Mike Freire - So, Let's Talk Defense

There has been a lot of chatter since the Mets' season ended about their lack of defensive prowess and how it may have cost them a few ballgames in 2019.  Using the highly scientific "eye test", I would tend to agree that the team struggled to catch the baseball last year.  If you take a look at the statistics, the Mets finished 19th out of 30 teams with a team fielding percentage of 0.983, along with 98 errors so that seems to line up with our collective impression.

In addition, the Mets also surrendered 49 unearned runs which are usually the end result of giving your opponent extra "outs" if you will.  While no one is perfect, you want to minimize mistakes where you can since close games are usually won by teams who are better fundamentally, i.e. defensively.  Just ask the Milwaukee Brewers who were in position to eliminate the Washington Nationals from the NL Wild Card game before an error late in that matchup doomed their chances.

There are a ton of defensive metrics that you can use to evaluate a team's performance.  To keep things simple, I am going to use Fielding Percentage as a measure of defensive ability for the rest of this article.  I know that it doesn't necessarily account for things like each player's range, but it does measure how well a team makes plays that they SHOULD make.

If you take a look at the top ten teams in Fielding Percentage (FP) for the 2019 season, it would look like this;

St Louis, Houston, Kansas City, Atlanta, Arizona, Boston, Oakland, San Francisco, Cleveland and Washington.

***Eight of the ten teams listed had winning records (bold) and six of them were in the playoffs, to include the eventual World Series Champions in Washington.

If we increase our sample size to include the last five seasons (2015-2019), 64% of the teams in the top ten for FP had winning records.  The lists are littered with playoff teams and past champions like the 2018 Red Sox.  So, it would seem that an important ingredient for winning teams is making plays in the field when you are given the chance.  While it doesn't guarantee success, it is MUCH harder to win consistently if you have a poor defense.

Despite the Mets' improving offense, they are still a team that is built around their pitching staff with a focus on "run suppression".  Pitching is intertwined with defensive ability as we all know, so if the team can improve their defense it should have a positive effect on their chances of winning more than 86 games in 2020.

I know, nothing written above is new information but it helps to explain how important a team's defense is to it's overall success.  A handful of teams appear on these lists every year like the Cardinals, Astros, Nationals, Braves and Red Sox.  It's no surprise that these teams are also playoff contention year in and year out (with two of them in our own division).

So, now that we have identified an area of weakness, how do the Mets go about fixing the problem?

Good defensive team are usually strong "up the middle" (C, 2B, SS and CF), so that would be a great place to start.  Ramos (C), Cano (2B) and Rosario (SS) are pretty much locked into their respective positions for the 2020 season, so changes are unlikely in the short term.  None of the players are likely to win a Gold Glove, but they have the ability to be capable defenders (which would be an improvement over 2019). 

The biggest void, in my opinion, is in CF and it is the most likely path for defensive improvement moving forward.  The free agent market for this position is pretty sparse, so help will need to come from internal options, or more likely the trade market.

What's your fix?