2021 Was Supposed To Be the Easy Part For the Mets

Two weeks before the trade deadline, I shared a depressing series of projections for the Mets based on Jacob deGrom’s health. The team’s ace, who spent much of the early going making a run at Bob Gibson’s modern ERA record, had been sidelined by forearm pain and tightness, though he was reportedly returning soon. Still, you never know with either pitcher injuries or the Mets, so I decided to run some numbers on what New York’s fortunes would look like with either minimal or no deGrom. The results were … less than reassuring for the folks in Queens.

Me: ZiPS, without knowing precisely what deGrom's outlook is, would you say it's time for Mets fans to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?

ZiPS: Yes I would, Dan. pic.twitter.com/teimAJsmak

— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) July 18, 2021

The “worst-case scenario” had the Mets retaining a 37% shot of making the playoffs; that turned out to be excessively sunny. A team that once held a 55–48 record and a four-game lead in the NL East as July turned to August is now in tatters, with a 14-21 record since then and trailing both Atlanta and Philadelphia in the division. As for deGrom, he had a setback not long after the deadline and still hasn’t returned to the active roster (and may not return at all this season). As of Tuesday morning, New York’s chances are down to 6.8% in our projected standings, and ZiPS is barely more bullish at 7.1%. The Mets don’t need much to go wrong to end up playing golf in October.

It won’t get any easier for going forward. The 2021 season was supposed to be the year for the Mets to cast off their accumulated sadness of the Wilpon era, with Francisco Lindor joining the team before Michael Conforto, Marcus Stroman, and Noah Syndergaard hit free agency in the coming winter. The current roster never had, nor ever would have, a projection as good as the preseason prognostications for this year, but already, the outlook for the returning cast has generally become bleaker for 2022 than it was in March. (And that’s to say nothing of the front office, where there are clearly some important organizational issues that need resolving, but here, I’m sticking to what’s happening on the field.)

What makes this table especially cruel is that the largest projection improvement, that of deGrom, is only a paper one; ZiPS sees very good reasons to think he improved as a pitcher this year, but it only knows the barest specifics about his health situation. If you asked me to take the over/under on the ZiPS-projected 143 2/3 innings in 2022, I’d have to take the under at this point.

Lindor’s decline has been especially troubling. Coming into the season, you could rationalize his fall from 2018’s dizzying heights by noting he got a late start in ’19 due to injury and that ’20 was a shortened season practically guaranteed to be every player’s most bizarre year ever. Making sense of his struggles becomes a lot harder to do in a fairly normal 2021. Though he missed a month with a sore oblique, his season was a relatively unimpressive one long before he hit the IL; Tuesday marked the first time at any point this year that his OPS has been above the .700 mark.

ZiPS still projects Lindor to be an All-Star going forward, but a lot has been trimmed off the high-end of the projections. Entering the 2021 season, it had him with the fifth-best 90th-percentile WAR projection of any hitter in baseball, at 8.5, behind a who’s who of MVP candidates (Ronald Acuña Jr., Juan Soto, Mike Trout, Mookie Betts). Things are far less rosy now.

I didn’t run everyone’s 2022 projection percentiles, but that new 90th-percentile projection for Lindor would have ranked only 39th in the preseason. As for career projections, the loss in his long-term value comes into nine-figure territory in dollars, which is not likely to encourage owner Steve Cohen to spend aggressively this winter.

The changes to McNeil’s long-term projections are similarly damaging.

The free-agent losses for the Mets this year are significant, too. While it’s likely that some players will return, Stroman, Conforto, Syndergaard, Javier Báez, Rich Hill, Aaron Loup, and Jeurys Familia is a lot of talent to replace. There are some terrific prospects in the system — Francisco Álvarez, in particular, has eviscerated minor-league pitching — but these possible future replacements are unlikely to be of the Opening Day 2022 variety. We have the team’s 2022 luxury tax number at just under $132 million, but that doesn’t include somewhere in the neighborhood of $18–22 million in salary for Díaz, Nimmo, and Lugo, raises from other players tendered a contract, or Alonso and McNeil hitting their first year of arbitration.

Looking at some ludicrously early 2022 projections, featuring only players under contract or bound to their teams for 2022, you can see an early-peek on the challenges the Mets face this winter.

Archie Bradley is probably Philadelphia’s biggest loss, and the Marlins have a rotation with massive upside. Atlanta loses Freddie Freeman in these projections, but it strikes me as unlikely that the team doesn’t close a deal with its biggest veteran name.

If you’re hoping the Mets are aggressive this winter, given the recent changes in the front office and ownership, it strikes me as just as likely that the team takes a step back and retools the roster a bit while waiting for some top prospects to graduate to the majors and some dead money to expire. Whichever path they choose, there’s a big mess to clean up.