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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Some of the nausea that comes with fandom begins as a terrible question in the back of your head. Could this be their best chance? Could this be their only shot? What if things fall apart next year? Do I trust the team’s front office to do the right things to keep this train on the tracks?

It is those nervous bubbles, those heartaches, those feelings of self-doubt that make the eventual win so amazing. We can’t do away with them or we lose some of the engine of future pleasure.

But if you’re a Mets fan, right now you’re left to wallow in those negative thoughts. Those triumphs that came before the World Series have faded quickly. You’re left in the dark, hoping that the hot stove provides light and warmth, and that hope is your friend and not a trick in the night, leading you astray.

So… can the Mets make it back?

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There were two big storylines leading up to the World Series: the unrivaled ability of the Kansas City Royals to make contact on offense, and the ability of the Mets’ young power arms. The main battle of the Fall Classic, it seemed, would be between those two opposing forces, and whichever won out over the other very well might meaningfully shift the series. Now, looking back on the five games of the Royals’ 2015 Championship, something is apparent in the outcome of that much-storied battle: Mets pitchers struggled mightily to put Royals hitters away when they had two-strike counts.

We know the 2015 Royals didn’t strike out a lot: they had the lowest strikeout rate in the majors during the regular season by a wide margin (15.9%; the next-closest team was the Oakland A’s, at 18.1%). Knowing that fact, we could look at their trend of two-strike success in the World Series as a continuation of that regular-season ability. And, while we should give the Royals a lot of credit for the quality of their at-bats (we’ll see later how their ability to foul balls off contributed to what we’re discussing), Mets pitchers also showed a detrimental tendency when the count was in their favor: they threw too many pitches in the strike zone.

First, lets understand the specifics of this Royals’ plate approach. Not only did they make contact more than almost any other team in the major leagues – their 81.8% contact rate was second only to the A’s at 81.9% — but they swung at more pitches out of the strike zone than any other team. That’s the main reason they saw the lowest rate of pitches in the zone during 2015. The thought process is simple: if a team shows that it will chase pitches, why bother throwing them strikes?

Take a look at a quick summary of their major league ranks for overall contact, swings at pitches outside of the strike zone (O-Swing%), and pitches in the strike zone (Zone%) for 2015:

This is who the 2015 Royals were: the free-swinging, contact-oriented team we’ve read about for the past month. Imagining yourself as an opposing pitcher, it might make sense to approach them with some of those traits in mind: perhaps you would throw more pitches out of the zone, get them to chase as much as possible, and hope that the majority of contact they generated would be weak because of the lack of quality pitches to hit.

However, Mets pitchers had a difficult time executing that game plan effectively during the World Series. Let’s take a look at a few heat maps from Baseball Savant to get an idea of some of the issues they faced putting Royals hitters away. We’re just going to focus on counts in which the pitcher was ahead with two strikes: 0-2 and 1-2 counts. First, here’s where Mets pitchers attacked their opponents during the NLDS & NLCS vs. the World Series in 0-2/1-2 counts:

There are obviously a different number of pitches between the two images, but we can see that the NLDS and NLCS image has far more pitches out of the zone, especially low and away to right-handed hitters. This makes sense: in 0-2 and 1-2 counts, a pitcher wants to throw pitches out of the zone. They want to get hitters to chase, and they can waste pitches trying to do that because the count is in their favor. The World Series image, however, has a lot of red (meaning a higher frequency of pitches in that location) on pitches up and over the heart of the plate. This, theoretically, is not want you want to be doing in 0-2 and 1-2 counts.

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It’s 24 years ago, and for the Minnesota Twins the World Series is on the line.

Jack Morris has finished his ninth shutout frame, but it looks like that won’t be enough. The Atlanta Braves have also held Minnesota scoreless, and Game Seven of the Series is likely headed for extra innings. John Smoltz having departed in the eighth, it will be all down to the bullpens.

Except that Jack Morris has other ideas.

Mythologizing and revisionism have clouded the exact details, but the outlines are there to see. Twins manager Tom Kelly tells Morris, with gratitude, that he’s done for the night; relief ace Rick Aguilera will take over. Morris declares “I’m not coming out of this game.” Kelly mentions the 118 pitches Morris has thrown, on three days’ rest. Morris holds his ground: “There’s no way I’m coming out of this game.”

And Tom Kelly relents. He probably wouldn’t give way for any other pitcher on his team, but for this 15-year veteran with a certain old-school demeanor, he does. Kelly gives Morris the green light, then turns away and is heard to mutter, “It’s only a game.”

The last starting pitcher to go into extras in a World Series game was Tom Seaver in 1969. In Game Four, he worked around two baserunners to put up a zero in the top of the 10th, and his Miracle Mets won the game in the bottom.

Jack Morris didn’t make it nearly as dramatic. One pitch to Jeff Blauser got the first out, five more struck out Lonnie Smith, and he polished off Terry Pendleton with his eighth. Kelly’s risk had paid off—and he’d be doubling down by sending Morris back out for the 11th.

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You’ve got an opinion on the Eric Hosmer play. Y’know, the one where he broke from third on a ground ball that didn’t get out of the infield grass and scored the tying run in the ninth inning of the World Series? Y’know, the one where if he would have been out, the game would have been over but he wasn’t and now the Royals are world champions? That’s the one. You’ve got an opinion on the Hosmer play, I’ve got an opinion on the Hosmer play, and even if you say you don’t have an opinion on the Hosmer play, well, that’s your opinion.

Immediately, people began debating whether he’d have been out with a good throw. Because Lucas Duda didn’t make a good throw. But that’s not the part that has my attention. The result was the result. I’m more interested in the process.

You see, the legend of the Kansas City Royals’ advance scouting department has grown to near-mythological proportions. The stories say it was the advance scouting department that discovered David Price tipping his changeup. Price’s Jon Lester-like avoidance of pick offs to first base. Jose Bautista’s inclination to throw to second base from the corner in right field — which allowed Lorenzo Cain to score from first on a single in the ALCS. Now, the advance scouting department has struck again:

@AmazinAvenue How does it make assumptions when the Royals internally talked about taking chances against Duda? This wasn’t willy-nilly.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 2, 2015

This has been the set-up. I want you to now forget everything you know about the Hosmer play, about Lucas Duda, about what the metrics say about him and what you’ve seen with your eyes, about the Nostradamus-like premonitions of the Royals advance scouts and about everything you’ve read since last night. To the best of your abilities, wipe the slate clean.

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