The Mets and the Boring Approach

by
June 25, 2015

The Mets have lost seven games in a row. It’s never a good time to lose seven games in a row, but a particularly bad time is when the rival Nationals decide to win five games in a row. So it is that the Mets have ceded control of the National League East, falling perilously close to the surprisingly competent Braves. Now, if you just fast-forwarded from the start of the season to now, these standings wouldn’t be a surprise. The Nationals were supposed to run away with the division. The Mets were supposed to be okay, and the Phillies were supposed to suck. Outside of the Marlins, it seems mostly normal. But sequences of events matter, and the way the year has gone for the Mets makes this current situation feel desperate. A season feels like it’s slipping out of their grasp.

There’s an awful lot of pressure on Sandy Alderson to make a move. Alderson feels it, and he’s been in communication with other front offices. Here’s one move, that just showed up literally as I was writing the above paragraph:

This has been coming. Fans knew Steven Matz was on the way. But, consider the first tweet response to that:

Young Ideas ?@DickYoungsGhost 23m23 minutes ago

@Ken_Rosenthal Unless Matz can bat .400 and play all other positions, still doesn’t help the @Mets.

During the losing streak, the Mets have scored nine runs in seven games. They’ve had a bottom-five NL offense for the year, and a bottom-five NL offense the last month or so. Pressure isn’t on to make any move — pressure is on to make an offensively-minded move. It’s understandable, given how the Mets have looked. But it might very well be prudent for Alderson to keep on taking the boring approach.

To quickly review the year: the Mets have squandered what they accomplished early on. Before anyone in the division played any games, the Mets were projected to go about .500. To this point, the Mets have played about .500. That misses the details, details like the early 11-game winning streak that shot the Mets to 13-3. At that point, they had about a 52% chance of making the playoffs. A few days later, the Mets opened up an eight-game lead over the Nationals, and their playoff odds topped out at 54%. And right now? 16%. They still look more or less like a .500 team, but all those things people said about wins in the bank — those were true, but the Mets gave their advantage away. They’ve erased the memory of the winning streak, a streak that made people believe this could be a special year.

A very simple rule of thumb is that things are never as good as they seem after a win, and they’re never as bad as they seem after a loss. So you can imagine the overreactions to an extended streak of either type. A winning streak makes a team feel unbeatable. A losing streak makes a team feel terrible. Right now, it feels like the Mets can’t hit anything. And, yeah, over seven games, they’ve managed a .482 OPS. The seven games before that, it was .762. This offense isn’t a good offense, but it ought to be functional. Things have gone wrong.

It is too easy to blame injuries, but it’s not like injuries are a non-factor. Consider what the Mets have been forced into doing. Injuries to Travis d’Arnaud have left the team playing Kevin Plawecki, and though Plawecki’s a good young player, he isn’t yet ready to hit in the majors. Daniel Murphy has missed time, and though it isn’t the end of the world to have to play without Daniel Murphy, his absence is a hell of a thing to combine with the absence of David Wright. So Mets fans have seen names like Eric Campbell and Daniel Muno, and the reserves have been a black hole.

The good news is that Murphy’s about back. And d’Arnaud should be out just a couple weeks. These are two of the team’s better hitters, and while no one’s really sure what should be expected of Wright, there’s talk he could return around the All-Star break, and Wright might still be the team’s best all-around position player. The Mets can’t count on Wright to provide anything. They can count on Murphy, though. And they can count on d’Arnaud. And Wright, at least, would be a fascinating wild card.

Look at the Mets, and look at the market. You can see where the Mets could be better, but the fixes aren’t simple. They’re probably not about to write off Michael Cuddyer, given his track record and given the team’s investment. Juan Lagares is locked in, as is Curtis Granderson, and obviously Lucas Duda is doing just fine. Potential options on the market are few and far between, because there aren’t many sellers, and those teams doing the selling are only going to get there because they didn’t have enough good players.

Just about a perfect fit would be Ben Zobrist, but that’s complicated by a few factors. For one, the A’s are playing better, and they aren’t totally out of it. And for two, every team could use Zobrist, and all it takes is one more aggressive general manager to shut the Mets out. The Mets have been connected to Aramis Ramirez, but he hasn’t been good. Alexei Ramirez would stand to be available, but he hasn’t been good. Maybe the Mets could, I don’t know, try to trade for Chris Taylor, but it’s unclear whether he’d be an upgrade. Juan Uribe might be available to get flipped again, but the Braves are just about even with the Mets in the standings. An intriguing idea would be Steve Pearce, who’s playing less and less in Baltimore. He could probably be had, and he was tremendous just last season, but he’s struggled this time around, and the Mets would have to buy him as a second or third baseman. Pearce might be the most creative upgrade, but there are worries there, and probably also other teams placing the same sort of call.

There isn’t much out there, and the Mets’ situation isn’t dreadful, provided they erase the black holes. Murphy coming back should help that. d’Arnaud coming back should help that. And no one knows about Wright, but if he comes back and is playable, that’s the best midseason upgrade imaginable. The Mets are still probably going to project as a below-average offensive team, but that simply isn’t their strength. They currently project to have baseball’s second-best starting rotation. Adding Matz into the picture means the Mets have too many qualified big-league starters. And if you think about Matz, while his promotion does nothing to help the offense, it does, in theory, mean the offense will need to do a little less in order to win. Runs saved and runs scored, and all that.

The Mets now probably won’t make the playoffs, and that’s hard to accept, given where they’ve been, and given that the Nationals opened up an opportunity. But you have to forget about those things and just focus on the days and months ahead. For now, the Mets are a pitching-first team with offensive help soon to come off the disabled list. The market bears little fruit, and while there are moves that could potentially help, consider this: Dilson Herrera has struggled, but he’s hit well in the high minors. Maybe he’s a quick breather from restoring his confidence and being able to help the big-league infield. There’s always the temptation to make a trade, and staying internal is less sexy, but the internal options might not be worse than the external options. Alderson might do well to just enjoy the good young pitching while hoping for health and better performance on the position-player side.

It’s kind of boring. It does nothing to satisfy those reacting to the losing skid. But what the Mets are building is anything but dull. And the pieces that might most help them offensively don’t seem to be hitting the market, especially now that the A’s are inching back toward the mix. Maybe the best move to be made would be adding Steve Pearce, but when that’s the sort of upgrade you’re thinking about, maybe it’s no worse than just adding a reliever or two and enjoying the hell out of an awesome young rotation.





 

Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.

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Roger
8 years ago

The problem this doesn’t even begin to address is that the “internal” pieces don’t fit together in the field, and that vitiates the chances to win with run prevention, as the current bad-fielding-driven losing streak has amply demonstrated. Flores at shortstop has been pretty disastrous, and so the team is stacked with young second basemen with plus-potential bats and barely-adequate gloves, while it has essentially no good options for short (or 3B beyond Murphy). Meanwhile ownership has committed the team to old guys with bad gloves and barely adequate bats at both outfield corners, filling spots where you could look to upgrade offensively. This piece is going after dumb “traid for batzzz!!!1!” arguments, but there are better arguments that the ’15 Mets are crying out for a trade (or a number of trades) for position players — essentially, that it’s a badly constructed roster, with too many overlapping pieces and too few elsewhere.

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Wobatus
8 years ago
Reply to  Roger

The 9 runs in 7 games doesn’t suggest that the current losing streak is especially fielding driven. Team UZR is slightly negative, mostly middle of the pack. Sure, Flores isn’t a great ss, but he’s been overall fairly adequate. While one can question the wisdom of the Granderson and Cudyer signings, those moves are done.

I think Jeff is right. I wouldn’t make any panic moves to improve somewhat this year, if it means sacrificing youth. Most of the pieces they can trade won’t bring back much, unless you are talking about trading away what makes the teams trajectory promising: young pitching. Conforto, Nimmo et al will supplant the aging corners eventually and the injured guys will return (with Wright obviously still a question mark).

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Roger
8 years ago
Reply to  Wobatus

No one here is arguing for a panic trade. This level of continued sanguinity about the team’s ability to assemble an adequate (at hitting and fielding) group of position players, either now or in 2016, seems entirely unearned. There are non-panic-driven reasons to be increasingly doubtful that this roster of position players, plus an eventual Conforto or whoever, can become a competitive baseball team. It’s true that losing Wright may have just unforeseeably killed the Mets’ shot this season, but in any case, even as a long-term plan, standing pat doesn’t necessarily look smart.

0
Wobatus
8 years ago
Reply to  Roger

Granted. No one ever advocates panic trades. But I still don’t see how any trades, or just dropping players or dumping salary, helps all that much. Pearce sounds like a nice add, flexible position player and a decent hitter having some bad luck in a small sample this year. The bench has been exposed with the injuries. But not sure if the Orioles will deal him or for what.

Losing 3/8ths of the starting offense for large chunks of the year, 3 of your 4 or 5 best hitters, in Wright, D’Arnaud and Murphy, with 2 prospects not showing they are ready or needing more time (Herrera and Plawecki), the bench disappointing, Cuddyer slumping, all of those things combined have left them at .500. They could afford a few, but not all of those occurrences, along with 1/2 the bullpen being injured. The Cuddyer signing wasn’t the smartes, and all teams have injuries, but I don’t think you could have expected the offense to be this bad. The projections were better.

By mid-year next year I expect Conforto, Nimmo and Cecchini will all be up and providing at least depth and energy. And the starting will be very good.

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JJ Magadan
8 years ago
Reply to  Roger

The defense has assuredly been atrocious, but even sparkling defense can’t win games when the offense is barely averaging over a run a game as the Mets have during the recent losing streak. And it’s not necessarily the roster but how it’s deployed: any infield configuration with Flores at SS and Ruben Tejada at either 3b or 2B is very poor allocation of on-field talent, but the Mets FO is (thus far, though there are whispers it may change) stubbornly refusing to play Flores anywhere but shortstop.

The larger problem with the “traid for batzzz!!!1!” argument is twofold: 1) there are few obvious places on the field to upgrade and 2) for those areas that could be upgraded there is a paucity of available talent to be had. The only real exception to this would be in the OF were the Mets to act in a very un-Metsian way and bench the all-around awful Michael Cuddyer, or at the very least platoon him with Curtis Granderson (who while posting respectable numbers overall has an utterly laughable 9 wRC+ against lefties).

But really, the biggest problem is injuries and an over-exposed lack of depth. There are five players one could reasonably expect to perform at above-average levels offensively on the Mets, and 3 of them are on the DL, replaced by a mix of minor leaguers who aren’t quite ready yet and minor leaguers who should never have been in the majors to begin with.

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