Will the regular season start on time?
Plus, is Tony Watson a suitable replacement for Aaron Loup?
Good Morning,
Normally, this weekend would represent the end of the baseball offseason. Check your Twitter feed after the final whistle of the Super Bowl and you’d find baseball fans celebrating the report date for pitchers & catchers. Obviously, that is not going to happen this year. But there’s still hope for a normal regular season. We will explain why in a bit.
Of course, no hard feelings if you want to skip over the lockout talk. We have plenty of Mets content for you, as well. Scroll down to read about the impact of the designated hitter coming to the National League and to learn about a crafty lefty who could be a potential replacement for Aaron Loup.
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
🔒 LOCKOUT UPDATE
MLB owners met this week in Florida and plan on meeting with the players on Saturday to make what commissioner Rob Manfred describes as a “good-faith positive proposal in an effort to move the process forward.”
🔹 ON SCHEDULE: While it feels like this negotiation process has been dragging on forever (the league officially locked out the players on December 2), it’s only February 11th, so there is still plenty of time to get a deal done without sacrificing regular season games.
In Manfred’s press conference yesterday, he said as much, “I'm an optimist. I believe we will have an agreement in time to play our regular season schedule.”
Negotiations are about deadlines and consequences. For everyone involved in major league baseball, the greatest consequence is missing regular season games. The deadline to avoid that consequence is somewhere around March 1, with Manfred telling reporters that ideally Spring Training would be four weeks long.
🔹 PLAYING CHICKEN: So that means both sides are essentially playing a game of chicken leading up to the beginning of March when we will learn how much owners are willing to sacrifice league revenue or players are willing to forfeit paychecks to hold their bargaining stance.
“We want a good deal,” Francisco Lindor told Andy Martino when asked about the potential of missing regular season games. “We want to play a full season, but if that's what it comes down to, we'll continue to come to the table and bring good things."
🔹 WHAT THIS MEANS: Don’t expect to see anyone’s “final offer” or real urgency to get this thing done until regular season games are truly at stake. In other words, don’t sweat the jockeying being played out in the press until we get closer to March.
⚾️ UNIVERSAL DH
Rob Manfred indicated the players and owners have “agreed” on instituting the designated hitter in both leagues. Of course, nothing is official until a new CBA is ratified. But it sounds like the days of Jacob deGrom acting as the Mets’ best hitter are over (in more ways than one).
🔹 WHAT THIS MEANS: For the current state of the Mets, this is good news. It means Robinson Canó has a place in the lineup if he can prove his success in the Caribbean Series is a sign that he is ready to return to the majors and be a productive player following his 162-game suspension.
Even putting Canó aside, it means J.D. Davis (assuming he is not traded) and Dominic Smith have additional avenues to make the lineup without sacrificing team defense. With the additions of Mark Canha and Starling Marte, it leaves little room for the Mets to continue experimenting with Smith in left field. Now, manager Buck Showalter has more flexibility in constructing his lineup.
🔹 PITCHERS HITTING: Traditionalists will surely miss the classic style of the National League, but the way the game has changed, pitchers rarely last deep in games anymore, anyway. The third time through the lineup penalty has trained managers to pull pitchers after two at-bats, even when they are pitching lights out. The designated hitter essentially only takes two at-bats away from the pitcher per game, in some cases less.
In fact, last season Mets pitchers only stepped to the plate 1.75 times per game, fourth lowest in the National League. However, they made those plate appearances count, with the fifth highest slugging percentage among pitchers in baseball. Jacob deGrom led the way with an outlandish 112 wRC+ (yes, that means his run production was 12% above league average for all hitters).
🧩 REPLACING AARON LOUP
Continuing our series from earlier in the week, today we will discuss Tony Watson as a potential replacement for Aaron Loup.
Tony Watson is your prototypical, crafty lefty. He relies on offspeed stuff and movement to retire hitters out of the bullpen. Last season, we saw two versions of Watson: one that struggled with command while pitching for the Angels; the other, the steady, veteran southpaw he has proven to be throughout his career, returning to form after a mid-season trade to the Giants.
In deciding whether Watson is a good fit for the Mets’ bullpen, the question the front office must consider is which version the 36-year-old lefty from last season best represents who he might be in 2022. Let’s discuss.
🔹 RESURGENCE: If we simply focused on Watson’s ERA last season while pitching in Anaheim versus San Francisco, we could find obvious points for correction. Two of Watson’s outing with the Angels turned into disasters — allowing four earned runs against the Rangers in May and six earned runs against the Athletics in May. Take away those two outings, and he pitched to a 2.12 ERA in 34 appearances with the Angels, in line with his performance with the Giants.
That said, every outing counts, especially when you are a high-leverage reliever, and Watson was a better pitcher in San Francisco, where he had pitched for the previous three seasons before his stint with the Angels. Clearly the staff at Oracle Park knows how to get the best out of him, making a slight tweak in his release point and being rewarded by the results. Watson’s walk rate and HR/FB rate dropped from over 10% to below 5% for both stats over the final two months of the season.
🔹 MOVEMENT: You can’t talk about Tony Watson without talking about movement. His unique movement profile on his changeup and slider allows him to work effectively against both righties and lefties (an important skill with the 3-batter minimum rule).
Starting with his go-to pitch, Watson’s changeup averaged more break than any qualified changeup in baseball last season. He throws it away to right-handed hitters (helping him neutralize platoon effects) and generates an insane 50% swing rate outside of the strike zone, as batters expect it to land closer to the plate.
Against lefties, he relies on an 83 MPH slider with gyro spin that he consistently locates low and away. By maximizing break on his change-up he can get right-handers to reach out of the strike zone, which is the opposite approach for how he gets lefties to chase his slider, a pitch in which he deflates movement to give him a sharp, late break. Similar to his changeup, he is creating the illusion that his slider will land for a strike on the outer portion of the plate… until it doesn’t:
🔹 LOCATION: No matter how Watson’s changeup and slider move, he can only create deception by offsetting each with his sinker and four-seam fastball combinations. In Anaheim, he located both pitches on the inner half of the plate to both lefties and righties, opposite of where he locates his offspeed and breaking action. In San Francisco, that changed. He started placing his sinker down and away to lefties and pushed his four-seamer closer to the horizontal plane as his slider. Hitters could no longer use location to guess at the pitch type.
🔹 THE PAYOFF: So what does this all mean? It means Tony Watson can get batters out in a variety of ways, no matter which side of the plate they stand. While his velocity was down to start the season, it ticked back up by the end of the year. For a pitcher who relies on craft more than blow-by-you stuff, he doesn’t need a ton of speed to make his repertoire work, but it’s at least something to keep an eye on.
The biggest remaining concern is his HR/FB rate, which has steadily remained above 10% in every place he has pitched except San Francisco (which has the lowest HR park factor since 2019). Combine that with some shoulder issues that have propped up recently, and there’s some obvious risk in signing a pitcher who will turn 37 this season. Relative to the market, Andrew Chafin is a better option. But Watson is crafty enough to continue to get major leaguers out in the immediate future.
◾️ Former Mets bench coach Jim Riggleman was hired as manager of the Billings Mustangs of the independent Pioneer League.
◾️ The defense attorney of former Angels employee Eric Kay — who is on trial for supplying Tyler Skaggs with counterfeit drugs in connection to his overdose — accused former Met Matt Harvey of supplying Skaggs with Percocet on the night of his death.
🔗 How the Mets can spend, trade or rethink their way to an upgraded pitching staff, by Joel Sherman, NY Post ($): “The Mets will be focused on pitching when the labor lockout ends — cue the labor-logjam laugh track. They do have positional needs […] But those are secondary concerns.”
🔗 deGrom-Theoretical Optimality in Two-Strike Counts, by Ben Clemens, FanGraphs: “I’m looking into something that doesn’t require much explaining. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I’m looking into a situation that’s so good for the pitching team that in our minds, we go ahead and write it off. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting, though; it can just be hard to see why it’s interesting, which is why I’m writing about it. That’s right: let’s talk about when Jacob deGrom gets ahead in the count.”
🔗 What if Griffey had accepted that Mets trade? by Michael Clair, MLB.com: “It’s almost impossible to fathom -- arguably the game’s biggest pop culture icon since Babe Ruth playing in the No. 1 media market at the start of the new millennium, and batting in the same lineup as Mike Piazza, too -- but it was very nearly our reality. Before Griffey was traded to the Reds in 2000 for Mike Cameron, Brett Tomko and Antonio Perez, the Mets and Mariners had agreed to the framework of a deal for the superstar.”
🧩 Great job for everyone who guessed “AMAZIN” in our last Wordle. Here is a new Mets-themed Wordle to keep you busy. Tag us on Twitter to let us know how you did. We will reveal the answer in our next issue.
And we leave you with this lasting memory as the DH appears to be coming to the National League…
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The what if on Griffey is interesting. The 2000 offense would have undoubtedly been better, but not having Hampton for that season would have been a real problem and they wouldn’t have had anyone to fill that role. The what if on Larkin accepting a trade that Summer is interesting too but I think he got hurt by the end of that season so maybe nothing would have changed.
This is the owners' lockout and the owners timetable. Unless the players totally cave, surrender more (and willingly "lose" another CBA), this lockout will last for as long as the owners want. They don't mind a shortened season so long as they get the expanded playoffs. In fact, there's very little disagreement here on issues; they just need to cut up the pie fairly. A couple of months ago I thought June. Nothing has changed my mind. Manfred, grrrr.