Everything Is Terrible, Noah Syndergaard Edition

Baseball, like the world around it, has been flooded with bad news for the last couple of weeks. Normally, losing one of the game’s most exciting 20-something pitchers to Tommy John would create a splash on the level of Dan-doing-a-cannonball-into-a-kiddie-pool. But in these times, the ripples created by the news of Noah Syndergaard’s surgery (along with Chris Sale’s) were relatively minor. What are UCLs compared to the concerns of COVID-19?

But it is bad news. Bad for the Mets and bad for Syndergaard himself. How bad? For a change of pace, let’s start off with the long-term projection rather than finish with it. The projection is notable in this case as there’s a key difference in the model. With no actual game-related news to distract me, I’ve been able to complete work on one of my ongoing data projects: better long-term playing time projections for players with injuries, especially serious ones that cause entire seasons to be missed.

While ZiPS has had a generalized model for injuries — both specific and, well, general — for some time, the focus was mainly on projecting how well the player would play upon returning and the long-term qualitative impact on their play. So long-term, pitchers with bum shoulders would fare worse than those taking a trip to Dr. Andrews’ Magic Elbow Factory, and speedy infielders with leg problems would see their aging curves accelerate. Less of the focus had been the long-term effect on playing time itself, something I’ve been able to work on a lot recently.

This is important for pitchers in Syndergaard’s situation. At this point, elbow surgeries of this type have a long history of success, but Thor is the awkward position of hitting free agency soon after his likely return from 12-to-16 months on the shelf. Tommy John surgery having a strong track record or not, there’s still a great deal of uncertainty for his next team. And uncertainty costs moolah. Not so much money that Thor will have to rely on his acting career to make ends meet, but he was likely headed for a ginormous deal after 2021 and now…not so much:

Before, the injury, ZiPS was projecting a seven-year, $204 million contract for Syndergaard after the 2021 season. That’s more impressive than it sounds; that’s what it projects for his contract if the Mets signed him right now, two years in advance of his free agency. Two years of risk for a pitcher amounts to a lot of dough. ZiPS already wasn’t pricing Syndergaard as a Cole-like workhorse, after two recent years marred by injury: 2018 and more seriously, 2017. Now, here’s the post-injury projection, assuming a July 2021 return:

ZiPS projects that seven-year contract taking a $60 million hit ($85 million using the old methodology for post-injury playing time). Now, it strikes me as unlikely that Syndergaard’s next team will sign him to a seven-year deal coming off this type of injury, but I wanted to express the financial hit he takes. Something like a one-year, $20 million extension right now might be beneficial to both the Mets and Thor.

The loss to the Mets is just as devastating, and not just because of the mean win projection for a pitcher like Syndergaard. In the first official run of ZiPS projections, back when it looked like we’d have a normal season, ZiPS projected the Mets to be an 87-win team on average. That was just four wins off of the Nationals’ 91 wins.

The Mets, like most teams in the National League, need to hit upside to make the playoffs. The league is very competitive and ZiPS projected the second Wild Card spot to require 88.3 wins, a number forecast for just one team in the NL not projected to win its division: the Atlanta Braves. The Mets are not filled with top prospects, and they’re likely already getting as much as they can from stars such as Jacob deGrom, Jeff McNeil, and Michael Conforto. Thor was one of the players with a foreseeable upside. Michael Wacha (or Rick Porcello or Steven Matz) may be an adequate fill-in for the innings that Syndergaard would have thrown, but he doesn’t have that upside sizzle that could push the Mets 90 wins with nothing else working out in their favor:

I’m still using 162 games here because at this point, the actual season length is an unknown number somewhere between 0 and maybe 110 games. The exact numbers are only illustrative and they demonstrate that losing Syndergaard, even with a legitimate major league option replacing him, is still enough to knock about a fifth of a playoff appearance off the Mets’ outlook. That’s…bad. I haven’t done a preseason Most Indispensable List since 2014 (I usually do it midseason), but a 20 percentage point loss would have been the fourth-largest loss from disappearance of a single player over that span, behind only Justin Verlander (-25 percentage points), Clayton Kershaw (-21), and Buster Posey (-21).

It gets even trickier in 2021. Three-fifths of the team’s post-Syndergaard rotation is unsigned. Assuming that half-season from Syndergaard in 2021, I ran the projections for the 2021 season with depth charts based on only the talent teams have under contract. Obviously, these aren’t final projections — I imagine that Mookie Betts and J.T. Realmuto will be employed in 2021 — but it’s a representation of where teams are right now:

The Nationals, for a change of pace, aren’t facing brutal free agent losses after the 2020 season, and ZiPS doesn’t have see anyone in the Mets farm system with an immediate chance to make good on what the team could lose in free agency. The team will have money to spend and will likely do something with the payroll room, but the Mets have a lot of work ahead of them and the loss of Syndergaard just makes that challenge tougher. If arbitration costs are identical to those for the 2020 roster, with player benefits, I guesstimate the Mets will start next offseason with a luxury tax payroll number of something around $150-160 million. And with Conforto a free agent after 2021, the Mets may have even less of a stomach for aggressive spending than they typically do.

For now, pretty much all of the questions in baseball revolve around the status of the 2020 season. But for the Mets, the 2021 questions have gotten a whole lot trickier.