For the Mets, It’s All About the Rotation

As we move tantalizingly close to pitchers and catchers reporting dates, with many players already descending on spring training complexes in Arizona and Florida, the New York Mets are beginning to draw a little buzz. It’s understandable, but there’s just one problem — those pesky projection systems. While the three systems that I regularly reference don’t bury the Mets, they aren’t exactly pushing them into any sort of pole position — be it for the National League East or Wild Card. That’s not to say the Mets can’t get back to October for the first time since 2006, but much will depend on which version of the starting rotation they get.

Let’s start with where the various systems see the Mets:

FanGraphs – 78-84
Baseball Prospectus – 81-81
Clay Davenport – 77-85

The latter two have the Mets finishing second in the NL East, while here the Marlins are pegged for second and the Mets third. If you peep our Totals page, you’ll see that the Mets are in the bottom 10 teams in both projected WAR for both batters and pitchers. The projections for pitchers might seem particularly low — they’re pegged to have the 20th-best rotation in the game, which doesn’t really befit all of the plaudits their rotation has received. But if we rewind the clock to 2014, we see that this really isn’t too far removed. Last year, their starting rotation ranked 25th in WAR. They essentially had three two-win or better starters, but they also had three sub-replacement level starters to drag their total down, including fifth starter Dillon Gee, who they couldn’t give away this winter.

The pick of the litter was Jacob deGrom, who tallied 3.0 WAR in roughly three-fourths of a season. If he can just keep that up the Mets have a superstar on their hands, yes? Sure, that sounds great in theory, but it wouldn’t be very wise to set that as the baseline. Even the oft-optimistic Fans projections peg deGrom at the same 3.0 WAR despite adding more than 50 innings pitched to his projection. ZiPS is in the same neighborhood. Steamer and PECOTA though are much more pessimistic, with both clocking in around 1 WAR(P).

In fact, the Steamer and ZiPS projection systems paint two distinct pictures of the Mets season. Steamer paints them as having one legit good pitcher, and a bunch of guys who can be good on any given day but at the end of the season won’t amount to much. It basically takes last year’s rotation, and replaces ace deGrom with ace Harvey. ZiPS, on the other hand, paints them as having two leading men in Harvey and deGrom and a strong number three in Zack Wheeler.

Certainly, the Mets’ prospects have the talent to make Mssr. Szymborski look incredibly right. Guys like Noah Syndergaard, Rafael Montero and Steven Matz have been top prospects for a reason. There are two questions though, with respect to 2015. The first is how quickly are they going to get a shot. After two straight seasons with a FIP- that is at least 10 percent worse than league average, we can safely paint Gee as a guy who doesn’t really need innings. Bartolo Colon has been gilded as a lovable personality in recent years, but he was league average last year, and at age 42 it’s an open question as to whether he’s the right person to be taking innings in the rotation. In other words, if the best Gee or Colon can be is league average, why not cut bait and give run to Syndergaard or one of the other young bucks?

That leads us into the second question — can the younglings be good right away? Plentiful are the number of starting pitchers who weren’t exactly lights out in their first season. We need to look no further than new Hall of Famers Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz, who all rocked walk rates of over 10 percent in their first real seasons of big league ball. Success is more likely for these Mets prospect pitchers than most, but the timing is an open question. Mets manager Terry Collins has a juggling act ahead of him.

If ZiPS is more right about the Mets rotation, and Collins plugs in the right pitchers into the rotation, the Mets will indeed have one of the top rotations in the game. Which is good, because if they want to contend, they’re going to need it. The team has more obstacles to overcome than just some incongruous pitching projections.

Defense
Teams have to play defense, and unfortunately the Mets don’t project to play it very well. The only starters who project to be above average defensively are Juan Lagares and David Wright, and Travis d’Arnaud was among the league leaders in pitch framing last year, which is also good. Curtis Granderson and Lucas Duda shouldn’t hurt the defensive effort too much, but they aren’t really going to help either. Michael Cuddyer, on the other hand, is going to be a significant detriment. ZiPS has him projected for a -8 Def in just a half season of action (372 plate appearances). Steamer has him at -8.4 in more action (591 PA, or 138 games). That’s slightly more encouraging, but the bottom line is that Cuddyer is going to hurt the team defensively, and hurt them badly.

That leaves the up-the-middle infield defense, which looks to be the real sinkhole. The projection systems agree that Daniel Murphy and Wilmer Flores will be very bad, and that Murphy will be a bigger problem than will Flores. But both will be a problem — ZiPS sees Flores as a -7 defensively, while Steamer is at -1 and the Fans are at -3. Using the ZiPS projections as a guide, we actually find that the Flores/Murphy combo is projected to be the worst in the game. I’ll spare you the whole table and just give you the top five and bottom five:

• Atlanta: +19 (Simmons/Gosselin)
• Colorado: +14 (Tulowitzki, LeMahieu)
• Detroit: +14 (Iglesias, Kinsler)
• Baltimore: +13 (Hardy, Schoop)
• Cincinnati: +13 (Cozart/Phillips)

• Anaheim: -8 (Aybar/Rutledge)
• Toronto: -9 (Reyes/Izturis)
• Chi Cubs: -11 (Castro/Baez)
• Houston: -11 (Lowrie/Altuve)
• NY Mets: -15 (Murphy/Flores)

As you can see, the Mets are just one of three teams to be projected in the negative double digits, and they have some pretty decent separation from the rest of the bottom of the pack as well. Not exactly a pretty picture. It should be mitigated slightly by the fact that only Zack Wheeler and Jon Niese generate a high number of ground balls, but plenty of balls are going to find Flores and Murphy, and it’ll put a strain on the pitchers when they don’t get to them. Dilson Herrera and Matt Reynolds are looming, but Kiley sees Herrera as only average defensively at second, and Reynolds as more of a second baseman than a shortstop. The Mets might not have been able to do better than Flores, but combine him with Murphy and it isn’t pretty.

Offense
According to Steamer, here are the number of Mets hitters projected to have a .340 wOBA or better: One. David Wright. According to ZiPS, here are the number of Mets hitters projected to have a .340 wOBA or better: One. Lucas Duda.

The Fans projections are a bit more optimistic — they have Wright, Duda, Cuddyer and d’Arnaud at .340 or better. Complicating this even further is that while Duda should be fine, Cuddyer, d’Arnaud and Wright have spent a good amount of time in the trainers’ room in recent seasons. Beyond them, the team is short on guys who you would expect to smash their projections. If Cuddyer, d’Arnaud and Wright can make it through the whole season intact, the Mets should have a reasonably acceptable offense. If they can’t, the Mets might have trouble scoring runs, no matter how far the fences come in.

Bullpen
It was a nice story that the Mets finally found a role for Jennry Mejia last season, especially after all the dicking around the Mets did with him in the past. But Mejia isn’t exactly a top notch reliever, at least not yet. And along with Bobby Parnell and Jeurys Familia, he is one of three expected Mets relievers who are projected with a positive WAR. And we really don’t know what we’re going to get from Parnell. He is well removed from surgery, so he should be back to normal, but there is still lingering uncertainty there. And it’s not like he was Eric Gagne in his prime or anything before he got hurt. Realistically, the Mets aren’t going to make a lot of noise with this bullpen. Upgrades will be needed, but who knows if they’ll have enough “payroll flexibility” to make them.

The Mets didn’t have a very good rotation last season, and they might not this year. There is a wide berth between what they are capable of doing and what they are likely to do. But given the team’s problems elsewhere — a leaky middle infield, an offense led by players with ugly injury histories, a middling bullpen and their owner’s current financial state — their playoff hopes are going to live and die with the starting rotation.