Good Morning,
Today we’ll explore just how good the Mets’ starting rotation depth really is. But we start with the news.
⏰ Catch me up in 60(ish) seconds…
🐐 deGROMINANT: Just when you thought Jacob deGrom couldn’t possibly get better, we are entering the land of the ridiculous. In three perfect innings of work against Houston last night — including an “off speed” pitch at 94 MPH — the two-time Cy Young winner faced the minimum number of batters, racking up 7 K’s and burning up the radar gun:
⚾️ GAME RECAP: In other game-related news, Pete Alonso stayed locked in by crushing a solo shot to left-center; Albert Almora, Jr., made a dazzling catch running back to the centerfield fence; and relievers Mike Montgomery, Jacob Barnes and Stephen Tarpley (all vying for a spot in the bullpen) delivered clean outings, to preserve the Amazins’ 1-0 win.
🔢 BATTING ORDER: Manager Luis Rojas told reporters before the game that he’s leaning towards penciling in Brandon Nimmo as the leadoff hitter during the season, followed by Francisco Lindor in the 2 spot. He didn’t commit to an order past that.
OPTIMIZED: Read how Tim Britton thinks the Mets should construct their batting order in his latest for The Athletic.
🔆 DEBUT: As the team continues to play it safe with his left foot, Dominic Smith DH’ed again in last night’s game — but is expected to make his first start in left today against the Marlins. “It’s a marathon,” Smith said. “And the team is doing a great job making sure I’m ready come April 1.”
🍪 COOKIE TOSS: Carlos Carrasco, battling right elbow soreness, is expected to begin playing catch on Sunday. Despite dealing with body aches, Rojas said yesterday that the right-hander “looked a lot better.”
📖 NEW RULES: MLB announced that a variety of “experimental playing rules” will be tested in the minor leagues during the 2021 season — including larger bases, an automatic ball-strike system, pick-off restrictions and pitch clocks.
TODAY: The Mets take on the Marlins this afternoon, as Marcus Stroman toes the rubber for his third appearance of the spring, in a game you can watch on television while pretending to be focused on your work Zoom.
📚 March 12, 2003: The Mets and Dodgers have a bench-clearing brawl after Mike Piazza is beaned by Guillermo Mota. Piazza charges the mound and Mota runs off the field and into the Dodgers clubhouse. It's the second incident between Piazza and Mota, who awkwardly later becomes a Met.
How good are the Mets’ depth starters?
🧓 by Jeffrey Bellone
When you’re an economist like me, sometimes a random thought about your favorite baseball team can turn into 19 lines of code and several rows of data in an effort to try to explain your idea to normal people. For instance, yesterday I tweeted:
But rather than just let my thought exist in the digital ether like a sane person, I found myself trying to figure out whether my tweet-as-you-think-it point could be proven by data. Obviously Jordan Yamamoto and Joey Lucchesi don’t have the pedigree of Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May, but how do the Mets’ surplus starters stack up relative to the rest of the league?
To answer that question, I pulled the depth charts of every team and sorted their rotations by their projected start totals from FanGraphs. I then isolated the #6-8 starters from each club and made a few adjustments so an injured player, such as Luis Severino with the Yankees or Chris Sale with the Red Sox, wasn’t grouped as a depth starter. For the Mets, I put Noah Syndergaard in their Top-5 and considered David Peterson, Joey Lucchesi, and Jordan Yamamoto as their depth starters.
From there, I mapped each name to their 2021 projections using the mix of ZiPS and Steamer provided by the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections. I also pulled in some ranking data that we will get to in a minute.
This is what I get for tweeting.
So what did I find?
Let’s start by looking at which teams project to have the best group of depth starters this season.
Deciding which statistic to sort by is the tricky part. I didn’t want to use WAR because it is based on an innings pitched assumption and I was more interested in finding the best pitchers among this group, regardless of opportunity. To try to account for this, I created a WAR200 value, which put each player’s WAR projection on a 200-inning basis. Using this number, the Mets #6-8 starters collectively rank 6th best in baseball.
If we use traditional ERA, the Mets rank 3rd best. So pretty good! But what has proven to be somewhat consistent in predicting future performance (which is a difficult task for pitchers) is looking at strikeouts compared to walks, a rate that drops the Mets to 15th overall—which is still reasonably impressive, especially when you consider it along with everything else.
What the table above doesn’t show, precisely, are the teams who have the highest top-end depth. What if you have really good #6 and #7 starters, but terrible options after that?
I could have added weights to the statistics above to account for this, but instead I decided to use Eno Sarris’ 2021 starting pitching rankings to find which teams have the best depth arms. While his list is made for fantasy purposes, it is still illustrative of the pitchers who have the highest quality stuff, solid command, and low injury risk. He uses those three criterion to rank 202 starting pitchers. Or the 199 pitchers between Jacob DeGrom, who tops his list, and Yamamoto and Lucchesi, who bottom out his ranking.
The Mets are one of three teams who have all three of their #6-8 starters included on the list. However, it’s hard to give them too much credit for literally having the final two names: #201 (Yamamoto) and #202 (Lucchesi).
To find the teams with the best #6 and #7 guys, I filtered on the top two depth starters for clubs with at least that many pitchers included in Sarris’ ranking, and averaged their relative position on the list to get a team ranking and came up with the table below.
Once again, we find the Mets score fairly high. The #6 / #7 combo of David Peterson and Jordan Yamamoto places the Amazins with the 8th best average duo ranking among depth starters ranked by Sarris.
So while my original thought that the Mets’ depth starters lag behind the top teams in the league is true, they are actually projected to perform a bit better than I guessed before diving into this exercise. And if we compare their depth to last season, they are in a much better position.
Lesson learned: From now on, I will test all my ideas through hours of data analysis before tweeting them. That’s how it works on Twitter, right?
⚾️ In a bit of deja vu, Cleveland wants former Met Amed Rosario to try positions other than shortstop, starting by taking fly balls in centerfield next week, per Zack Meisel.
⚾️ Former Mets catcher Robinson Chirinos, now in Yankees camp on a minor league deal, fractured his wrist after taking a pitch to his right hand, per Dave Lennon.
⚾️ Phillies catcher JT Realmuto is “moving in the right direction” in his recovery from a broken thumb, making 40 throws on Thursday. But his status for opening day is still in question, per Jim Salisbury.
⚾️ Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer struggled in his outing last night, giving up a run, three walks and a hit-by-pitch before the team opted to end the first inning, per Bill Plunkett.
🔗 Mets’ Jacob deGrom and Yankees’ Gerrit Cole: The great New York baseball comparison of our time, by Andy Martino, SNY: “Of the many pleasures of watching New York baseball in 2021, one that we will especially enjoy is the exposure to a pair of top-shelf aces in their primes. Jacob deGrom is probably the best pitcher in baseball, and Gerrit Cole is close.”
🔗Mapping a Francisco Lindor extension, by Dan Szymborski, Fangraphs: Mega-star contracts are difficult because you don’t have a lot of direct comparables. Fernando Tatis Jr. signed a monster 14-year, $340 million pact with the Padres, but there are reasons he should get more than Lindor: He’s five years younger and coming off an MVP-caliber season. On the flip side, Tatis also had less leverage, with four full seasons until free agency.
🔗 Brett Baty makes great impression at Mets spring training, by Justin Toscano, Bergen Record: During his time around the big leaguers, Baty, a third baseman, has tried to be a student. He worked a lot with first baseman Pete Alonso and third baseman J.D. Davis, trying to note everything they did and said. “Just picking their brains about all the different sides of baseball,” Baty said, “has just been amazing.”
🔗 The Lawyer Who Became a (Pitching) Ninja, by Zach Schonbrun, New York Times: “For the past six years, Friedman has averaged nearly 30 tweets a day as the Pitching Ninja, an account that has roughly as many followers as the one run by Mookie Betts… “He’s one of the more formidable accounts in the baseball world,” Mets pitcher Marcus Stroman said. “I’ll ask him, ‘Hey, send me Scherzer’s changeup,’ or how Kershaw holds his curveball,” Stroman said. “He’s able to zoom in and find me a YouTube video.”
And we leave you with the tip Dom Smith received from a star one day, that would transform his career…
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You guys seem to have a connection with SNY. Can you get a scoop on these ST road games and why they can't be televised? Who decides this? SNY? Mets? MLB? Do teams like the Yankees/Dodgers do it? Is it strictly an issue with the venues unable to support it or SNY just doesnt want to buy & send another production truck? I know normally they split squad games as well. The NFL televises all of its pre-season games. Just seems like lost opportunities. GKR don't have to call every game you could have Gelbs do it or an up and coming person trying their hand at calling games. Anyways figured this could make for an interesting article.
I asked @MetsBooth
"Who decides which games are broadcasted? SNY? Contracts of GKR? Seems like lots of lost opportunities for the fans that want to watch."
"On the TV side, it's really quite simple. They park the production truck in Port St. Lucie. If the game is at home, it's on. If it is away, it isn't. Been that way for years now."
Really interesting on those 6-7 starters that probably has not had a "deep dive" or "unpacked" data on. However, as a old timer my eye balls are spinning a bit lol.