support for the coaching staff and the owner promised to be “straight” with the fans, the Mets looked like the team they were supposed to be before everything fell apart this season.
I can’t imagine there have been many good nights of sleep for Buck Showalter or Billy Eppler these past few months, but maybe they got one last night.
The decision to pitch David Peterson paid off. He’s a different pitcher when he can command multiple pitches for strikes. Either he lucked out against a weak-hitting Brewers lineup, or it’s a sign the coaching staff actually knows how to fix things.
You knew it was an extra good night when even Daniel Vogelbach joined the home-run party.
A fun game doesn’t make up for the countless miserable ones preceding it. The Mets are still dead in the water, even if the corpse floated to the top for some daylight.
We have a lot to talk about this morning, so let’s get into it!
Speaking at length to reporters ahead of owner Steve Cohen’s press conference tomorrow, GM Billy Eppler made clear the coaching staff will not take the fall for a flawed and underperforming roster he is mostly responsible for assembling.
“I constructed the roster,” he said, via SNY. “We put this team together, largely, last year and supplemented with pieces we lost in the winter time but ultimately this is the club we have right now. I think we expect them to be able to do more and they expect that of themselves.”
🔹 Buck’s job is safe. “Buck's had a good amount of adversity heaped his way,” Eppler said in reference to his manager. “I think Buck's handled that adversity and he's the guy to get us back on track.”
🔹 Lindor strongly supports Buck. “He is our leader,” Lindor told Andy Martino of SNY. “He is the one who holds us accountable day in and day out the most. And he’s the perfect guy to go through what we’re going through right now. He has helped quiet the noise a lot.”
🔹 Hefner and Barnes still carry weight. Eppler offered support for the entire coaching staff, including pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and hitting coach Jeremy Barnes. Adding to Eppler’s comments, in his latest newsletter, Anthony DiComo noted how high the Mets are on both coaches.
The team specifically rejiggered its staff this past offseason to accommodate Barnes, who had at least one offer from another Major League team. The 37-year-old Hefner, meanwhile, was the only holdover from before Eppler’s time as GM. The new regime valued Hefner immensely because of both his analytical savvy and his relationships with players.
🔹 Will they be sellers at the deadline? Eppler hedged when asked about his approach at the deadline. “We have a decent amount or runway before the deadline. We hope we can change the story. If we can, we can add. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to create other opportunities and see what else exists out there. A lot of the focus is on the present and how we can attack each day.”
🔹 Top prospects are safe. Like last year, Eppler will not forfeit the future for near-term gain. “There were some situations where we talked about those players with other clubs, but it was gonna be for players that we would control for multiple years going forward. When that didn’t come to light, we weren’t going to move those guys for rental players. I think our approach will be the same.”
🔹 Could Max Scherzer become a trade chip? Several industry sources believe Scherzer would waive his no-trade clause “for the right situation,” per Anthony DiComo, who later tweeted that Scherzer is committed to winning with the Mets.
🍎 WHAT THIS MEANS: This has always been an organization in transition with a Grand-Canyon-sized gap of pitching talent in their farm system. They tried to make up for it by spending on the highest end of the free agent market. It didn’t work out. They can’t just snap their fingers and fix a problem like that. The same can be said of their everyday players. While there are opportunities to make moves on the margins, the ability of this team to turn into a near-term and long-term contender relies on the core pieces of Lindor, Alonso, McNeil, and Nimmo, along with the budding prospects of Baty, Álvarez, Mauricio and Vientos. It’s going to take patience and prudent forward-thinking moves to put this organization back on a winning path.
“I will be doing a press conference [on Tuesday] before the game. You will get it from me straight,” Cohen tweeted.
We will no longer be uncertain, to borrow a phrase from the hit TV show Billions. Steve Cohen will address the media before tonight’s game. I can only imagine the mentions on his Twitter feed over the past several weeks. The billionaire owner has been mostly quiet as his team has fallen out of contention. His last tweet coming after an ugly win on June 14, “That was a crazy game. Too many mental mistakes but I will take it.”
🔹 What will he say? Billy Eppler spoiled any chance of a surprise, but we knew the second Cohen announced he planned on talking to the media that it meant the Mets were staying the course.
We pretty much already know what he is going to say, too:
He will voice his frustration with the season.
He will say he would make a change if he felt it would make a difference.
He will offer an honest anecdote about wanting to do more as a means to endear himself to the fans calling for significant change.
He will then explain why blowing things up won’t fix things.
Essentially, he will say the same thing he said a few weeks ago to Joel Sherman of the NY Post:
“I don’t think [blowing things up] solves anything, other than it gives people a one-day story. But it doesn’t really solve anything. There’s plenty of blame to go around from a performance point of view. So blowing up, I’m not sure it solves anything. It would demonstrate, ‘Oh, he really cares. He’s one of us.’ But the reality is it’s not going to solve our problems. And I think in some ways it can be demotivating.”
🔹 A patient approach. Cohen exploded onto the ownership scene making early headlines with a massive payroll that would make even George Steinbrenner blush. It’s clear he doesn’t want to be known as an owner who is as brash as he is lavish. He made his fortune as a calculated manager of risk. He is going to run his baseball team the same way. Whether it’s right or wrong, firing a manager who was recently named the NL Manager of the Year could come across as a “panic” move. As I will talk about in a bit, it also probably doesn’t move the needle much.
🔹 Fate of the front office comes later. As for upper management, you don’t overhaul a front office in the middle of the season, especially only weeks before the draft and trade deadline. It will be interesting to see if he provides any hints about the direction he expects GM Billy Eppler to take in managing assets on the roster.
🫣 It’s ok, Peterson found his groove
Mets fans were afraid to watch last night with David Peterson and his bloated ERA back on the mound for a spot start. The first inning didn’t calm their nerves, after he loaded the bases with one out. But after inducing a double play from Owen Miller, Peterson settled in and pitched six shutout innings, striking out five walking only one batter after the two he walked in the first.
Before the game, Eppler explained why the team believed in Peterson over perhaps a more deserving candidate like Joey Lucchesi::
“We've seen some encouraging things with locations and the shape of the pitches,” he said, via The Athletic. “We're hoping to give David another run. Some of the components that drive success — strikeout rate, walk rate — those things are there.”
We’ve talked about it one million times in this newsletter. Peterson is a different pitcher when he can locate his secondary pitches, a point that is true with pretty much any hurler. On Tuesday, Peterson pounded the strike zone with his sinker, keeping his slider in his back pocket, while landing his changeup for several called strikes and placing seven of his 10 curveballs in the zone. As we have also talked about, the Mets are a different team if Peterson can look like that. For all the attention on the top of the rotation, it is spot starts like last night that partly separates this year’s squad from last season.
The Amazins are 22–3 when their starter pitches at least six innings, and 14–40 when they don’t. That sums up the season right there.
🔥 POWER DISPLAY: With Peterson putting up zeroes on the scoreboard, the Mets’ offense put on a power display at the plate. Brandon Nimmo hit two home runs, Francisco Lindor added another, and Mr. Vogelbach put the game out of reach with a two-run shot in the sixth.
Add Nimmo to the list of people showing support for the work of hitting coach Jeremy Barnes:
“I think it’s just the work with Jeremy, we did it in the offseason, we’ve been doing it during the season to clean up my swing a little bit,” Nimmo said, via the NY Post. “Kind of clean the fat out of it, make it a little more direct and make better decisions. Even though I’ve been a good decision-maker, I’ve had room for improvement on that.”
◼️ Francisco Álvarez has been working with hitting coach Jeremy Barnes to adjust his hips and keep himself from opening up too quickly as he tries to fight out of a slump that has seen him go homerless in 12 games. “I don’t think [pitchers] actually made that many adjustments to how they’ve been pitching me. I think it’s just, I’ve been missing a lot,” Alvarez told the NY Post through team translator Alan Suriel. “I haven’t been coming up with the big hits, but they’ve been executing their pitches. That’s what it comes down to.
◼️ Former Met Eduardo Escobar became an American citizen. “I will always be grateful to this country where it has given me a lot in my career,” he wrote on Instagram.
⏭️ WHAT’S NEXT
◼️ Kodai Senga will look to give the Mets another six-inning start. The Japanese native has pitched at least six innings in six of his 14 starts, reaching the fifth 12 times. He will be opposed by Wade Miley, who hasn’t allowed an earned run over his past two starts.
Drew Smith will likely be unavailable tonight after back-to-back high pitch count games. However, the high-leverage trio of David Robertson, Adam Ottavino and Brooks Raley should be ready to pitch.
Much of the feedback we have received over the past few days in response to my argument for firing Buck has focused on whether doing so would be an “emotional” decision. How can you fire a manager three months into a season after he recently won 101 games and was honored as the NL Manager of the Year? And how can you fire a manager that has been dealt a flawed roster, particularly in the bullpen? These are valid counterpoints, as my colleague Peter Kauffmann gave voice to in yesterday’s issue.
But I want to make sure we don’t lose sight of the point I feel strongest about in this conversation, and that is, managers are overrated. As I noted in my original argument, I don’t think managers don’t have a large impact on wins and losses, which is why they are expendable and why it’s difficult to make an analytical case for keeping or firing them. It’s impossible to completely isolate the indirect effect a manager has on individual and team performance. Therefore, we are left with proxy metrics, like a team’s win/loss record, or bullpen performance.
🔹 What impact do we think managers have on performance? Using the best statistical techniques available shows minimal impact. Analysis by FiveThirtyEight found 95% of managers are worth +/- two wins over the course of a season. That leaves from for outliers. But in most cases, a manager isn’t moving the needle beyond what you can attribute to causes outside of their control.
🔹 So what’s the point of firing Buck? Replacing Buck would have mostly been a symbolic gesture. It’s offering accountability for this mess of a season that will likely result in the main culprits for the team’s failure in the front office to lose their job at a later date. It’s believing in the possibility that there are psychological impacts on player performance that we haven’t truly identified yet. At a point in the season where the team literally has nothing more to lose, it’s trying something different that has minimal negative consequences, outside of potential PR fallout for what some would describe as a “panic” move.
🔹 I thought you said changing managers improves team performance. I shared a study yesterday from Fox Sports that compared results of teams before and after changing a manager in the middle of the season. As a astute reader pointed out, that study only tells part of the story. How do we know if teams simply regressed to the mean after making a change without the manager impacting performance at all? What about the teams that didn’t make a change?
To help answer those questions, I found another study published in The Park Place Economist in 2010 that took a more scientific approach in looking at the cause and effect of managerial turnover on team performance.
Based on the results of the multiple regressions and analyses described above, it is clear that on average a manager is fired when his team is performing poorly. It is not as clear; however, what the impact of this change is on performance.
The average comparison of mean winning percentages across teams that experienced a within season change compared to those who completed a whole season with one manager implies that a new manager is ineffective in boosting winning percentage in the year they took over. On the other hand, when comparing the winning percentage of a new manager to its predecessor, it seems as if the manager is able to increase performance, even if only a few games. Although this data shows more teams saw improved performance, those who suffered did so by a much larger margin than those who saw increases in winning percentage. In order to fully interpret this finding, it is imperative to determine what number of extra wins is significant.
Overall, the change in winning percentage, whether positive or negative, is seemingly inconsequential showing that a change in management has no significant impact on team performance.
Hopefully, we’ve covered this topic from enough angles to inform your own opinion about whether the Mets should have moved on from Buck, or not. We love seeing your thoughts in the comments, keep them coming!
🔗 The long-term reason Steve Cohen isn’t making rash Mets changes, by Joel Sherman, NY Post: “You might recall that after the 2020 and 2021 season, Cohen had difficulty recruiting the best and brightest to run baseball operations. There were many reasons the top candidates were often rejecting even an interview. I heard multiple forms that the book “Black Edge” was being widely circulated and that the unflattering portrait of Cohen running his hedge fund was reverberating. Cohen also was tweeting with regularity and executives worried about leaving more comfortable environs and suddenly being Twitter fodder for their boss.”
🔗 Mets trying to find formula for consistent success — like the Yankees, by Mike Vaccaro, NY Post: “It’s understandable why this sky-is-always-falling-somewhere narrative exists: it almost makes it easier to bear as a fan. For 86 years an element of Red Sox fandom took comfort in the belief that God Himself was furious for the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Even more logically, for the latter half of 108 years, Cubs fans blamed Billy Sianis’ goat for the many misfortunes that befell the North Siders. Blame the fates. It’s easier that way.”
🔗 Wednesday sure to be painful accounting for Mets, Steve Cohen, by David Lennon, Newsday: “We understand why Cohen may not feel like firing somebody right this minute. He’s still relatively new at this baseball thing and doesn’t have quite the same wealth of knowledge to draw from as his hedge-fund gig. Plus, firing either Showalter or Eppler right now probably wouldn’t have much discernible benefit in-season, and likely throw the organization into further disarray.”
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The best stat for staying the course is the record for +/-6 innings pitched by SPs. The long term plan they've discussed is designed to develop or acquire enough SPs or RPs to address that, just hopefully not at such an expense or with people who carry lots of variance in production. As long as there's a a continued level of accountability to what is or is not working (by all parties) and not a bunch of platitudes or deflections promising something different instead, I'm fine with however the season goes from here. Don't need anyone to be fired, just own there's a problem. That being said I'm never going to like Buck, but I can grumble less going forward, lol.
Eppler owning he built a roster that isn't working and being open to selling at the deadline and not hoping of injured players to come back to justify inaction is enough a change in the trade winds for me from ownership/FO that tells me Sandy's hands aren't on the steering wheel anymore and I have confidence we can move forward.
I don’t think the 529 WAR analysis of managers is that useful or that it applies here because it is an aggregate metric. What matters are the big individual moments/decisions in a big games and Buck consistently fails at these (Orioles in 2016); end of 2022 Mets; and the horrible loss to the Phillies a few days ago. Buck might win the popularity contest with players but he has never won a World Series. I don’t think it is a wise investment to expect a different outcome with this Mets team.