The Metropolitan: A night of grotesque baseball
Presenting... the worst game of the year so far
Good Morning,
While we would never tell you to skip a game recap, if you scroll quickly past the details of last night’s game, in order to read about the positive signs we saw from Francisco Lindor last night, we will forgive you.
And for those who are suckers for pain, let’s get into it.
⚾️ IN SHORT: It’s ironic the Mets were playing the Cubs last night because they looked like the Bad News Bears, forgetting just about every baseball fundamental in trying to field their positions while losing 16-4. David Peterson started and received the loss, the bullpen gave up a lot of runs, Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor looked good at the plate, but the story of the night was the terrible defense. [Box Score]
🔑 KEY MOMENT: Before the game completely blew up, the Mets were protecting a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the 4th with runners on 1st and 2nd when a ground ball hit to J.D. Davis looked to be an inning-ending double play, but instead turned into an error and left the bases loaded. This play only opened the flood gates.
🤦♂️ IT GETS WORSE: After Peterson walked in the tying run, David Bote hit a soft flare to right field that somehow fell in-between Michael Conforto and Jeff McNeil. Conforto then made a wild throw to home plate, allowing two runners to advance to second and third. The score had reached 6-2 by the time Francisco Lindor joined the miscue party, turning an inning-ending ground ball into a botched pick-up and errant throw to allow another Cubs run to score. By the end of the inning, a 2-1 lead had turned into a 7-2 deficit thanks to three official errors and a few more bad plays.
🙃 AND IT GETS WORSE: In the 5th inning, a slow ground ball up the middle turned into a double after Lindor and McNeil couldn’t decide which player should field it. Trevor Hildenberger relieved Robert Gsellman (who gave up 4 runs, 2 earned) and turned the game into a real laugher by walking three batters and serving up a grand slam to Javier Báez, who has 31 strikeouts in 64 at-bats this season.
3 TAKEAWAYS
❶ FUNDAMENTALS: It sounds cliché until you commit 4 errors and give up 16 runs in a game that had Gary Cohen thinking it was an hour later than it really was on the east coast, but the Mets need to do the simple things right if they want to compete for the division title. Their roster has some inconvenient pieces on defense, but they are still major league players who should be able to make routine plays. Remember, it wasn’t just J.D. Davis booting the ball out there last night, it was Conforto and Lindor, too.
❷ SOMETHING GOOD: It looked for a minute like the Mets might crawl back into the contest after falling behind 7-2. Pete Alonso hit a moonshot that just landed in someone’s front yard in New York to briefly make the score 7-4. Other than that, the silver lining of the night came from Lindor at the plate, who hit his first home run as a Met in the 1st inning and ended up with three hits, which we will talk about in a bit.
❸ FUGGEDABOUTIT! The beauty of baseball is there is always another game waiting for you the next day. Francisco Lindor told reporters after the game that he thinks the Mets can learn from their early struggles, “It's not good that we're losing games. Let's not get that mixed up. But it's great that it's happening now, because we're continuing to learn, we're continuing to know each other.”
🧑🏫 SOUND SMART: Before utility man Luis Guillorme found his way to the mound in the 8th inning (giving up two runs on three hits and one walk), the last position player to pitch for the Mets was Todd Frazier last year. Guillorme pitched earlier last season, as well.
⏭ NEXT UP: Joey Lucchesi (0-1, 5.40 ERA) will try to salvage the Mets’ dignity tonight by escaping Chicago with a split of the series. After a rough first inning in Colorado on Saturday, the lefty was able to get outs by commanding his “churve” both in and out of the strike zone. The Cubs will throw 28-year old righty Trevor Williams (2-1, 5.02 ERA), who spent all of his career in Pittsburgh before this season.
😟 UNHELPFUL: With their bats continuing to run cold this series, the Mets took batting practice yesterday afternoon at Wrigley Field. It was the first time in eight days, per Anthony DiComo.
⛑ NIMMO: Brandon Nimmo did not start last night, because he had a stiff right hip. Rojas said he was available off the bench.
⚾️ PITCHING IN: Luis Guillorme’s pitching appearance elevated his career ERA to 9.00. He had thrown a scoreless inning last year, before surrendering two runs last night.
🎖PERSONAL PRIDE: To make things more challenging against Guillorme, righty Javy Baez batted from the left side against him, flying out to deep left-center field.
⬇️ STAND DOWN: The Mets lost a game in the standings to all of their NL East rivals, as each of them won their games yesterday.
📉 RUN DOWN: While they’re still in first place, the Mets have allowed 12 more runs than they've scored this season.
A deeper meaning behind Lindor’s HR?
🧓 by Jeffrey Bellone
Buried beneath the mess of last night’s game was a rare diamond in the form of Francisco Lindor hitting a home run off a change-up. It was the first offspeed pitch he has sent into the outfield seats since before any of us knew what COVID-19 was way back in September 2019. He followed that up with a hit off a slider later in the game, which happened to be his first knock of the season off a breaking pitch.
Why do these details matter?
If you are a diehard baseball fan or had Lindor on your fantasy team while he played in Cleveland, you probably knew that he has always had fits against breaking pitches. This isn’t abnormal. In fact, most damage across the league is done against fastballs. Hitters slug about 100 points better on pitches that are mostly straight than those that twist and break.
For all his troubles over the first few weeks of the season, Lindor has continued to hit fastballs. He isn’t driving the ball with power, but his hard hit rate is well over 50%, and the production will eventually come.
What matters for the $341 million man is how much he struggles against pitches that aren’t fastballs. It’s one thing to hit .220 against sliders, it’s another to hit .122, as he did last year (or to have just one hit on 34 pitches in the 2021 early going).
While it would be easy to chalk up Lindor’s poor start in New York to an incredibly small sample size, we actually have a large amount of data to tell us that curves and sliders aren’t his favorite pitch to hit, a trend that has been prominent throughout his career, and has followed a downward trajectory since 2019. His most recent game notwithstanding, his current slump is partly a continuation of what caused him to have his worst offensive season of his career in 2020.
What is different this year is the degree to which he is struggling against breaking stuff and the fact that he hadn’t squared up on an offspeed pitch until yesterday. His hard hit rate has typically hovered around 30% on these offerings, but this year, the only slow pitch he has hit over 95 MPH was last night’s home run.
So what do you do when you can only mash the fastball? You try to find counts where you might see one, which is why Lindor started to become more aggressive on the first pitch over the past few seasons.
We saw a glimpse of this on Tuesday night against Cubs closer Craig Kimbrel, who throws a devastating knuckle curve. With the bases loaded, Lindor swung at the first pitch, perhaps hoping Kimbrel would try to sneak in a fastball for a first-pitch strike. But instead, he got that knuckle curve, and rolled it over softly to the first base side.
Kimbrel isn’t the only pitcher to realize Lindor is searching for an early fastball. You can see in the table below how the book is out on the swith-hitter and pitchers have responded to his aggressive first-pitch approach by throwing him more breaking balls.
The good news is the star shortstop is trying to find a happy medium. Overall, he is swinging less at the first pitch (he took three pitches before smashing Davies’ change-up for a round-tripper last night). Meanwhile, he is swinging more often at sliders and less often at change-ups, while dramatically reducing his swinging strike rate on both.
He also seems to have a keener eye this season, swinging less at borderline pitches in the shadow zone, which has helped him stay ahead in counts and earn more walks.
BOTTOM LINE: I will leave what I wrote before the game last night to show why there is something to feel good about from that loss:
If you want a hint that Lindor is starting to turn the corner, look for his performance against breaking and offspeed pitches. His hits against fastballs will come. But the difference between measuring up to the high benchmark he has set for himself and having a sub-par season comes down to, frankly, just not being terrible against every other pitch type. Let’s check back in a few weeks to see if he builds a better rhythm once the Mets get back to playing everyday.
⚾️ Max Scherzer fanned nine, over six scoreless innings yesterday to lead the Nats to a 1-0 victory over the Cardinals.
⚾️ Ronald Acuna Jr. is close to rejoining the Braves after sitting out this week due to an abdominal strain. He could return to action tomorrow.
⚾️ Padres starter Dinelson Lamet had to leave his first start of the season early last night, and will undergo an MRI, after feeling tightness in his right forearm.
🔗 Mets clobbered by Cubs on another cold night at Wrigley Field, by Deesha Thosar, Daily News: “The Mets, despite having allowed 14 unearned runs in 13 games, were somehow still in first place after what will go down as one of their worst losses of the year.”
🔗 An underrated aspect of the Mets, by Ken Rosenthal, The Athletic ($): “Speaking of Matz, he is yet another example of how well the Mets have drafted under scouting directors (Rudy Terrasas 2006-10), Chad MacDonald (2011), Tommy Tanous (2012-16) and Marc Tramuta (2017-20). Over the past eight years, Baseball America ranked the Mets’ farm system an average of 17th out of 30. But considering the players the Mets drafted who are now on their roster or with other clubs, the publication might have sold the franchise a bit short.”
And… we leave you with this fun note about the airspace around Citi Field:
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