The Metropolitan: A power move from MLB
Plus, all the spring training updates
Good Morning,
Today we’ll talk about how the Mets could be affected by MLB’s new “deadened” baseball for 2021. But we start with the news.
⏰ Catch me up in 60(ish) seconds…
⚾️ GAME RECAP: In Monday’s spring training contest, Francisco Lindor collected two base knocks, Jordan Yamamoto made his first spring start, J.D. Davis made a fielding miscue and 19-year-old Matt Allan showed off some heat in a 9-5 loss to the Nationals on Monday.
🤦♂️ ERRORS: The Mets have made 7 errors over the past two games, with four of them coming from third base options Davis (1) and Jeff McNeil (3).
SHIFTED: Davis committed a throwing error on Monday while he was shifted between first and second base, “My problem is never my hands, it’s always just the footwork and being able to create angles and work through balls,” Davis told reporters after the game. “Especially at the hot corner, you always gotta try and move your feet.”
🤕 SIDELINED: Veteran José Martínez, whom the Mets signed to a split contract in the offseason, has a torn meniscus in his left knee and will undergo surgery this weekend, which will sideline him for approximately four months.
IMPACT: While the injury is unfortunate, the Mets are well-equipped to move forward without Martinez as a bench piece. Since signing him early in the offseason as a right-handed platoon option who could potentially DH, we have learned the DH position won’t return to the NL this season, and the front office has since added Jonathan Villar, Kevin Pillar, and Albert Almora Jr. to solidify the bench.
🗣 INTEREST: Meanwhile, the Mets are one of the teams reportedly interested in 3B Maikel Franco, per Jon Heyman. The 28-year-old former Phillies prospect was non-tendered by the Royals after a decent 2020 campaign. While he could make for a right-handed depth piece on the roster, Tim Britton of The Athletic reports a deal with the Mets is unlikely at the moment.
🔥 YOUNG ARM: One of the Mets’ top pitching prospects, Matt Allan, made his Spring Training debut on Monday, tossing one inning, allowing 4 hits and an unearned run, and striking out a batter. Results aside, he touched 97 MPH on the radar gun.
⬆️ IMPROVED: Reliever Dellin Betances allowed an unearned run in one inning of work on Monday, an improvement over his disastrous spring debut, which we recently talked about in detail. His fastball command looked better yesterday.
VELOCITY: “I like his stuff better than last season,” a major league talent evaluator told the NY Post. “I think his velocity will tick up by Opening Day.”
👈 FACING LEFTIES: Outfielder Brandon Nimmo, who made a nice catch on Monday, is working overtime to improve his approach at the plate against lefties, gaining advice from Rockies legend Todd Helton:
“I feel like it [versus lefties] is a place I have an ability to improve. Purely based on repetition and I just need more of it. I need more sound advice and so when I get these opportunities, like with Todd [Helton], I want to soak it up like a sponge.”
🍎 COACHING: The St. Lucie Mets have announced their 2021 coaching staff. Reid Brignac will become the 19th manager in club history. His staff will include pitching coach Jerome Williams, hitting coach Tommy Joseph and bench coach Jay Pecci.
📚 March 9, 1963: The official Met theme song, Meet the Mets, is introduced to the public by songwriters Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz.
How MLB’s “deadened” new baseball will affect the Mets
🧓 by Jeffrey Bellone
For Mets fans, 2021 is supposed to represent the season of more: more payroll to spend, more fans in the stands, more wins, and hopefully, more tailgates and BBQs with friends and family, as conditions allow for easing of COVID-19 restrictions.
But one thing we might not see more of this season are home runs. In an effort to normalize the playing conditions that have led to power spikes in recent years, Major League Baseball is “deadening” the baseball, as explained by The Athletic who obtained a memo detailing the changes:
The MLB memo includes a footnote that says an independent lab found that fly balls that went over 375 feet lost one to two feet of batted ball distance with the new ball. That sounds like no big deal, but every 3.3 feet of distance increases the likelihood of a home run by ten percent. An analyst familiar with the physics and math of this situation said the relationship was linear enough to estimate that this change will reduce home run rates by around five percent.
What does this mean for the Mets?
Thanks to some great research by Max Bay from Baseball Prospectus and Dodgers Digest, we at least have an idea of how much a deadened ball would have impacted the players on the current roster and their home run totals over the past two seasons.
While it’s logical to believe that everyone would suffer relatively the same from a different baseball, it turns out some teams and players will be impacted more than others.
Why? Not everyone makes the same type of contact, and therefore, you can’t expect the same impact to every player, as Bay explains below:
Each batted ball event has certain qualities that make it more or less likely to result in a hit, most notably, those qualities are exit velocity (the speed of the ball of the bat), launch angle (the angle the ball projects into the air) and spray angle (left, center, right field, etc.). Those same batted ball qualities can be used to compute home run probability (xHR). If the construction of the ball changes from season to season, the same exit velocity, launch angle and spray angle will have different home run probabilities in different years.
Based on Bay’s model, we can see the estimated impact of the deadened ball for each major league team, and the players currently on the Mets’ roster would have lost ~8.5% of their big flies if the new ball had been used over the previous two seasons, which is slightly below league average.
The Mets are one of five teams who already store their balls in humidifiers, which should help to neutralize some of the year-to-year inconsistencies that lead to sudden power surges. The Athletic reports five more teams will do so in 2021.
If we look at individual players who could be impacted by the deadened ball, we find the Mets are also in pretty good shape.
Pete Alonso is a good example of a power hitter who would have lost some home runs because he hit so many, but the way he strikes the ball — as characterized by his exit velocity, launch angle, and pull direction — seems to indicate that he is less likely to lose home runs from the deadened ball than someone like Amed Rosario, who, ironically, is the player Bay estimates would have been the most impacted on a percentage basis.
While it seems like there’s always something to worry about if you are a Mets fan, the deadened baseball doesn’t appear to be one of them.
⚾️ Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo told the media yesterday that the team will make long-term extension offers to both Juan Soto and Trea Turner in the “near future.”
⚾️ Right-hander Jake Odorizzi’s contract with the Astros is guaranteed for $20.25 million if he declines his 3rd year player option, and $23.5MM if he exercises the option. There are also incentives and deferrals, per Jon Heyman.
⚾️ Chicago is lifting some coronavirus restrictions to allow 20% fan capacity at Cubs and White Sox games in time for Opening Day.
⚾️ Rheal Cormier, longtime MLB pitcher and 2-time Olympian, died at 53 from cancer.
🔗 Dellin Betances knows what went wrong. Has he done enough to fix it? by Tim Britton, The Athletic: “Betances’ late-season admission that his lat had been bothering him revealed the primary culprit. The injury wrecked his mechanics, drastically lowering his release point and creating that horizontal rather than vertical movement on his fastball.”
🔗 Best Mets Pitching Performances: 2010s, by Mark Simon: “The point here isn’t where Steve Trachsel or Pete Schourek’s one-hitter ranks in comparison to something from Matt Harvey or Johan Santana in Mets history. It’s simply that when you tell the story of the franchise’s history, these games belong on a list of the best they’ve ever had.”
📺 And a documentary about the ‘86 Mets appears to be coming to ESPN, so help them out if you can…
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Once you hear "Meet the Mets" it is stuck in your head for about 72 hours lol