Mets Add Maybin for Outfield Depth

The Mets have been no strangers to injury this year. As Jay Jaffe detailed yesterday, Michael Conforto and Jeff McNeil aggravated injuries on the same play Sunday afternoon. When Kevin Pillar was hit in the face by a pitch on Monday night, the situation worsened. In an attempt to keep their roster afloat, the Mets acquired Cameron Maybin from the Cubs for cash considerations, as Bob Nightengale first reported.

Maybin will be reporting to Triple-A, but that state of affairs probably won’t last long. The Mets started Khalil Lee and Johneshwy Fargas in the outfield last night, which brought their combined career major league start total up from one (Fargas started Monday night) to three. Dominic Smith anchored the unit, as it were, but Fargas and Lee have combined for 72 plate appearances above Double-A. It’s clearly not a working solution for the injury-ravaged club.

Maybin is an obvious short-term upgrade, but not so long ago, he looked like he might be more than an injury fill-in. In 2019, he played an abbreviated season with the Yankees and unlocked heretofore unseen power; his 11 home runs were a career high despite only 269 plate appearances.

As Lindsay Adler detailed, his fix was both complicated and simple: he started trying to hit for power. That’s easier said than done, and lots of players would love to simply hit for more thump, but the change worked with Maybin; at 6-foot-3, he has a frame that supports power, but simply hadn’t optimized his swing to get the ball in the air with authority.

For someone who runs like Maybin — even at 33 last season, he posted above-average speed numbers, and was downright electric at his peak — it’s not hard to imagine why he had focused on contact. The new form was intriguing, but unfortunately short-lived; Maybin signed with the Tigers after the season, then scuffled through an injury-shortened season featuring a trade to the Cubs. His 88 wRC+ was hardly unplayable, but an uptick in groundball rate coupled with a worrisome swinging strike rate were bad omens, to say the least.

Sometimes in baseball, that’s the end of the road. It’s increasingly a young man’s game, and Maybin is 34. He signed a minor league contract with the Cubs, didn’t make the majors, and went down to Triple-A, where he’s had an underwhelming start to the year — .103/.186/.205 with a 32.6% strikeout rate. Plenty of players in Maybin’s general situation simply fade away from the major leagues at that point, parlaying a string of spring training invites into minor league bus trips or moving overseas to keep playing every day.

Maybin won’t have long to prove he still has it. The Mets came into the season with a bevy of outfield options: Brandon Nimmo, Conforto, and Smith were the presumptive starters, but J.D. Davis can play outfield in a pinch, and Pillar and fellow offseason addition Albert Almora Jr. can both handle center. Maybin’s shot at everyday playing time could end when any of them make it back. That could be days — Davis was scheduled to come off the IL over the weekend — but it could also be weeks or months, as the timelines for Nimmo, Conforto, Almora, and Pillar remain unclear.

I’m a sucker for a good redemption story, but I’m skeptical Maybin can make it work. His 2020 might have been short, but it showed some worrisome signs. Maybin’s power breakout was based on two things: elevating the ball and making hard contact more frequently. Last season represented a step back in both directions, though it was still above his previous career norms:

The barrel and hard-hit rates were still better than his previous results, but it’s sadly not that simple. You can’t just generate harder and higher-angled batted balls by magic; you have to change your swing, and Maybin’s introduced some extra swing-and-miss to his game.

In 2019, the tradeoff was perfectly reasonable. It cost him five percentage points of strikeout rate, but he made it back in power. You can fund a lot of strikeouts with a single home run, as it turns out. But though the contact quality faded in 2020, the whiffs didn’t decline in sympathy. His contact rate in 2020 was actually worse than the year before, and though he swung early and often enough that it didn’t become a strikeout problem, his walks still cratered.

If you think of Maybin’s contact quality as not a fixed value but a fluctuating distribution, it helps explain why what looked so good in 2019 looked off a year later. When he’s at the high end of the distribution, the plate discipline is good enough. When he’s towards the middle or bottom, the total package is short of league average. Where he’ll fall on that spectrum this year isn’t clear, but it’s probably not a great sign that he didn’t make the Cubs out of spring training.

That’s the statistically-minded part of my brain speaking, at least. There’s one other potential factor that this line of thinking misses, one I’m not sure how to handicap. In 2019, Maybin got his first chance at everyday playing time in years. He didn’t have that role all season, but the extreme wave of injuries the Yankees played through made him a starter whether he succeeded or failed.

He got injured nearly right away on the Tigers and lost his starting job; after he returned, he never started more than two consecutive days again. He broke into the Cubs’ lineup by season’s end, but that was in a new city during COVID protocols, hardly a solid way to get into a rhythm.

With the Mets, Maybin will be a starter when he steps into the clubhouse. It might not last. Heck, whether or not he’s an everyday starter might have nothing to do with whether he succeeds or fails. It’s a speculative line, no doubt. It’s hard to pretend those soft factors couldn’t exist, though, and given his recent successful stint in the Bronx, it feels like a reasonable bet to take for the outfield-needy Mets. If he does reclaim his form with extended run, great. If not, well, he’s probably still a hair above replacement level, and that’s what the Mets need at the moment.

It’s strange looking at these Mets and thinking an in-season acquisition of a mid-tier veteran is a savvy move. Isn’t that basically what the last regime did, much to the derision of all? But I think this one’s different because of why it happened. The Mets used to fail in predictable ways — Charlie Brown with the football or a slapstick comedian walking towards a banana peel.

You could look at their roster in April and see it: “Oh, if one player goes down, the Mets might end up needing to call people out of retirement to play left field.” Or third base. Or second, or whatever the case was that year. Those were unforced errors, and the team’s scrambling to fix them felt vaguely preordained.

This problem wasn’t an obvious one. The Mets probably felt like they signed one too many outfielders this offseason. Neither Pillar nor Almora had an obvious starting role, and they added Lee as upper-minors depth just in case. A long string of injuries later, they’re scrambling to fix it, just like always — but different.