After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Kansas City / Minnesota / New York AL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
While not particularly relevant to the 2016 edition of the Mets, it’s difficult to examine the ZiPS projections below without also acknowledging the system’s relative optimism concerning free-agent outfielder Yoenis Cespedes (629 PA, 4.4 zWAR). The gap between Cespedes’s forecasted win total and Michael Conforto’s second-best mark is equivalent to the gap between Conforto’s mark and the average of the club’s 11th- and 12th-best hitter projections. In other words: for whatever Cespedes’s flaws, his strengths appear capable of compensating for them at the moment.

Which isn’t to ignore another of the system’s perhaps surprsing outputs — namely, the projection for Conforto himself. Entering just his age-23 season, Conforto began the 2015 campaign as the left fielder for the High-A St. Lucie Mets. He’s expected to play that same position for the actual New York version of the team on opening day this year — and, it would seem, is a candidate to produce wins at a higher rate than any of his teammates.

In general, what the Mets feature is essentially the antithesis of a stars-and-scrubs configuration. The success of the club relies not on elite performances by one or two players, but rather the competence of the entire starting eight.

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With the news that Bartolo Colon signed a one-year, $7.25 million deal with the New York Mets, we once again have a chance to talk about the skill set of one of the most beloved players in baseball. Add onto that the fact that his new contract includes a $50,000 bonus if he wins a Silver Slugger Award, and we’re perfectly set up to talk about the most loved aspect of one of the most loved player’s game: his performance at the plate. Any chance to talk about Colon is a good one. A chance to find a new angle on Colon’s hitting is the El Dorado of baseball writing.

The search for that city of gold could start in any number of places. Especially over the past few years, we’ve seen highlights of Colon’s exploits with the bat, from his helmet doing everything it could to escape the perch atop his head, to him legging out infield singles. He’s a human highlight reel when he gets a piece of maple in his hands, and it would be very easy to simply embed a few videos of his at-bats here and call it a day (I’ve linked to them instead).

Let’s dig a little deeper, however. One question we can answer is where Colon ranks among all pitchers who have accrued (or endured) their fair share of plate appearances. We all know of the jokes about him at the plate, and the at-bats in which he simply seems to have better things to do. But is Bartolo really one of the worst hitting pitchers of all time?

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Despite losing out on Zack Greinke, the Los Angeles Dodgers look to have one of the best teams in major league baseball. While Jeff Sullivan made a reasonable case recently for the Chicago Cubs as the best team in baseball currently, the Dodgers are right there with them, even without the benefit of a major move. But now that the Hisashi Iwakuma deal has fallen apart and led Iwakuma to reunite with the Seattle Mariners, the Dodgers need pitching. They were rumored to be involved with the Atlanta Braves for Shelby Miller and rumors still surround the pursuit of Jose Fernandez and pitchers in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. It’s possible, however, that it’s Matt Harvey who could best solve the Dodgers’ problems.

Despite likely losing Yoenis Cespedes and Daniel Murphy to free agency, the New York Mets also have a very good team returning next year. By our Depth Charts projections, the Mets have the fifth-best team in baseball, less than a win behind division-rival Washington Nationals. The club has a really good shot at repeating as division winners, with a rotation of Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Steven Matz, and Noah Syndergaard leading the way, and a returning Zack Wheeler and Bartolo Colon as insurance. The team has a solid infield, shrewdly picking up Neil Walker, and they should be able to cobble something semi-productive out of Asdrubal Cabrera and their returning middle infielders at shortstop. The team does have a bit of a hole in center field, and the offense, without Cespedes or Cespedes, doesn’t look all that great. The Mets might still have some financial concerns going into next season. It’s possible, though, that the young and cheap and talented Joc Pederson could solve the Mets’ problems.

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Talking to Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen last year, he mentioned something about the strategy of his brand of slider that has stuck with me. We normally think of sliders as hard curveballs, maybe. Loopy but hard pitches. Try figuring out if Craig Kimbrel throws a hard curve or a slider, and you’re down that normal path.

But Warthen said something a little different about the slider: “We don’t want to make it break, we want to think about getting our fingers to the front of the ball and spinning the baseball. Then you take another breaking ball and you separate the speeds, and it doesn’t have to be a great breaking ball, it just has to be a different speed.”

So, in effect, Warthen was talking about changing speeds with the slider. Normally that’s something you talk about with the changeup, which is obvious because of the way the pitch is named. But now we can talk about it with respect to the slider.

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When Yoenis Cespedes suits up in April, he will very likely be playing for his fifth team in just over a 20-month period. His last 211 games have been split between four clubs. Some might try to use this as a reason to undervalue Cespedes in free agency and argue that three, perhaps four, teams have given up on him of late. Those arguments tend to miss the point, as the Oakland Athletics are prone to trade anyone, the Boston Red Sox desperately needed pitching last season while also possessing a surplus of outfielders, the Detroit Tigers fell out of the playoff race, and the New York Mets are merely prone to some unusual spending limits. The market for outfielders has been slow to develop, but with Jason Heyward off the board, we should begin to see Cespedes’ market gain some clarity.

Cespedes has certainly had an unusual couple of years, although his career as a whole has hardly been typical. Most recently with the Mets, Cespedes came to the United States from Cuba and signed a four year, $36 million contract with Oakland that would make him a free agent at the end of those four seasons. Cespedes hit well almost immediately, putting up a .292/.356/.505 line along with a 136 wRC+ in his first 540 plate appearances.

In the following two seasons, Cespedes could not reproduce the 8% walk rate of his initial season, his BABIP dropped a bit, and he settled in for two seasons of slightly above-average offense with above-average defense in left field, totaling 5.7 WAR over two seasons — with the A’s for a year and a half and then half a season with the Red Sox. Last season was Cespedes’ best season since 2012: he hit .291/.328/.542 for a 135 wRC+ that included 17 home runs in just 51 games following his trade from the Tigers to the Mets. That production led, in no small way, to the Mets’ appearance in the postseason.

In trying to determine what Cespedes will look like over the next five to seven years of a new contract, finding comps using career numbers is unlikely to yield great results. Based on how Cespedes performed at age 26 with the A’s, he was clearly ready for major league baseball. Due to the constraints of Cuba’s emigration laws, however, he was denied the opportunity to play against the game’s best players. As a result, his career numbers are unique. Focusing specifically on the most recent three years, however, we can find some interesting comparable players.

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All along, it seemed like the Mets were the clear frontrunner for Ben Zobrist. The Nationals and the Giants hung around in the periphery, but the Mets were among the earliest suitors, were perhaps most vocal suitor, and the fit made plenty of sense. It came down to the wire, enough for Mets fans to truly get their hopes up, but seemingly at the last minute the Cubs swooped in and made Zobrist their own. Turns out the Cubs had been in on Zobrist all along, but the public didn’t know that, and to New York fans, missing out on Zobrist must have felt like a crushing blow. Zobrist is the kind of player that any team would like to have.

One day after missing out on Zobrist, though, the Mets did what they perceived to be the next-best thing. They acquired Neil Walker from Pittsburgh in exchange for left-handed starter Jon Niese. Niese is set to earn a little over $9 million this season, with a pair of similarly-priced club options in the following two seasons. Walker is in his final year of arbitration, projected for $10.7 million by MLBTradeRumors, and for those reasons, Walker’s been an offseason trade candidate from the start. The Mets could’ve used a second baseman, having lost Daniel Murphy, and having something of a surplus of starting pitching. The Pirates needed starting pitching, having lost A.J. Burnett and J.A. Happ, and having something of a surplus of infielders. This is what the offseason is for.

Yet, in reading reactions to the trade, I couldn’t help but notice that it seemed the consensus was that Walker was a somewhat disappointing fallback plan to Zobrist. A lesser option, or a little brother, or a poor man’s Zobrist. They’re both switch-hitters, and they’ve both been around for a while, and they both play second base, and they were both targeted by the Mets, and they’ve both experienced success (even if Zobrist’s peak has been higher than Walker’s) and so the comparison isn’t surprising.

But I think to categorize Walker as anything less than Zobrist’s equal, at this stage in their careers, would be unfair to Walker. Regard their performance over the last three seasons, with Zobrist’s defensive numbers only coming from his time spent at second base:
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What are the Mets going to do to get over the final hump? Are they going to find an upgrade at shortstop? Are they going to find an upgrade in center field? Might they dip into their vast pitching resources to swing an unforeseen blockbuster? I don’t know. Let’s watch Jon Niese play defense.

Just to set the table real quick — last year, opponents bunted against the Mets 120 times. That was the highest total for any team in baseball. Bartolo Colon saw 17 bunts. So did Matt Harvey. Jacob deGrom saw 19 bunts. And Jon Niese saw 26 bunts — the most in baseball, by five, over second place. Clearly, there was something about Niese opponents thought they could exploit. It just didn’t always work. It actually almost never worked. Granted, 16 of those bunts were sacrifices. But just one bunt resulted in a hit, and zero resulted in errors.

Related to this, you’re probably familiar by now with our Inside Edge defensive statistics, where plays get classified by probability. There’s a category, labeled “Remote”, including plays given a 1-10% chance of being successfully made. These are the most challenging defensive plays, among those plays that could reasonably be made, and last year throughout baseball pitchers turned a total of 25 remote plays into outs. The individual leaderboard:

1. Jon Niese, 3 remote plays made
2. 22 pitchers tied with 1

Niese was the game’s only pitcher to convert multiple remote opportunities, and he finished not with two, but with three. No less astonishing is the fact that two of those remote plays were converted in the same game in June, just a few innings apart. Let’s say that again: over the span of four innings in Arizona, Jon Niese converted two remote defensive opportunities. No other pitcher converted more than one all season long. Niese threw in a third later on for good measure. You want to know how the offseason is going to go. I don’t know how the offseason is going to go. I do know that Jon Niese made some great plays. So let’s just watch them, as we wait for everything else. He deserves some fleeting attention for this.

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Ben Zobrist has been something of a polarizing figure in the game for seven years now. Ever since his 2009 breakout — where a 28 year old with -0.4 career WAR put up an +8.6 WAR season — his place among the game’s best players has been a point of discussion, with some pretty wide ranging opinions regarding his value. To the sabermetric community, he was a legitimate superstar, putting up +35 WAR over a six year stretch, coming in behind only Miguel Cabrera among position players in MLB during that time. To those who evaluate players more by their physical tools and traditional performance markers, Zobrist was a good player but an archetype of the guy overrated by FanGraphs-style analysis, with too much emphasis placed on his defense and baserunning and not enough on his moderate power.

During those six years where he graded out as an elite performer by WAR, he only made the All-Star team twice, and his only top 10 MVP finish was in 2009, the year he led the majors in WAR; he finished 8th on AL ballot that year, and his next-best MVP finish put him 16th. Zobrist is about as close to a litmus test as you’re going to find for how much emphasis someone puts on metrics versus tools.

This winter, we’re finally going to get to see how the market evaluates Zobrist’s abilities, but because he signed an extension with Tampa Bay that sold a few free agent years in exchange for some guaranteed income, we still won’t really get to find out what the market thought of peak-Zobrist. Instead, Jason Heyward is taking the role of being the defense-and-baserunning superstar this off-season, and Zobrist’s market will give us more of an idea of how teams see the late-career aging curve in the post-PED era.

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Ian Desmond is 0-for-14 with 10 strikeouts and zero walks against Craig Kimbrel.

I know, I know. Small samples, noise, predictive value and whathaveyou — I get it. Usually, it’s best not to read too much into batter-pitcher matchup stats. Sometimes, though, it’s clear that a certain batter just doesn’t stand a chance against a certain pitcher. Sometimes, it’s clear that a Craig Kimbrel can turn an Ian Desmond into a helpless puddle of mush in the batter’s box simply by standing on the mound.

What if I told you that, in rare cases, fielders could possess the same ability? What if I told you that, in early 2014, Andrelton Simmons learned he had such a power? That simply by taking the field, he could render Travis d’Arnaud completely and utterly powerless? Not only that, but that Simmons could actually control the game with his mind, so long as d’Arnaud was on the field with him?

* * *

The date was April 9, 2014. Spirits were high in the Mets’ clubhouse. The season was young. They’d shut out the host Braves in their home opener the night before. Young catcher Travis d’Arnaud had collected his first two hits of the season and scored a run. He hoped to build upon that success against Braves hurler Ervin Santana the next day. He strode to the plate, confident and unknowing.

This was young d’Arnaud’s first encounter with Simmons. The result was unexpected, yet also unsurprising. d’Arnaud had heard tell of Simmons’ skills. Now, he’d experienced them firsthand.

“What can you do?” d’Arnaud thought to himself. “Gotta tip your cap.”

In fact, as he lunged toward first base, d’Arnaud did tip his cap. It fell right off the back of his head and down to the Earth behind him. As the helmet hurtled toward the dirt, it eclipsed the print on the back of d’Arnaud’s jersey, momentarily displaying the word “dUD.”

This could be interpreted as foreshadowing.

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The 2015 season will forever go down as (literally) a banner year for the New York Metropolitans. A National League championship pennant will forever fly above Citi Field, and with youthful pitching studs Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler in place for the foreseeable future, a competitive future appears assured. As someone who has spent many years in a major league front office, I can assure you, however, that the page is turned from the present to the future at record speed in the game of baseball. The Mets, and all 29 other clubs, must quickly take stock of who they are and put the wheels in motion toward the club they which to become moving forward.

There is no such thing as a perfect ball club in this day and age. The champion Royals themselves lack offensive power, and their starting rotation was far from fearsome. One can easily make the argument that the Mets owned the starting pitching advantage in each and every World Series contest. Obviously, the Royals’ superior team defense, bullpen, position player durability and ability to make contact more than offset their shortcomings.

The Mets are a very curious case. On the last day of July, they stood 30th and last in the major leagues in runs scored. It’s pretty unique to travel from that low point to playing meaningful games in November. Their other chief weakness, which just happened to be the one that reared its ugly head when the stakes were the highest, was the Mets’ subpar team defense.

While no one would have placed the Mets’ overall defensive ability on par with that of their World Series opponents, both old-fashioned and new-age metrics agree that the National League champions profiled (at worst) as an average defensive club. You want old school? The Mets ranked fifth in the NL in fielding percentage, and made the fifth-fewest errors. You want a little more new-school? They ranked second in the NL in defensive efficiency, i.e., turning batted balls into outs. So far, they look positively above average.

Let’s get a little more cutting-edge, and move on to FanGraphs’ team defense page. Here we find the Mets 17th in overall defense, 13th in UZR/150, 19th in error runs, and 10th in range runs. Now we’re talking straight up major league average.

What if we were to take a look at the issue from a somewhat different perspective, both incorporating batted ball data into the equation, and evaluating team defense from a head-to-head perspective; how did clubs perform defensively as compared to their opponents over 162 games, in the same ball parks, with the same weather conditions?

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