Jay Bruce Makes the Mets More Mets

Going into this trade deadline season, you might have thought that the Mets could use a fifth starter, or a center fielder with good glove and bat combo, or a third baseman, but instead they went and got another corner outfielder when they traded 22-year-old infielder Dilson Herrera and another minor leaguer for the Reds’ Jay Bruce.

Since the Mets have an affordable $13m option on Bruce next season, it may be a look ahead in case Yoenis Cespedes opts out of his contract. But in the meantime, Bruce makes for an uneasy fit on this roster. Sort of. Because he’s also perfect for the team, in that he’s just like the rest of the team. He makes them more like themselves.

Assuming that Bruce won’t play center — and even his biggest supporters wouldn’t wish that for the newest Met — it looks like the team just acquired their fourth corner outfielder. Cespedes’ hamstring woes, combined with his, uh, lackadaisical play in center makes him a poor fit there. That leaves a combo of defense-first Juan Lagares (once he comes back from thumb surgery in six weeks), the aging Curtis Granderson, and young corner outfielder Michael Conforto to man center field.

You might think that it would be difficult to make the Mets defense worse, but overall they’re only 21st in the league by overall defensive value, 18th by Ultimate Zone Rating, and 22nd by Defensive Runs Saved. It can get worse, and this deal, even if you think that Bruce is more meh (-8 by ZiPS) than terrible (the worst regular outfielder by UZR this year), will make the defense more terrible. Even though August Fagerstrom found that some of Bruce’s poor numbers were definitely earned, the fact that he’s pushing their only good defensive corner outfielders into center field is the real matter.

And it does have the chance to make this bad defense demonstrably worse. Take a look at how the Mets currently match up to the rest of the National League in overall defense by Defensive Runs Saved, and then how their outfield matches up. Their outfield defense is a strength right now, somehow. On the backs of Lagares and Conforto, it’s at least not as bad as the rest of their defense.

By pushing Granderson and Conforto to center, the Mets will undo their lone remaining position of defensive strength, really. They’re currently fifth in the NL in outfield DRS, and that should get worse, even if you can spell the starters with defensive wunderkind Lagares late in the season.

There are, of course, mitigating factors.

For one, the team has been worse against righties than lefties at the plate this year. They’ve been basically league average against them, while their weighted offense has been 5% better than league average against lefties. For his career, Bruce is 15% better than league average against righties, and he’ll even out the lineup offensively.

Maybe the Mets are the kind of team that need defenders a bit less than other teams. They have the fourth-best strikeout rate in the National League, and keeping the ball out of the field of play is a viable way to mitigate the bad defense. But if you add up homers, walks, and home runs to get a measure of the ‘three true outcome’ nature of every pitching staff, the Mets fall to eighth in the National League. They don’t necessarily limit balls in play an incredible amount.

One last thing, though. Dave Cameron once showed that team context matters for things like on-base percentage and slugging percentage. In his piece he showed that adding a little bit of OBP to a bad OBP team moves the needle less than adding more slugging to that same team. Perhaps, if a team is already pretty bad at defense, making it a little worse may not be a big deal.

Certainly, Bruce fits the team mold on the offensive side. They strike out (fourth in K% in the NL) and hit for power (fifth in ISO in the NL), and Jay Bruce normally strikes out more than league average and currently has the fourth-best isolated power in the big leagues. Once you have a team character on offense, you might as well stick with it. Adding a spray-it-around line-drive guy like Martin Prado is not going to change the character of this offense in one fell swoop.

So Jay Bruce came to the Mets. And he’s so very Mets. And maybe that’s okay.