Good Morning,
Today we’ll talk about how Mets catcher James McCann can outperform his (not very encouraging) statistical projections, but we start with the news.
⏰ Catch me up in 60(ish) seconds…
🍎 ROSTER MOVES: The Mets officially announced the signing of speedster Jonathan Villar on Thursday. In a corresponding move, they designated right-hander Brad Brach for assignment.
METS FAN: The Brach news pulls at your heartstrings a bit as he grew up a diehard Mets fan and even rooted for the team as a major leaguer (attending the 2015 World Series as a fan) before ultimately signing a team-friendly deal last winter.
IMPACT: Brach recently picked up his $2.075 million player option. If no team claims him, the Mets will still be on the hook for that amount against their luxury tax payroll. With last year’s rule removing the limit on the number of pitchers teams can have on their active roster, it’s possible the Mets carry as many as 14. This would seemingly leave an opening for another bullpen addition, assuming someone else isn’t moved in trade.
🗣 SEARCHING: Speaking of trades, New York continues to try to find a sucker (another team) to take on Jeurys Familia and/or Dellin Betances’ contracts, per Mike Puma and Andy Martino.
LUXURY TAX: After missing out on Trevor Bauer (who was introduced as a Dodger yesterday and is already ruffling some feathers with that fan base now), the Mets have an estimated $28 million in breathing room under the tax threshold. Given Steve Cohen’s finances, it seems odd they would be intent on trading contracts (at a potential prospect cost) of two players who could both come off the books next season anyway (Betances has a vesting option). If they want roster flexibility, they would be better off eating some money. But maybe they have bigger plans in mind.
🗣 BRYANT WATCH: New York has resumed trade discussions with the Chicago Cubs about third baseman Kris Bryant, per Andy Martino. It’s unclear how far those talks have progressed, but Mike Puma reported on Wednesday catching prospect Francisco Alvarez has come up in discussions for Bryant and Reds 3B Eugenio Suárez, so presumably that is a hard sticking point.
🌴 TEACHER’S PET: Outfielder Brandon Nimmo is the first player to arrive at Spring Training in Port St. Lucie, per Anthony DiComo.
🔝 PROSPECTS: ESPN scouting guru Kiley McDaniel ranked Ronny Mauricio (61) and Francisco Alvarez (82) on his latest list of Top 100 prospects for 2021.
🗣 RUMORS: While he has trolled New York sports fans plenty of times before, WFAN’s Craig Carton says he has been told the Mets have talked to the Oakland A’s about acquiring 3B Matt Chapman.
🍻 TIPSY: Former Mets GM Omar Minaya said he and late former Padres GM Kevin Towers got so drunk one night during a Winter Meetings that the next day, neither of them could remember who they had agreed to trade the night before.
⌚️ START TIMES: MLB released an updated 2021 schedule that includes start times for each of the Mets games. New York will open the season on April 1 at 7:09 PM (ESPN) against the Nationals. And they will play more day games on Saturdays over the first half of the season.
📚 February 12, 2016: Mets reliever Jenrry Mejia becomes the first player to receive a lifetime ban for three failed tests for performance-enhancing substances, after testing positive for boldenone, a steroid that has been used in horse racing (note: Mejia is not a horse). Mejia later claimed that he only failed one test, stating the second sets of results to be inaccurate, and suggesting the league fabricated the second violation to ban him from baseball.
Beating PECOTA
🧓 by Jeffrey Bellone
PECOTA. It almost sounds like the name you would find written in silver on the back of an antique car you keep tucked under a cover in the garage. And maybe this image is appropriate because whatever Baseball Prospectus does under the hood of their projection system each winter to rev up a 90+ win total for the Mets has proven better for show than actual performance.
Their latest guess has the Mets winning 95 games this season. We talked earlier this week how no team has underperformed their projections more than the Mets over the years, but looking closer at the underlying 2021 numbers reveals the current total surprisingly has some bearish results, especially for $40 million catcher James McCann.
Statcast data has revolutionized how we analyze baseball players, and it is slowly making its way into projection systems, like PECOTA. While we have a good idea of which statistics are meaningful predictors of future performance, analysts are plugging new parameters into their models as we speak, hoping to find the secret sauce nobody else has uncovered yet.
For McCann, it doesn’t take a math nerd to look at his numbers and see a drastic change over the past three seasons.
Somewhere in-between taking a phone call from a Detroit area code that left him non-tendered in 2018, and staring out at the pinwheels atop the exploding scoreboard in the South Side of Chicago from his new catching stance in 2019, McCann found his swing.
He recently talked about the change in his approach.
“From an approach and understanding who I was, I had to be content with taking pitches the other way for line-drive singles that a guy like [Miguel Cabrera] might hit out of the ballpark,” McCann told Mathew Brownstein of MetsMerized Online. “What that did for me was it got me more relaxed, less effort, and the next thing you know those line-drive singles turned into doubles and turned into homers, and I really learned a lot about how a swing is supposed to work because I was content being me and not trying to do something that wasn’t necessarily in my capabilities of doing.”
By relaxing his mind and opening his stance, he started his time with the White Sox by doing as he described, hitting more balls the opposite way. In time, the power started to come, and soon he was exchanging some added strikeouts for a lot more production.
The most telling Statcast number for McCann is his exit velocity. Compared to JT Realmuto (who has become like a favored catching sibling to McCann the way the two have been so frequently compared), their average exit velocities have been quite similar over the past two seasons. But the thing about averages is they fail to tell you about the shape of a distribution. The only reason we care about exit velocities is because balls hit really hard tend to turn into hits and home runs; the difference between soft and medium contact matters less than identifying how often a player made pure contact.
A recent study by Jeremy Siegel of Pitcher List shows that 90 percentile exit velocity numbers could be more predictive than using the average. If we look at McCann’s 90% EV, once again, we find a very similar profile to Realmuto’s.
If it feels like I suddenly pulled you under the hood of that antique car with the Baseball Prospectus bumper sticker, I apologize. A few more turns of the wrench and we will come back up for air.
What this tells us is that when McCann made contact with the baseball, he hit it as hard as the best hitting catcher in the game. Putting defense aside (we talked about his improvements here using a video breakdown), the difference between the two backstops’ projections can mostly be found in their strikeout rates. While they both hit the ball hard, Realmuto makes contact more often.
What is promising for the Mets is that McCann showed glimpses of restraint last season in chasing pitches out of the zone, something that has traditionally spiked his strikeout rate, even when things are going well.
While the sample size is small, McCann didn’t swing-and-miss at one pitch low and inside vs lefties last season. He let 15 of the 20 offerings in that area drop for balls and fouled off each of the other pitches he swung at. He then turned pitches over the plate into problems for the opposition, which helped him hit .429 against southpaws in 2020.
If the Mets actually hit their projection target of 95 wins, they will need good health, some luck, and players performing to the back of their baseball cards. Since all three of those things never happen, they will also need some of their undervalued starters to surprise people. It’s hard to believe James McCann falls into the latter category given the contract he just signed, but if he builds on his improved approach both holding the bat and squeezing the catcher’s mitt, he could be better than the stat geeks believe.
⚾️ The Mariners have reached a multi-year agreement with reliever Ken Giles, per Shannon Drayer.
⚾️ Boston has signed utility man Marwin Gonzalez, per Mark Feinsand.
⚾️ The Indians have signed former Met Billy Hamilton to a minor league deal, per Daniel Álvarez.
⚾️ Former Met Jake Marisnick is close to signing with the Cubs, per Jon Morosi.
⚾️ Trevor Bauer was introduced by the Dodgers yesterday. Oh, and to New York, as well:
🔗 Mets can’t afford repeat of Pete Alonso’s sophomore slump, by Mike Vaccaro, NY Post: “So, yes, Pete Alonso can overcome his sophomore slump, although before we talk more about that we should mention: it actually wasn’t as bad as you remember. The truth is, nothing was ever going to serve as an acceptable bookend to 2019 when, as a rookie, he made the Opening Day roster, won the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game, cruised to Rookie of the Year honors and slugged 53 home runs with 120 RBIs. He finished seventh in the NL’s MVP vote.”
📺 Keith Hernandez and Gary Cohen discuss the Mets’ offseason on SNY’s Beyond the Booth: "This is the best offseason I’ve seen the Mets have since I can remember, as far as building this club and answering all the needs that are there on that roster,” Keith said.
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