Tom Brennan - Real Progress on the Mets' Pitching Front, But More Is Needed

 

The Mets had quite a pitching dichotomy last season. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, for sure.

Forgetting ERA for now, it's total runs allowed per 9 innings that count - because you win or lose in large part due to how many runs you allow, not how many earned runs you allow.

The dichotomy is this:

THE GOOD GUYS OF 2020:

Jacob deGrom, Edwin Diaz, David Peterson, and Jeurys Familia:

The foursome combined to throw 171 innings (1/3 of all Mets innings in 2020) and allowed 58 runs, or 3.0 runs per 9 innings.

THE BAD GUYS OF 2020:

The other 19 pitchers for the Mets last year:

The nineteen combined to throw 342 innings (2/3 of all Mets innings in 2020)  and allowed 250 runs, or 6.6 runs per 9 innings.  That is one big, ugly boil that needs to be excised.  

No pro team on earth - ever -  can win when the pitchers for 2/3 of your innings allow 6.6 runs per 9 IP.

Let's assume that a real winning team should only allow about 3.75 runs per 9 IP.  That feels about right to me.

I can see deGrom, Diaz, Peterson, and Familia jumping from 2020's 3.0 to a still strong 3.5 R/9..

So simple math means that if those guys put up a 3.5 in 2021, for the Mets to get to 3.75 runs allowed in 2021, the other 2/3 of the innings will have to be about 3.9 runs allowed per 9 - or a drop of about FORTY PERCENT produced by the "lousy 19" of 2021.

The good news is that the recently acquired Carlos Carrasco allowed 2.92 runs per 9 last season, the returning Marcus Stroman allowed 3.97 runs per 9 in 2019, and Trevor May, in his last 3 seasons, allowed 3.5 runs per 9.  Those 3 ought to replace about 30% of last season's innings with about 3.5 runs per 9 IP.  So far, so good.

So, add last year's fab four to these new 3 hombres and you now have about 65% of your innings coming from 3.5 runs per 9 IP guys.  Thus the remaining 35% of the innings have to come from guys giving you about 4.2 runs per 9 IP in order to end up at 3.75 R/9.

Seth Lugo should be in the pen and give you about 5% of the team's innings at a bounce-back 3.5 runs per 9 IP (5% being equal to about 75 IP).

Noah Syndergaard ought to be good for about 7% to 10% (100 to 145) innings in his return, at about 4 runs per 9 IP.  Let's be conservative and say 7%.

65% + 5% + 7% = 77%.  Still 23% to go.

Another decent quality acquired starter and, say, a Brad Hand would get  the Mets another roughly 190 IP, or 13% of the season's innings, getting us up to 90%.

The rest?  Hopefully the Mets either acquire another quality reliever to eat up 5%, or the likes of Dellin Betances, Miguel Castro, and Steve Matz can give us the remainder.

Of course, every good team needs a good pitching cushion,  too, given injuries, and a real cushion is something the Mets have woefully lacked in so many past seasons - once they've been forced to dip into the reserves, the reserves were collectively utterly disastrous.

Lots of numbers in this exercise, and hopefully I did not lose you along the way.

Suffice it to say that Carrasco, Stroman, and May are huge steps in getting this team where it needs to be, but it is clear from the above that MORE is needed to avoid being a would-be contender with a middle-of-the-pack pitching staff.