The Metropolitan: The truth behind the Mets’ bats
Breaking down whether the hitting struggles are truly alarming, or NBD
Good Morning,
Well, the “good news” is the Mets scored as many runs yesterday when they didn’t play, as they did on Wednesday for Jacob deGrom. Now let’s hope things change this weekend in Philadelphia.
We’ll go into depth about the Mets offense, and how much to freak out or not. But first, let’s preview the series with the Phillies, and recap the latest news and notes.
🖊 NEW SIGNING: The Mets signed right-handed pitcher Bradley Roney to a minor league contract. The 28-year-old has a 3.32 ERA and 12.7 K/9 in the minors, with an opponent’s average of .184, but control has been an issue for him.
🎢 CYCLONES: Minor League Baseball finally returns next week after the entire 2020 season was cancelled due to COVID-19. Two of the Mets’ top prospects, RHP Matt Allan and 3B Brett Baty, will play for the Brooklyn Cyclones this year, and both talked to reporters yesterday:
DOMINANT: “Now being in minor league camp, I think I really feel -- I think a good way to say it is just dominant,” ALLAN said on Thursday. “I think facing some of the big leaguers and 40-man guys and just generally older guys, to facing kind of my level, High-A guys, Double-A guys, I think honestly I just feel pretty dominant, and I'm looking to take that into the season.”
EXCITED: “I’m really excited, especially after last season just not being able to play," BATY said. "I know I was at the Alternate Site and got to go to instructs for a little while, but just the level of competition — we’ve gotten some games down here already and just playing in a different uniform has been amazing and it brings out the competitive juices in everybody.”
🍴LOOK WHO’S COMING TO DINNER: Owner Steve Cohen was not content to just have mediocre ravioli with Francisco Lindor. Now he’s having dinners with other Mets stars, reportedly hosting Marcus Stroman and Pete Alonso (separately), with plans to reach out to more players.
SOLICIT IDEAS: “Cohen has been hosting the dinners to get to know the employees,” Joel Sherman reports. “He also sees this as a way to solicit ideas from the people doing the day-to-day work, not unlike what he would do at his hedge fund.”
😲 SURPRISED: Despite all that dining, Cohen still found time to tweet yesterday, expressing his “surprise” at the lack of offense thus far:
🏛HELP FROM CITY HALL: The Mets’ inability to support Jacob deGrom has become a governmental concern. Mayor Bill de Blasio was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” yesterday and (facetiously) announced the Jacob deGrom Support Plan, saying, “I think it’s a fair use of taxpayer dollars to get this guy some bats.”
🍲 SOUP: Former Met Eric Campbell will manage the Norwich Sea Unicorns, formerly the Class A Short Season affiliate of the Tigers. As a result of MLB’s reorganization of the minor leagues, the club will now play in the Futures Collegiate Baseball League.
⏭️ NEXT UP: The Mets visit the Phillies tonight for a three-game set, with Marcus Stroman taking the hill against RHP Chase Anderson. Both are seeking to avenge poor performances last week, with Anderson holding a 6.48 ERA after being shelled in Colorado last week. Stroman is 2-0 against Philadelphia this season, with a 0.75 ERA, limiting the Phillies to a .171 batting average.
A scary movie, but it’s just getting going
🧓 by Jeffrey Bellone
We are 19 games into the season, which is the equivalent to being 14 minutes into a 2-hour movie. While some of you might have quickly guessed that Dr. Crowe was actually dead while watching The Sixth Sense, it sure as hell took me longer than 15 minutes to figure it out (and I’m still not sure I understand what happened in that movie).
The point is, it’s a long season and even if watching the Mets’ offense over the first three weeks might make it feel like we can see dead people, there is plenty of time for the bats to come alive.
Having said that, we can’t ignore the fact that the offense is faltering, and following a familiar theme, they are unable to buy a knock in a clutch situation.
After finishing near the bottom of the league last season, the Mets are batting a miserable .187 with RISP through their first 19 games. No other team is hitting below .200, so that places them dead last in baseball. If you prefer advanced metrics, their 63 wRC+ is also the lowest in baseball. The stats match what Mets fans have been seeing through the cracks between their fingers as they cover their faces in disgust every failed opportunity that arises to drive a baserunner home.
While the sample size is extremely small and there are a few new players in the everyday lineup, the fact the Mets are struggling the same way they did last year makes the current slump feel even longer.
So… how worried should we be about the Mets coming up short (again) when they need a hit the most?
Before we answer that question, it’s important to understand how we measure clutch hitting. It’s a challenging topic because there are a few different ways to look at it. We can simply evaluate a team based on how often they get a hit with runners in scoring position. Or we can follow what many sabermetrics people would tell us and ignore the situation completely by looking at how the offense performs overall as a hint to how they will likely perform in individual settings.
Another approach is to use a metric from FanGraphs called Clutch. This measures how well a player performs in high-leverage situations relative to how well they perform overall. So a .300 hitter who hits .300 in big spots would be considered less “clutch” than a .200 hitter who hits .300 in those same situations. The idea is to identify which players (or teams on an aggregate level) perform better or worse than their expectations when the game matters most.
Using the Clutch metric, the Mets rank 17th as a team this season, which is an improvement over their 29th place finish last year. But actually, this is pretty telling.
Remember, “clutch” tells us whether a team exceeds its usual performance in important moments, so if we know the Mets have been terrible with runners in scoring position, and their clutch metric ranks close to league average, it tells us the offense hasn’t been very good in any situation. Last year, the Amazins finished second (behind the world champion Dodgers) in hitting (as measured by wRC+), but 13th in runs scored. They clearly weren’t hitting in the clutch. This year, as the box score reminds us each morning, they aren’t hitting at all.
So, again, should Mets fans be worried?
First, let me remind you that research has shown there is relatively no relationship from year-to-year for hitting in the clutch. And you can see that in the chart below from former FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan.
Second, forgetting the situation and focusing on the offense as a whole, there are several Mets players who are hitting well below their career averages. Jeff McNeil, who we talked about yesterday, is a prime example. He is a career .313 hitter (and a rare player who is consistently good in the clutch), but he’s changing his stride to try to break out of a slump that has him hitting .204 this season. We won’t even get into the struggles of Francisco Lindor relative to his career numbers. There are numerous cases of guys who aren’t performing to the back of their baseball cards.
But if we look at the quality of their contact — in terms of how hard they hit the ball and whether they do so at optimal angles — we find there is plenty of opportunity for improvement, or eventual statistical correction, to sound more like a nerd. Seven of the eight everyday players in the lineup have an actual wOBA that is lower than their expected wOBA (and if you don’t know what wOBA is other than a funny-sounding word when you say it out loud, just think of it as on-base percentage on steroids).
As a team, the Mets find themselves ranked 29th in terms of having the second largest gap between their actual wOBA and their expected weighted on-base percentage.
Conversely, last year, the Mets had the third highest, positive differential. In other words, they were producing above expectations based on their quality of contact, resulting in them finishing second in context-neutral hitting to the Dodgers, as we discussed earlier.
BOTTOM LINE: While the results feel the same as last season, like most things from 2020, we shouldn’t pay attention to what happened back then in thinking about what lies ahead. There is no correlation from year-to-year in clutch hitting, even though the Mets have been a rare outlier in recent seasons.
More importantly, looking at the quality of contact among Mets hitters, it appears as if it’s only a matter of time before the hits start to fall. Baseball is a strange sport; it’s not always about the number of hits you get, but how you sequence them. Watch the Mets score 10 runs tonight after they couldn’t muster one on Wednesday. But no matter how they bunch together their hits, the offense we have seen over the first few weeks is a far cry from the one we will see by the end of the season, so Mets fans shouldn’t worry, at least not yet. Let the movie play out a little longer.
⚾️ After getting hit by a fastball to the face on Wednesday, Bryce Harper was out of the lineup last night, and went through the concussion protocol. He will be evaluated again when Philadelphia returns home today to play the Mets.
⚾️ Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman struck out the side last night, and has now fanned 20 of the 29 batters he’s faced this season.
⚾️ After striking out against first baseman Anthony Rizzo this week, Atlanta’s Freddie Freeman was a good sport, saying, “That’s one strikeout I’m okay with… that’s what baseball is, that’s what sports is, to put smiles on people’s faces. I’m on the wrong side of it tonight, but I’m okay with it. I’m sure a lot of people got some good smiles and laughs, ‘cause that’s what sports is about.”
🔗 What’s gone wrong for Francisco Lindor and the Mets offense? by Tim Britton, The Athletic ($): “A disappointing offensive season with Cleveland in 2020 only accentuates the early slump this year. There’s a reason Lindor is the guy hitting coach Chili Davis has been spending the most time on of late… Davis consulted last week with Victor Rodriguez, Lindor’s assistant hitting coach in Cleveland who had been Davis’ assistant in Boston, about his experience with the shortstop. As a result, Davis and Lindor worked on a tunnel drill that he had used in Cleveland.”
🔗 Jacob deGrom’s run support is as lacking as you think, by Dan Szymborski, FanGraphs: “If the Mets just scored runs the way they do for their other pitchers, it would add roughly 17 wins to deGrom’s career line, shifting his record to a healthier 89-34.”
🎧 LISTEN: Former Mets GM Omar Minaya tells SNY’s Doug Williams what he’d say to the manager and hitting coach when the team was struggling offensively:
🔗 Davey Johnson on deGrom’s talent, by Jay Horwitz, Mets V.P. of alumni relations: “Davey Johnson always knew Jacob deGrom could hit. A few years back Davey managed Jake in a collegiate summer league and the world’s greatest pitcher wanted to be a shortstop back then. Davey told me today Jacob could really swing the bat, had good power, rarely struck out and loved playing every day. Thankfully, Jacob listened to his coach.”
And… we leave you with this cool moment from the wife of LHP Daniel Zamora, to remind us of the human element behind the game:
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