The New York Mets are a treasure trove of interesting case studies. They’re a large-market team run frequently like a small-market one, a club that doesn’t always seem to consider the present quality of the team when making decisions about the future, an organization whose various departments — medical, public relations, etc. — don’t always appear to interact. Whatever they are, the Mess are never boring.

Fresh off rumors that the team is interested in pursuing, for their next general manager, someone who is less reliant on data, the team has recently caused the internet buzz again by choosing not to promote the team’s top first-base prospect, Peter Alonso. My colleagues Jay Jaffe and Sheryl Ring have already addressed the service-time games that involve Alonso, but I think it’s interesting to also tackle the situation by looking directly at Alonso vs. Jay Bruce as a pure baseball decision.

It’s a completely non-controversial opinion that 2018 has been a monster season for Alonso, one that has given him real hype as a prospect, something that was not a foregone conclusion entering the year. Even the ZiPS projections for Alonso didn’t quite see this comping, ranking him as the No. 2 Mets prospect coming into the season, the No. 3 first-base prospect in baseball, and the No. 99 prospect overall — all of which I believe were the most optimistic forecasts. Alonso started off the season blazing hot, hitting .408/.505/.776 with seven home runs in April for the Binghamton Rumble Ponies. That performance led to a mid-June promotion to Triple-A Las Vegas. Alonso struggled early there, hitting .171/.330/.368 with 29 strikeouts in 76 at-bats for the 51s. That was extremely concerning in light of the fact that, at 23, Alonso was not a young player at Double-A, but he hit .297/.367/.676 with 17 homers in 182 at-bats after the All-Star break.

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The New York Metropolitans have had what might be termed a disappointing season. (If this comes as news to you, I’ll wake you up when September ends.) Two of the Mets’ more recent debacles have involved a pair of players at very different stages in their careers. First, there’s David Wright, the Mets’ team captain and erstwhile third-sacker, who, as Jay Jaffe wrote last week, is attempting to work his way back from spinal stenosis, among other injuries. Then there’s Peter Alonso, the Mets’ first baseman of the future and author of a .285/.395/.579 slash line and 36 home runs across the upper minors this year, whom the Mets seem determined not to make the first baseman of the present.

Naturally, this has ruffled some feathers. The story with Wright seems to be that the Mets aren’t activating him because they instead want to collect insurance money, which is currently covering 75% of his salary while he’s on the disabled list. He’s not medically cleared to play despite appearing in minor league games.

This has led some to accuse the Mets of committing insurance fraud. (In a bizarre twist, MLB has a long history with insurance fraud, leading most recently to a case in which Ted Lilly was convicted of insurance fraud related to $4,600 worth of damage to his RV.)

Before we continue, please make sure you sit down, swallow any food or beverage in your mouth, and note the date and time, because I am about to defend the Mets.

No, the Mets are not committing insurance fraud.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Note from Eric: Hey you, this is the last one of these for the year, as the minor-league regular season comes to a close. Thanks for reading. I’ll be taking some time off next week, charging the batteries for the offseason duties that lie ahead for Kiley and me.

D.J. Peters, CF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 4-for-7, 2 HR, 2B (double header)

Notes
A comparison of DJ Peters‘ 2017 season in the Cal League and his 2018 season at Double-A gives us a good idea of what happens to on-paper production when a hitter is facing better pitching and defenses in a more stable offensive environment.

Reports of Peters’ physical abilities haven’t changed, nor is his batted-ball profile different in such a way that one would expect a downtick in production. The 2018 line is, I think, a more accurate distillation of Peters’ abilities. He belongs in a talent bucket with swing-and-miss outfielders like Franchy Cordero, Randal Grichuk, Michael A. Taylor, Bradley Zimmer, etc. These are slugging center fielders whose contact skills aren’t particularly great. Players like this are historically volatile from one season to the next but dominant if/when things click. They’re often ~1.5 WAR players who have some years in the three-win range. Sometimes they also turn into George Springer.

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Update: Less than an hour after this was published, the Mets announced that Wright would join the team for this weekend’s series in San Francisco “to continue his rehab under the watch of our training staff” and adding that he “will remain on the DL [disabled list].” Via the New York Post, “Sources said the Mets most likely would not activate Wright on the current road trip but would be more likely to do so Friday [September 7], when they return home.”

In the latest demonstration of their 80-grade ability to transform good news into bad, the Mets have turned David Wright’s promising rehab assignment into another illustration of the club’s parsimony and clumsy relationship both with players and fans. Even while promoting the 35-year-old third baseman and team captain from their High-A affiliate to their Triple-A one on Tuesday, the team — which has gone 48-73 since April 13, just half a game better than the NL-worst Padres — indicated that it’s unlikely to promote Wright to the major leagues this year, even for a September cameo, because of the insurance implications.

A seven-time All-Star, two-time Gold Glove winner and career .296/.376/.491 hitter, Wright hasn’t played in the majors since May 27, 2016 and has played just 75 big-league games since the start of 2015 due to chronic spinal stenosis (a narrowing of his spinal column) and problems with his right (throwing) shoulder. He has undergone three surgeries since his last MLB appearance, one to alleviate a herniated disc in his neck (June 2016), one to repair his right rotator cuff (September 2017), and one to alleviate pressure on a nerve in his back (October 2017). In August 2017, before the shoulder and back surgeries, he attempted a rehab stint, but it lasted just three games before he was shut down again.

In the wake of that operating table double whammy, Wright wasn’t cleared to resume baseball activity until June, and had to re-learn the mechanics of throwing. His pregame exercises to prepare his neck, back, and shoulder start at 1:30 pm for a night game, and he deals with pain on a daily basis. As The Athletic’s Marc Carig described it in his recent profile of Wright:

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No matter what else is happening in your life — no matter how dire your circumstances seem, or how far away salvation might appear — you can at least take consolation in the fact that you are, almost certainly, not a New York Met. And yet despite yet another season nearly entirely unsullied by success or inspiration of any kind, 25 blessed souls still labor on in Flushing, and one of those souls is housed in a body named Brandon Tate Nimmo.

According to a profile of the young man published in the New York Times shortly after Nimmo was selected 13th overall in the 2011 first-year player draft, young Brandon grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, dreaming of one day becoming a bull-rider. Instead, he became a Met. In the years that followed, Brandon Nimmo turned out to be quite good at playing baseball, as was possible but not overwhelmingly probable back in 2011, and by early this spring writers at this site were calling for him to be given quite a bit more playing time this year, in 2018, than the 215 plate appearances he was allowed in 2017.

To their credit, the Mets have mostly given Nimmo a starting outfield spot this season. To Nimmo’s credit, he’s made the most of it. On the year, for example, Nimmo is slugging .503, with an ISO of .238 and 15 home runs in 413 plate appearances. All four figures are career highs, besting both the marks Nimmo set last year and, in perfect order, also the standards he set in the year before, when he made his debut in Queens as a 23-year-old. This power is especially surprising for Nimmo because, with the exception of a stint at Triple-A that forced his original call-up back in 2016, his power numbers were never anywhere close to this good at any stop in the past. My former colleague Travis Sawchick covered this subject back in June.

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The New York Mets are currently not a good baseball team. This isn’t news, and it can also be the source of occasional amusement. In the future envisioned by Futurama, the New New York Mets are the worst team in baseball’s successor, blernsball. But the humor provided by the Mets isn’t solely confined to the future; it provides comedy in the present as well. Upon Wednesday’s announcement of the 2019 MLB schedule, our own Dan Szymborski got in a dig at New York’s second-favorite team.

This current state of Mets-dom is unlikely to change anytime soon. That said, the Mets are actually having a decent August. At 12-11, with three series wins and one split in six series against admittedly weak competition, August represents a major improvement over the months of May through July (27-51 combined record).

The underlying numbers back up this August run. Most important of all is the fact that the Mets have put up the third-highest pitching WAR for the month, trailing only the Indians and Braves in that timespan. Their staff has been led by Jacob deGrom (1.7 WAR, best in MLB in August), Noah Syndergaard (0.8 WAR, 17th-best), and Zack Wheeler (1.0 WAR, eighth-best). While this level of performance isn’t out of the ordinary for deGrom or Syndergaard, Wheeler’s appearance alongside them is little surprising, at least relative to expectations. Prior to the season, the projection systems placed Wheeler at around 1.2 WAR, with all three of ZiPS, Steamer, and Depth Charts projecting him to be worth less than Jason Vargas.

That’s not to say that Wheeler’s talent level was expected to be worse than Vargas’s. It was just hard to know. After 2015 and 2016 seasons wiped out by Tommy John surgery and then a poor 2017, there was little sense of what to expect from the former top prospect. However, Wheeler has rebounded in 2018 to the tune of 3.3 WAR, 15th-best among pitchers in all of baseball. This turnaround has come at a beneficial time for the Mets, a club now looking to build for 2019 and beyond.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Mark Vientos, 3B, New York Mets
Level: Appy   Age: 18   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 3-for-3, 2B, BB

Notes
The Mets have made effectual changes to Mark Vientos’s swing since he signed. His stance has opened up and his hands set up in a way that has enabled him to lift the ball better than he did in high school, especially pitches on the inner half. His hands are more alive and powerful than they were a year ago, and Vientos has launched balls out the other way even when he doesn’t fully square them up. His size/build might eventually cause a tumble down the defensive spectrum (he’s been projected off of shortstop to, at least, third base since he was a high-school underclassman), which would mean power alone won’t be enough to enable him to profile. His early-career contact rates are positive, especially considering Vientos doesn’t turn 19 until December.

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The Mets’ trade deadline strategy seemed a bit dysfunctional. They traded pending free agent Asdrubal Cabrera for an upper-level pitching prospect, which seems like a good idea. However, that was basically the one positive thing the Mets did. They also traded Jeurys Familia, but the return was incredibly light and could have been stronger if the Mets were willing to pay down any of Familia’s salary to get better players back. They added Austin Jackson and kept Jose Bautista for some reason. Keeping Devin Mesoraco wasn’t that terrible because he will probably pass through waivers. Zack Wheeler was shopped extensively but did not move. All of this comes on the heels of a public relations debacle regarding Yoenis Cespedes’ injuries, and a disappointing Tuesday ended with an exclamation point thanks to a 25-4 loss to the Nationals that night.

It certainly appears as though the Mets don’t know what they’re going. Even more concerning, the Mets might actually agree. The following words come from the Mets’ Assistant General Manager, John Ricco, in Ken Davidoff’s New York Post piece from deadline day.

“I think all that happened today is we did not make a trade by the trade deadline,” the assistant general manager said Tuesday in a conference call. “It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re headed into one direction or the other [on the starting rotation]. We’ll make a more informed decision this offseason.”

Davidoff further elaborates on the difficult task the next Mets General Manager faces with an organization in disarray and an ownership group that has repeatedly underfunded the team in an embarrassment to the franchise and the game. The Mets — who over the past half-decade have not been tanking nor rebuilding in a way that would justify a low payroll — haven’t had a payroll higher than 15th in MLB since the 2012 season. From 2000 through 2011, the Mets’ average payroll ranked fourth in baseball, congruent with their status in a massive media market as a club with good attendance and a great local television contract. The Mets are still in a massive media market, generate solid attendance, and have a great television deal, but over the past five years they’ve spent money like the Royals.

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Anyone who has ever studied statistics generally, and sabermetrics or other analytics specifically, will have at least a passing familiarity with the idea of sample sizes. I’m not a sabermetrician – nor do I play one on TV – but you can’t be a good trial lawyer without at least a decent understanding of statistics. And regardless of the statistic, it’s generally true that one game isn’t really all that useful. I mean, it’s useful in the sense that being entertained is useful, but it’s usually not useful in the sense that you can determine talent levels from it.

Enter the Nationals and Mets. They are both, in theory, Major League Baseball teams. They both play on the East Coast. And on July 31, as major league teams are wont to do, they played a baseball game. And when they were done, this had happened.

And as you might expect for a team that scored 25 runs, a lot went right for the Nationals. Daniel Murphy had three hits, hit two homers, and drove in six, yet had just a 0.10 WPA, because that’s what happens when your team scores 25 times. Tanner Roark, the Nationals’ starting pitcher, tossed seven innings of one-run ball and had two hits, including a bases-clearing double. Matt Adams and Mark Reynolds both homered for Washington, and neither of them even started the game. The Nationals walked eight times, had a hit batsman, racked up 26 hits and, as a team, hit .520/.593/1.000, which, in case you were wondering, comes out to a 311 wRC+ and a .646 wOBA. In other words, the Mets’ pitching staff allowed eleven more batters to reach base (35) than they got outs (24).

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Less than three weeks ago, in the context of a July 11 game that featured the longest pitching appearance by a position player since 1988, the earliest mound entry by one since 1979, and the first instance of multiple position players tossing multiple innings in the same game since 1956, I noted that the count of such instances for this season had already reached 29 (not including those of Shohei Ohtani), essentially guaranteeing a smashing of the single-season record of 36 (or 32, depending upon how you feel about Christian Bethancourt, whose conversion to the mound didn’t take), set just last year. In the 21 days since then — four of which were part of the All-Star break — an additional 17 non-pitchers have taken the hill, an average of one per day. On Tuesday night, we saw the worst of them, and perhaps the nadir of the entire genre, when the Mets’ Jose Reyes was battered for six runs by the Nationals while throwing 48 pitches in a single inning of work.

Reyes, who already has little business being on a major-league roster given his ineptitude as a position player (.182/.254/.240, -1.1 WAR entering Wednesday, when of course he homered twice!), entered a game in which the Mets trailed 19-1 in the eighth inning. Working with a fastball that averaged 81.5 mph and topped out at 86.9, and a curve that averaged 63.5, he retired Ryan Zimmerman on a fly ball, and then proceeded to allow the next six batters to reach safely: Juan Soto won a 10-pitch encounter with a double to rightfield, Matt Adams followed with a two-run homer to right-center (21-1), Michael Taylor and Matt Wieters both walked, pinch-hitter Mark Reynolds followed with a three-run homer (24-1), and then Trea Turner singled. Reyes got Anthony Rendon to fly out, but then Wilmer Difo tripled (25-1). Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Reyes then hit Zimmerman with a 54-mph curveball, after which Zimmerman pretended as though he might charge the mount. Finally, Soto flied out to end the debacle.

While a position-player pitching appearance is supposed to be either a break-glass-in-emergency desperation move (generally in extra innings) or a lighthearted farce that draws attention away from an otherwise unpleasant blowout, this was unpleasantness itself. In all, Reyes’s 48 pitches were three more than Jacob deGrom threw in a single inning on June 17 before being pulled out of concern for his health. Regardless of Reyes’s current playing ability or his status as a pariah in the wake of his 2016 domestic violence suspension, manager Mickey Callaway allowing him to toil that long was irresponsible, though it was at worst the second-most irresponsible act of the night following a dead-armed Steven Matz being torched for seven first-inning runs and then later examined for complaints of forearm tightness. Chalk it up as the umpteenth data point illustrating the team’s incompetence and lack of accountability when it comes to protecting its players.

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