The Metropolitan: Is the Polar Bear back?
Analyzing Pete Alonso’s torrid spring. Plus, all the day’s news.
Good Morning,
Today we’ll talk about why Pete Alonso is crushing the ball again. But we start with the news.
⏰ Catch me up in 60(ish) seconds…
DAYS UNTIL OPENING DAY: 7
5️⃣ SPOT: The Mets announced on Wednesday that RHP Jordan Yamamoto has been optioned to Triple-A. This would seem to suggest that LHP Joey Lucchesi would be the team’s 5th starter entering the season, or at least used in an opener tandem on that day of the rotation.
POSITIVE THINKING: After hearing the news, Yamamoto tweeted, “Always choose to look at the glass half full, never half empty!”
MORE MOVES: The Mets also announced RHP Corey Oswalt, catcher Bruce Maxwell and infielder Brandon Drury have been reassigned. That leaves 40 players on the spring roster. The Mets must trim that number down to 26 by April 1.
🍎 RECAP: Oswalt was reassigned after starting in the Mets’ 3-0 loss to the Cardinals on Wednesday. In four innings, he allowed only 1 run, while striking out three and giving up a pair of hits, including a home run. The Mets’ bats were silent, going 0-9 with runners in scoring position. Carlos Martínez was effective as the starter for St. Louis.
😳 STILL HERE: Despite a fastball that no longer zips or rises, Dellin Betances appears to have a spot locked up in the bullpen: "This is a guy that I think at this point, you gotta say that he’s part of our bullpen," manager Luis Rojas told reporters yesterday.
DIFFERENT PITCHER: “I can spin it really well and I’m just going to attack the strike zone, I can’t fall behind — I don’t have that luxury,” Betances said via the NY Post. “Where before maybe you would fall behind and maybe you get chases here and there because you are throwing a lot harder. But now I have got to change my speeds and keep guys off balance, which is the name of the game.”
⚾️ BULLPEN: Including Edwin Díaz, Trevor May, Miguel Castro, Aaron Loup, Jeurys Familia, and seemingly Betances, it leaves two open bullpen spots if the Mets carry 13 pitchers. With Oswalt reassigned, it would seem the competition comes down to picking two arms from the leading candidates of RHP Jacob Barnes (who has pitched well and is out of options), RHP Robert Gsellman, LHP Stephen Tarpley, or a non-roster invitee such as LHP Mike Montgomery, RHP Tommy Hunter or old friend LHP Jerry Blevins.
😴 REST: The Mets will take a full day off on Thursday as they rest before the final stretch of Grapefruit games leading to the season opener next week.
🔝RANKING: ESPN ranked Jacob deGrom as the 6th best player in all of baseball, and 2nd pitcher (one slot behind Gerrit Cole — don’t kill the messenger, here).
📚 March 25, 1999: The Mets sign 40-year-old Orel Hershiser, who goes on to start 32 games and record a 13-12 win-loss record in his lone season in Flushing.
Also on this date in 1997: Howard Johnson announced his retirement.
How Pete Alonso’s living in the shadows
🧓 by Jeffrey Bellone
For all of the things that have changed over the past year — from the way we attend (or don’t attend) baseball games to the masks we now wear on our faces — from a Mets perspective, one thing has remained the same: Pete Alonso continues to hit the ball hard.
You might not believe it based on his somewhat disappointing results last season, but on average, the affable slugger hit the ball just as hard in 2020 as he did during his breakout campaign in 2019. He just didn’t do the same damage. And if you look across his summary statistics, nothing immediately jumps out to explain why his production dropped. His walk to strikeout ratio was the same, as was his hard hit percentage. So what gives?
The answer is right in front of us. And we can use his promising Grapefruit performance to help explain what he was doing different last year compared to his outstanding rookie season.
Through 15 spring games, Alonso’s 1.147 OBS ranks 6th among qualified hitters. Does this mean the Polar Bear is back?
There are a few promising signs.
First, he is finding patience at the plate, particularly against curveballs, one of the few offerings against which his hard hit percentage was considerably lower (nearly cut in half) compared to the season before, and a pitch he often chased out of the strike zone.
This spring, he is taking a much more measured approach. Of the data available via Statcast, he has only swung at one curveball below the box. By being more deliberate in what he swings at, he is putting himself in better position to do more damage later in the count.
“Yes, the numbers are there, but I feel like I’m swinging at a lot of very quality pitches, capitalizing and hitting those pitches hard in my zone,” Alonso told reporters this week.
While it’s one thing to keep himself from chasing pitches completely out of the zone, that isn’t an area where he particularly struggled last year.
Ironically, it was on pitches in the “shadow” zone (the boxes that surround the dotted line in the graphic above) where there was a major difference. This is the area that directly borders the edge of the strike zone, and traditionally, it is an ideal spot for pitchers to locate their pitches instead of risking hard contact by throwing directly over the plate.
To use Statcast and schoolyard terms in the same sentence, Alonso gets barrels on meatballs, like everyone else. But what elevates his game is being able to turn pitches on the edge of the strike zone into batted balls that reach the outer part of the stadium.
As you can see in the graphic above, Alonso hit over half of his 53 home runs on shadow pitches in 2019. Rather than turning those same pitches into trouble during the following season, he often watched them sail into the catcher’s mitt for balls or called strikes.
This brings us to the second positive sign from Alonso this spring. Once again, he is attacking pitches located in the shadow zone. He has upped his swing percentage on these pitch locations to 54.5% compared to just over 50% last year. And while he hasn’t hit a long ball on an edge pitch yet, he is turning over 10% of those swings into hard hits (balls put in play with an exit velocity greater than or equal to 95 MPH).
By being more disciplined on pitches out of the zone — deciding not to chase those curveballs below his knees — it allows him to be more aggressive on pitches in the shadow area. And this has allowed him to flourish this March.
Hitting the ball hard has never been a problem for Alonso. Picking the right pitches to hit has been. He seems to have found the right balance so far.
⚾️ The White Sox are expected to sign Cuban OF Oscar Colas (22) for around $2.7 million when a new international signing period opens on January 15, 2022, per Francys Romero. The Mets were one of the finalists bidding on Colas.
⚾️ White Sox uber-prospect Andrew Vaughn seems likely to make the opening day roster, with GM Ken Williams saying, “We understand the service-time issue that plays here, but our feeling is that when you’re ready to help the major-league club, there’s a spot for you.”
⚾️ Milwaukee slugger Christian Yelich crushed a grand slam, the latest big day for the former MVP who’s coming off a .205/.356/.430 season, but has been raking this spring to the tune of a 1.542 OPS.
⚾️ Astros shortstop Carlos Correa turned down a contract extension offer of six years and "about $120 million," per Jon Heyman.
⚾️ But the Astros did extend starting pitcher Lance McCullers, Jr., to a five year deal worth $85 million, per Mark Berman.
🔗 The hard-won life lessons of the Mets’ Dominic Smith, by Rustin Dodd, The Athletic ($): “Nearly six months after he walked into a Citi Field interview room, looked into a camera and started to speak, the Mets‘ Dominic Smith was back home in Los Angeles, thinking about the days when he didn’t say anything. He used to be this way, he says, used to compartmentalize, used to carry on in silence, used to listen to his parents when they told him to forget.”
🔗 Mets manager Luis Rojas in position to have strong Year 2, by Ken Davidoff, NY Post: “His first year on the job didn’t go well, yet he never appeared overwhelmed emotionally, looking the same during his postgame Zoom news conferences regardless of the result. Not on thin ice, not swaying with the wind, the 39-year-old might just turn out to be a force of stability as the Mets look to launch this new era in the right direction. With a most turbulent rookie season in the past, with less micromanaging above him, Rojas appears poised to do just that.”
🔗 The unusual and incredible case of Jacob deGrom, by Joe Posnanski, The Athletic ($): “What makes deGrom so unusual is that in 2019 he won his second Cy Young Award with a 2.43 ERA and an 11-8 record. Last year he had a 2.38 ERA and a 4-2 record. What gives? Even if we understand that pitcher wins and losses are not a particularly useful statistic, you would still expect there to be some correlation between not giving up runs and winning games, right?”
🎧 On the Shea Anything podcast, Doug Williams and SNY MLB Insider Andy Martino discuss the fact that Francisco Lindor and Michael Conforto have significant roles within the MLB Players Association, and how that could affect their contract extension talks with the Mets.
And… watch why classic Met, Benny Agbayani, is pumped for the season opener…
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