Last year, Robert Gsellman came up to the big leagues and helped stabilize an injury-plagued Mets rotation. With a power sinker that had added velocity, the unheralded Gsellman missed bats and generated grounders at an elite level. And after another Steven Matz injury put the lefty’s dependability into question this past spring training, Gsellman was given a prime opportunity to grab a 2017 rotation spot and run with it. To date, however, he hasn’t returned to top form.

For one thing, the results have been ugly. By RA9-WAR, Gsellman has been one of MLB’s worst starters. That once-great sinker whiff rate has been halved. But beyond outcome-level stats, his pitch data indicates worsened stuff. Overall, Gsellman’s sinker is down 0.71 mph, and especially striking are his in-game velocity declines.

Below are LOESS-smoothed curves plotting the difference between the given two-seam fastball velocity and its initial “baseline” in that game — represented, in this case, by the average velocity of the pitcher’s first five two-seamers. By restating velocities like this, each start becomes its own “universe” and we mitigate pitch-tracking biases on the game and park level.

Out of the gate of his 2017 starts, Gsellman’s velocity is dropping. By the 40-pitch mark, he has typically lost 1 mph from his starting speed. As he approaches 80 pitches, his two-seamers are nearly 1.75 mph slower. The orange curve does rebound near its end, but a widened 95% confidence interval reflects a smaller sample of pitches and less certainty that he’ll continue to gain velocity back. Regardless, Gsellman is ending his starts at 1.5 mph off his opening speed. Compared to the dark gray curve for the league — which indicates starts this April in which pitchers threw 20-plus two-seamers/sinkers and 90-plus total pitches — Gsellman’s velocity has tumbled much more steeply.

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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.

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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Last Thursday, baseball got weird and the Mets and Marlins played past midnight. After Travis d’Arnaud hit the go-ahead homer in the 16th, the catcher slowly trotted around the bases, admitting afterwards that he needed the invigorating effects of that moment just to complete the task. “The emotions of the home run helped lift my legs a little bit,” he said to James Wagner after the game regarding his tired knees. After the dust had settled and all the exhausted quotes were collected, though, the teams had to play another game later that day. What sort of effect would the marathon game have on that game?

Intuitively, you might expect the teams to have trouble scoring runs the next day. Tired legs, tired minds, tired bats, you’d think. Turns out that instinct is accurate… sort of.

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Mets fans know the dilemma well. Despite already possessing probably the club’s second-best bat after Yoenis Cespedes, Michael Conforto might have a tenuous grasp on a roster spot.

Conforto isn’t a natural center fielder. Juan Lagares is a natural center fielder and is also nearing a return from a rehab stint to serve as the club’s fourth outfielder, a role which Conforto is currently filling.

Conforto is a more natural fit at a corner-outfield spot, but Cespedes has a solid grasp of left field and the Mets owe Curtis Granderson and Jay Bruce $15 million and $13 million, respectively, this year. Granderson and Bruce are atop the depth chart at center and right field.

Conforto is well aware of his situation. He’s well aware he has minor-league options remaining and a relatively paltry salary. Said the 24-year-old to Newsday earlier this week: “My situation is a day-to-day thing.”

Despite doing this on Wednesday night…

Regardless of the quality of contact he’s produced, his pedigree as a first-round pick, and the intriguing track record, Conforto isn’t a lock to stick in the lineup regularly or on the 25-man roster at all.

There’s the old adage that if you can hit they will find a place for you in the field. Will the Mets?

This is a player who posted a 133 wRC+ of as a rookie in 2015 over 194 plate appearances, when Conforto’s average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives was 96.1 mph, ranking him 22nd among hitters with at least 100 batted-ball events (just behind Cespedes). After an excellent start to 2016, a wrist issue and inconsistent playing time contributed to a lackluster sophomore campaign.

Still, despite 2016, Conforto was projected by ZiPS to be the Mets’ second-best position player in 2017. From our ZiPS post back in February:

Only four Mets field players recorded a WAR figure of 2.0 or greater in 2016. According to Dan Szymborski’s computer, six different Mets might be expected to reach that mark in 2017. Yoenis Cespedes (596 PA, 4.1 zWAR) receives the club’s top projection by a full win — and three of the club’s top-four forecasts overall belong to outfielders. One of those additional outfielders is Curtis Granderson (538, 2.3). The other isn’t presumptive right-field starter Jay Bruce (583, 1.2) but rather Michael Conforto (558, 3.0). Conforto, in other words, appears to be a markedly superior option.

And all Conforto has done this spring is hit like Kyle Schwarber Lite. He’s making life difficult on Mets officials tasked with setting the roster and lineup card.

Last year, Eno Sarris wrote about the development of power and how Conforto’s best contact hadn’t been ideal. Well, Conforto is making strides there early this spring. His home run on Sunday left his bat at 108 mph and landed 430 feet away in right-center field.

Conforto can hit. He might be the Mets’ second-best hitter and yet the Mets continue to struggle to find a place for his bat, giving him only two starts so far this season.

The Mets might have initially regretted picking up Bruce’s option, insurance in case Cespedes signed elsewhere this offseason. But Bruce has been productive to date this year, and might be benefiting from an attempt to launch more balls in the air. Bruce has hit four home runs in the season’s first week and is slashing .273/.385/.667 — in part, fueled by a 0.40 GB/FB ratio.

So what to do with Conforto?

A modest proposal: platoon Conforto with Lagares in center (which is how the Mets began last season), hope for the best defensively, and let him hit.

For starters, outfield defense is a bit less important behind the Mets, whose pitching staff finished ninth in strikeouts in baseball a season ago and ninth in ground-ball rate (46.5%). The Mets’ power rotation is again expected to miss many a bat and produce a better-than-average ground-ball rate.

But Conforto might actually be a superior defensive option to Granderson in center right now. In limited defensive work in center field, covering 48 innings, Conforto has been worth 1 defensive run save (DRS). In 952 innings in left, he’s been posted 9 DRS, exceeding expectations of his defense. Granderson, meanwhile, has declined as a defender and is already rated as being worth -2 DRS this season in center. In his last full season in center, in New York in 2012, Granderson was worth -7 DRS.

Conforto is the better offensive option going forward.

As for Lagares, he’s an excellent defensive center fielder, having tallied 62 DRS from 2013 to -16, but he’s posted well below-average offensive seasons in back-to-back years, including a 79 wRC+ mark in 2015 and an 84 wRC+ last season. However, for his career, Lagares has a wRC+ of 105 versus lefties versus a 76 mark against righties. Given what we know about platoon splits, that might actually be a fair representation of his true talent. There’s a place for Lagares’ glove as a defensive replacement, or perhaps with a fly-ball pitcher on the mound. And Lagares’ right-handed bat could serve as a platoon partner for Conforto who has struggled to hit lefties (.129 average in 62 at-bats) early in his big-league career.

Every win matters for the Mets in what figures to be a competitive NL East. While their lineup is off to a productive start, it would be more productive, more often, with their second-most-capable hitter in the lineup.

We’ve always heard that if you can hit a team will find a place for you. For much of this spring it seemed the Mets were thinking that place was Triple-A for Conforto, but perhaps Conforto’s strong spring and torrid start to open the season in limited chances could force some more creative thinking.

The sooner they find a way to make a consistent lineup home for Conforto, the better off they will be.

How does one define stardom in baseball? How does one identify a star? Well, firstly, it probably doesn’t require knowing a guy’s WAR. It’s more intuitive than that. You can feel your lips curling into a grin when a certain player does something exceptional. When that happens again and again, that’s when you know: there’s something special about that one guy. He can do it all, and he does it more often than everyone else. What’s a star? A star is someone capable of evoking an almost childlike sense of joy and wonder.

Yoenis Cespedes has sentimental value for Mets fans beyond his capacity to do just that. It was Cespedes who strode in and muscled the Mets to the World Series a couple years ago. He may not serve as a daily one-man wrecking crew with the sort of frequency that he did during the 2015 stretch drive, but he’s still pretty damn good, and pretty damn watchable to boot. He’s a near-ideal mixture of talent and swagger, a man with monstrous power and a magnetic presence off the field. It was that monstrous power, and the Phillies, which helped him launch three home runs last night.

Homer #1

Look, I don’t know whether we’ll ever be able to say for sure if Clay Buchholz is (was?) good. His career has been a roller coaster without safety harnesses. There have been years where he’s looked brilliant, and there have been years where he’s looked disastrous. Both varieties of seasons are prone to being curtailed by injuries. And, speaking of which, Buchholz did wind up leaving last night’s game with the dreaded “right forearm tightness,” so he may not have been at his best when Cespedes did this to him.

Now, yes, the Phillies do indeed play in a bandbox. But hitting a ball out to dead center is impressive no matter where you’re playing, and Cespedes cleared the wall with room to spare. It’s easy to do that when you’re built like Cespedes and you’ve just been thrown a big-league meatball, but you’ve still got to actually hit the thing. Cespedes, true to form, did in fact hit the thing. Thus began a game that would see the Mets score 14 runs and hit seven bombs in total. It seems Mets hitters really do trust the process.

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Jay Bruce is not going to win any popularity contests in New York’s largest borough when the season opens next month.

Through no fault of his own, the Mets exercised his $13 million option this winter, ostensibly as insurance in case Yoenis Cespedes fled elsewhere. With the return of Cespedes, though, Bruce is now regarded primarily as an impediment to promising young outfielder Michael Conforto’s ability to receive more playing time. This is not a post arguing that Confroto shouldn’t be the recipient of more playing time. I would like to see a full season from Conforto, too. This is a post about Bruce independent of playing-time issues in New York.

This is a post, in part, about a player using batted-ball data to rethink his ideas about lifting the ball, a subject we’ve detailed exhaustively at FanGraphs this offseason and spring. This is also a post about a player who’s running out of time to live up to his lofty prospect pedigree. While Bruce’s 111 wRC+ last season and 107 mark for his career continues to render him employable, his declining defense has him pushed him near replacement-level the last two seasons, when he has combined for one unit of WAR. This is a player who must get more out of his bat to secure another lucrative contract, and to secure steady playing time.

But what’s a little different about this story is that Bruce already hits more fly balls than ground balls. This is a fly-ball hitter who wants to become an extreme fly-ball hitter, as James Wagner details in a recent, excellent New York Times feature.

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In the year 2016, pitchers continued to hit, even though they are very bad at it. This is not good for the pitchers’ own teams, but this is good for science. It stands to reason the most terrifying pitcher for another pitcher to try to hit against would be Aroldis Chapman. That doesn’t happen. Among the matchups that do actually happen, it stands to reason the most terrifying pitcher for another pitcher to try to hit against would be Noah Syndergaard. Let’s look at how that just went.

Over the course of last season, including the playoffs, Syndergaard had more than 50 matchups against opposing pitchers. As this particular split is concerned, that’s a fairly large sample size. How do you think the pitchers all did? You might be tempted to believe they all struck out. No, that’s not realistic. They didn’t even go hitless! So maybe the data won’t raise your eyebrows in the least, but don’t be mistaken — Syndergaard was dominant. (Obviously.)

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Remember Vintage Matt Harvey? He sat 96 and didn’t walk anyone and could go to any of three plus secondary pitches. Sigh. That Matt Harvey was sweet. And it was only 2015 when we last saw him. We all had hope that thoracic-outlet surgery would bring that Matt Harvey back, but we’re hearing some bad news on that front recently.

“Harvey’s velocity hovered in the 92-mph range — just as it has in all three of his spring starts — as he got roughed up in a 6-2 loss to the Marlins,” wrote Marc Carig on Wednesday before a grumpy Harvey did his best to assuage concerns with the press afterwards. Given his rough season last year, however — when he was down to 94 from 96 the years before — those fears are justified.

“It’s going to be there or it’s not, and I have to go out and pitch,” Harvey told Carig. “And I think after today I feel really confident going into my next outing and moving forward.” He’s right to assert that he has to pitch with whatever he has, and the underlying assumption, that others have been fine at similar velocities, is also correct. But will this righty, with this fastball, be just as well off as, say, two other righties who averaged 92 on their fastballs last year like a Tanner Roark or an Ian Kennedy? What will his work look like if he’s healthy all year?

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This morning, Eric Longenhagen released his list of the Top 20 Mets prospects, giving kudos to an underrated system led Amed Rosario, who Eric noted could be the #1 prospect in the game when next year’s Top 100 rolls around. Right behind him, Eric went with Robert Gsellman, the Jacob Degrom lookalike who ended last year in Queens, helping pitch the Mets to a Wild Card berth. This was a bit of a deviation from where Gsellman has ranked on other lists, as Baseball America had him as the #7 prospect in the Mets system, while MLB.com had him at #5. Eric, though, put a 55 FV grade on him, the same rating as many of the best-known pitching prospects in the game, such as Michael Kopech, Tyler Glasnow, and Jose De Leon.

Given Gsellman’s track record, it’s not surprising that he would engender some pretty different points of view. A 13th round pick, he was a run-of-the-mill pitch-to-contact guy for most of his minor league career, running strikeout rates as low as 13% in Double-A as recently as 2015. As Eric noted, he mostly sat in the low-90s and pitched primarily off his fastball, so between not being much of a prospect when drafted to not having an out-pitch against low-level hitters, there weren’t a lot of reasons to get too excited about Gsellman’s future.

But then last year, the velocity began to tick up a bit, and he got his strikeout rates up closer to league average in both Double-A and Triple-A, which earned him enough notice to get a big league callup when the injury plague hit Queens and the team needed another starter to help down the stretch. And then, once he got to the big leagues, he was nothing short of spectacular, running a 2.42 ERA/2.63 FIP/3.38 xFIP in 45 innings of work. As a Major Leaguer, his fastball sat at 94, generated a bunch of groundballs, and his secondary stuff was good enough for him to post an above-average strikeout rate. Besides the fact that five of his seven starts came against the Braves and Phillies, there was basically nothing to argue with in his big league performances.

So, Gsellman is a great test case for how evaluators weight different types of information. On the one hand, we have four years of minor league data suggesting that he doesn’t get enough strikeouts to be a high-end big league pitcher, and you almost always want to go with four years of history over a month’s worth of data. On the other hand, not only is Gsellman’s performance in the majors the most recent data, but it also provides some pretty clear evidence that he’s not throwing the same stuff he was as a minor leaguer who didn’t miss bats. What you think of Gsellman’s future likely depends on how much importance you put on long-term track record versus how willing you are to believe that a small sample performance that doesn’t match the history suggests a change in skillsets.

Before PITCHF/x and Statcast, I’d probably be in the “small sample size” camp, pointing out that even including 2016’s improved minor league numbers, KATOH is still comparing him to guys like Aaron Cook, and suggesting we don’t get too excited about a small handful of starts against poor competition. But thankfully, with better data, I think we now better understand of the limits of yelling “small sample size” about everyone, and we have tools that allow us to more regularly identify guys whose track records lose relevance after a significant shift in skills. And when you read Eric’s write-up and look at what Gsellman threw in the big leagues, I think there’s enough evidence to suggest that not only is the optimism warranted, but that it’s possible that we’re still undervaluing him even now.

Let’s put the minor league numbers aside for a minute. Let’s just talk about raw stuff. In the big leagues, Gsellman primarily threw a sinker that averaged 94, ran his four-seam fastball up to the high-90s on occasion, and threw a couple of breaking balls and a change-up ranging from 82-89. Using the always-nifty pitch descriptions from Brooks Baseball, which turn the data into scouting-report style write-ups, this is what Gselllman’s stuff looked like in the majors last year.

His sinker generates an extremely high number of swings & misses compared to other pitchers’ sinkers, generates a very high amount of groundballs compared to other pitchers’ sinkers and has well above average velo. His fourseam fastball has slightly above average velo. His cutter generates an extremely high number of swings & misses compared to other pitchers’ cutters, has heavy sink and is a real worm killer that generates an extreme number of groundballs compared to other pitchers’ cutters. His curve is slightly harder than usual. His change is basically never swung at and missed compared to other pitchers’ changeups, is much firmer than usual and results in somewhat more flyballs compared to other pitchers’ changeups. His slider (take this with a grain of salt because he’s only thrown 18 of them in 2016) is thrown extremely hard, is an extreme flyball pitch compared to other pitchers’ sliders and has primarily 12-6 movement.

Despite the difference between calling his primary hard breaking ball a slider or a cutter, this matches up well with what Eric wrote, and the first sentence really emphasizes why Gsellman destroyed big league hitters last year. A 94 mph sinker that generates both an “extreme” number of swinging strikes and generates a “very high” number of groundballs is a huge weapon. For instance, here’s the leaderboard of swinging strike rate on sinkers from 2016.

Probably not a coincidence that there are three Mets on that list. Also not a coincidence; most of these guys are really good. Darvish, Arrieta, and Syndergaard are three of the game’s most elite pitchers, and Carrasco isn’t far behind. Guys who throw swing-and-miss sinkers have a great foundation, and Gsellman’s sinker put him in the top tier of bat-missing with the pitch.

But Gsellman might also be different from most of those guys, because his sinker also generated the 12th highest GB% of any sinker in MLB last year. In general, the guys who get high whiff rates on their sinker don’t also get high grounder rates. For instance, Velasquez had the highest whiff rate but the fourth-lowest grounder rate. Out of the 119 pitchers who threw at least 200 sinkers last year, Darvish ranked 79th in groundball rate, Arrieta ranked 65th, and Ray ranked 87th. Brandon Finnegan, the least encouraging comparison on the whiff rate list, ranked 110th.

The only other pitcher who ranked in the top 20 in grounder rate on his sinker and top 10 in whiff rate with the pitch was Carlos Carrasco, who ranked 19th in GB% with his sinker; Ventura was 22nd and Syndergaard was 24th, for the record.

So, yeah, Gsellman’s sinker. This looks like it might be a pretty special pitch. If all we knew about him was that he threw that, then there would be plenty of reason for optimism. But the good news doesn’t end there.

His minor league track record shows a guy who is able to pound the strike zone, and he did the same thing in the big leagues. This isn’t a Daniel Cabrera situation, where a guy with a great fastball is unable to throw strikes and puts himself in hitter’s counts where guys can sit on it and crush a predictable offering. As Eric notes, Gsellman’s entire thing as a minor leaguer was fastball command, only now he’s apparently commanding a sinker that might be among the best in the game.

The primary knock against Gsellman now is that the breaking balls still aren’t great, and as Eric notes, the change-up is kind of terrible. As, as a sinker-heavy right-hander who is probably going to move towards the slider as his primary breaking ball — he’s a Met, after all — there seems to be some risk that he might be vulnerable to left-handers. But then, there’s this.

Platoon splits are one of the things that can show up pretty quickly, especially if a guy has a limited repertoire that only works against one type of hitter; it’s almost impossible for a sinker/slider right-hander to accidentally strike out a bunch of lefties if he’s throwing from a low-arm slot. But that wasn’t Gsellman’s story, as he struck out a higher percentage of lefties than righties, and still got a bunch of grounders from them as well. His breaking stuff might not scare left-handers much, but it seems like the fastball is good enough to pitch off of against hitters from either side, and while we shouldn’t put any stock in the reverse-platoon aspect of things, it’s at least encouraging that lefties didn’t torch him in the big leagues.

So, based on what he threw in the majors last year, it seems difficult to cling to comparisons to guys like Aaron Cook or Mike Leake. Gsellman looks like he has one of the best sinkers in the game, sitting at 94 with movement and command. The secondary stuff isn’t great, but realistically, there doesn’t seem to be a huge difference between what Gsellman was throwing in the big leagues last year and what Aaron Sanchez rode to an All-Star appearance in Toronto. Sanchez throws a tick harder, but he’s an example of what a heavy sinking fastball that also misses bats can do, even for a pitcher that doesn’t do a lot of other stuff at a high level.

Without a true knockout breaking ball, he probably won’t run elite strikeout rates, but the reality is that a guy who throws strikes and gets groundballs doesn’t also need an elite strikeout rate to be a good pitcher. Even if he settles in as more of a Marcus Stroman or Sonny Gray, guys with roughly average strikeout rates, that’s still a high-end arm, and the profile doesn’t look too different from what Garrett Richards was earlier in his career, showing that these guys do add strikeouts as they develop sometimes.

Of course, not every velocity spike is long-lasting, and the story changes a bit if Gsellman goes back to throwing 92 instead of 94. Health certainly is no guarantee. But I think this might be one of the times where what a player was previously might be having too much of an impact on what we think he is now. Eric certainly wasn’t conservative in giving Gsellman a 55 FV grade and putting him in the upper tier of pitching prospects around the game, but I wonder if even that might be underselling the value of a big league ready arm who throws what Gsellman throws.

There just aren’t that many guys commanding 94 sinkers that miss bats and get ground balls. It’s easy to look at the rest of the stuff and say that it’s not special, but if he had another special pitch, he’d be the best pitching prospect alive. As is, he looks pretty good to me, even without a knockout breaking ball. And if he develops one, well, good luck National League.