The Washington Nationals are the best team in the NL East. The second best team in the NL East might be the Mets Disabled List. Already consisting of Yoenis Cespedes, Steven Matz, Lucas Duda, David Wright, Wilmer Flores, Seth Lugo, and Brandon Nimmo, the injured Mets are now going to add Noah Syndergaard to the list, as the Mets announced his MRI this morning revealed a torn lat muscle.

Update on Noah Syndergaard. #Mets pic.twitter.com/n8JVxIBBid

— New York Mets (@Mets) May 1, 2017

While there’s no official timetable, this isn’t going to be a short DL stint. Matz missed two months with a similar injury back in 2015, and that was diagnosed as the lowest grade lat tear. At this point, it’s probably unlikely that Syndergaard is back before the All-Star break.

While the Mets theoretically had a lot of pitching depth before the season started, no team can really sustain the loss of three starting pitchers that easily, and there’s no replacing Syndergaard. This probably costs the Mets a win or two even if Syndergaard gets back in July, and if this lingers beyond that, it could be closer to three or four wins. This is a huge blow, on par with the Giants loss of Madison Bumgarner, and puts the Mets 2017 season in some legitimate jeopardy.

The NL Wild Card race might really end up being first-to-87-wins-gets-it. This doesn’t end the Mets chances of making the postseason, but they’re going to need some things to turn around in short order. They can only dig so big a hole before it becomes overwhelming.

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Jessica Mendoza’s ears perked up while she was conversing with Kyle Hendricks yesterday afternoon. The ESPN analyst was doing game prep for this evening’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast when the Chicago Cubs right-hander mentioned effective velocity.

“I interrupted him,” Mendoza told me later. “I said, ‘Can we talk about that?’

If you read this Sunday Notes column from last August, that won’t surprise you. The Stanford-educated Mendoza is a baseball nerd. So is the Dartmouth-educated Hendricks, who was more than happy to oblige her request.

“It was refreshing, because that’s (the type of subject) we love talking about,” said Hendricks. “We started talking about bat paths, two- and four-seam fastballs, how to attack hitters. That was the first time I’d met her, and it was great to talk baseball with her. You can tell she’s very knowledgeable, especially about hitting.”

How Hendricks is avoiding bats is what Mendoza wanted to address when she approached him in the clubhouse. She was especially curious about his velocity, which has been down this year. That’s where the ear-perking subject came up. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we examined pitcher in Los Angeles who’d switched from a pretty ordinary four-seam fastball to a more dynamic two-seamer and found success in the process. JC Ramirez does throw in the high 90s, but his was the story you want to tell.

What we might be seeing with Kenta Maeda is the opposite, or close to it. Because, right now, despite a strikeout minus walk rate that looks familiar, Maeda’s ERA is more than twice his 2016 version. The difference between the two years? Home runs, seven of them already. The fastball might be the key to avoiding those going forward.

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Only six pitchers in the majors so far this season have thrown more innings than Cole Hamels, and his 3.03 ERA is pretty nice, too. Good start to the season for him, then, right? Well, not so fast. There are a number of indicators that paint the picture that Hamels may be in for a world of trouble in 2017.

I first was alerted to Hamels’ precarious situation by this tweet from the venerable Mike Petriello:

That’s not great, especially given how consistent Hamels has been throughout his career. The drop in swinging-strike percentage isn’t necessarily totally damning though, so I wanted to investigate further. Let’s start with some of his other plate-discipline statistics.

Most of Hamels’ plate-discipline stats are trending in the wrong direction, aside from his Z-Swing%, which hasn’t changed much the past three seasons. His Zone% is the second-lowest of his career, the lowest mark having occurred last season. His Swing% and O-Swing% are both at career lows. That’s not great, either. His Z-Contact% and Contact% are both career-worst marks, and his O-Contact% in at its highest since 2009. It’s the second-highest mark of his career. None of this is encouraging.

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A variety of maladies were already plaguing the Mets before they met with the media on Thursday morning. Things would soon get worse, however. Reporters soon learned, for example, that in addition to the six Mets currently on the disabled list, Noah Syndergaard would not be making his start due to a bicep issue. Matt Harvey would be getting the ball that day instead. Before the day was out, Yoenis Cespedes would leave the game after further injuring a balky hamstring, and Harvey would fail to make it out of the fifth inning. They’ve now lost six straight games, and added further insults and injuries to an already large pile of both. Less than a month into the season, their playoff odds are starting to get ugly.

The Mets likely can’t be blamed for every single issue currently plaguing them. They can be blamed, however, for some of them. Too many of them, perhaps.

Prior to the start of the season, a new collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ union was put into place. Among the new provisions within the document was a new 10-day disabled list, shortened from 15 days. It was created with the idea that teams could have more flexibility in giving time off to banged-up players. Clubs, in turn, would have more freedom to call up replacements and to avoin playing with an understaffed roster. Some teams, including the Mets, had gotten into a habit of playing a man or two down while players nursed injuries deemed too minor to merit a full 15 days on the DL. Now, teams can theoretically get players back five days earlier, and play with 25 men. Everybody wins, no?

The Mets have failed to fully embrace the possibilities afforded by a 10-day DL. Cespedes originally injured his hamstring on the 20th. He didn’t play again until Wednesday, partially due to an off day and a rainout, although he did come out on deck for a possible pinch-hitting appearance on Sunday before the Mets lost. The Mets and their training staff had decided that Cespedes didn’t need a full DL stint, just a few days off, with potentially a plate appearance off the bench mixed in.

Cespedes came up slightly lame when he hurt himself on the 20th. He needed help getting off the field yesterday. It’s not an ideal situation for a man who’s still dealing with the vestiges of a quad injury that sidelined him for part of the 2016 campaign and never really released him from its grip down the stretch.

Of course, Cespedes isn’t the only Met who has been carried along for the ride in such a fashion. Both Asdrubal Cabrera and Travis d’Arnaud were in similar states of limbo in the past week. The clubs has done this quite a bit over the last few seasons. It now appears to have cost Cespedes at least a few weeks of action.

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CLEVELAND — We know the Astros are one of the most forward-thinking, analytically minded organizations in baseball. They’ve led baseball in infield shift usage in recent seasons. They’ve experimented with piggy-back rotations in the minor leagues, they’ve been creative in maximizing draft pools, and have given us a revolutionary bullpen figure, the gift that is Chris Devenski.

They’ve also been as aggressive as any team I’ve observed with regard to outfield alignment.

Outfield alignment doesn’t receive as much attention as infield shifts. There are few, if any, outfield alignment measures publicly available, and we don’t often see outfield alignments in full scope on television broadcasts prior to a batted ball. Average depth is recorded by Statcast, but we’re still working on understanding optimum outfield positioning.

But the Astros are up to something — something which I first noticed last season at PNC Park.

Since air balls are more evenly distributed than ground balls, there are typically fewer radical defensive alignments in the outfield. Since there are only three fielders tasked with covering a much larger area of ground than in the infield, outfielders are generally kept in equidistant positions, spreading risk. But the above alignment against the left-handed-hitting Gregory Polanco represented an extreme swing to the left. It appeared counterintuitive, too, with the Astros playing Polanco as if he were an extreme right-handed pull hitter. In this case, the left fielder was near the left-field line, the center fielder shading toward left center, and the right fielder nearly in right center.

But the approach appears to be rooted in logic, too. While most ground balls are pulled, air balls are more evenly distributed, with batters often slightly favoring the opposite field.

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One of the classic criticisms of the front-page entries on FanGraphs is that it can sometimes look like writers are just scanning different leaderboards until they find a subject. Now, there’s nothing actually wrong with that, I don’t think. That’s why the leaderboards exist — so we can all learn from what they say. It’s not like we can easily and automatically keep track of everything by ourselves. Still, I understand where the criticism comes from. And so I’d like to be up front here: This post is about something I didn’t expect to see on a leaderboard. There’s no deeper inspiration. But when I saw a player’s line, I knew I couldn’t not write about it.

In the early going this season, the White Sox have been a pleasant surprise! They’re hanging tight with the Indians, and they’re well ahead of, say, the Royals. One element that’s driven the White Sox has been the pitching staff, and, specifically, the bullpen. Even coming into the year, the team had Nate Jones and David Robertson, so the bullpen wasn’t likely to be terrible. To this point, it’s second out of all big-league bullpens in ERA-. It’s first in K-BB%. That…isn’t what anyone expected. And now, a plot.

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Yes, ThamesGraphs is still in full force. I’ll write about someone else eventually.

You know the Thames story by now. You probably also know that a lot of it has been written against the Cincinnati Reds. The Brewers have played seven games against the Reds already, and in those seven games, Thames has launched 8 of his 11 home runs. He’s slugging 1.400 against them, and it’s easy to dismiss his early success as just mashing bad pitching. After all, the Reds just set the all-time record for home runs allowed last year, and their current staff is missing Anthony Desclafani, their best starting pitcher. We have the Reds projected as the worst rotation in baseball.

So since this comes up so often, I figure we might as well show what he’s doing against everyone else. Here’s Eric Thames‘ 2017 batting line if you eliminate the seven games against Cincinnati.

If Thames had been benched for all of the games against the Reds, he’d still rank 9th in MLB in wRC+. And, of course, that’s without taking away any results from anyone else because we deemed part of their competition too weak to include in the calculations.

Yes, Thames destroyed the Reds. He also destroyed the Cubs, Rockies, Cardinals, and Blue Jays. The 8 of 11 home runs is a nice headline stat, but the reality is that Thames has hit against good and bad pitching this year, and his numbers haven’t been that heavily inflated by facing weak pitching early. Facing the Reds a bunch has helped, but he’s doing work against everyone.

On Monday, I asked for your help in evaluating these five hitters who have gotten off to wonderful starts:

• Bryce Harper
• Eric Thames
• Mitch Haniger
• Aaron Judge
• Eugenio Suarez

On Tuesday, I asked for your help in evaluating these five hitters who have gotten off to terrible starts:

• Jose Bautista
• Alex Gordon
• Gregory Bird
• Dansby Swanson
• Byron Buxton

The 10 polls accumulated thousands upon thousands of total votes. I was looking for you to select projected rest-of-season wRC+ marks, and you graciously participated in tremendous numbers. I don’t always follow up on my poll posts; sometimes I just want the polls to start a conversation, and sometimes I don’t think the data is worth a follow-up entry. But here I’d like to show you how the FanGraphs community voted. As a sneak preview, I’ll tell you now that apparently the community thinks Suarez is officially a better hitter today than Bautista is. Weird game!

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