Reese Kaplan -- Mets Must Rethink How to Win Ballgames

How would you go about building a long term formula for Mets success?  There are a number of issues at hand, so start with a blank slate and decide what it is that a winning team needs, what do the Mets have and how much should be retained moving forward into the future?

Home Run Power

Earl Weaver was famous for managing towards the game-changing swing producing a three-run homer.  In fact, his exact quote was, “The key to winning baseball games is pitching, fundamentals, and three run homers.”

Obviously the launch angle driven metrics these days buy into this philosophy big-time and the Mets certainly have some players capable of providing those three-run dingers in bulk.  Pete Alonso, Dom Smith, J.D. Davis, Francisco Lindor, Javy Baez and long forgotten Robinson Cano are all capable of driving more than 20 long balls in a season.  Next comes the big decision about Michael Conforto who, despite his 2021 tailspin, is in this category as well.  Then there are the 15+ HR guys like Jeff McNeil, Jonathan Villar, Brandon Nimmo, Kevin Pillar and even James McCann.  

The problem with the long ball guys is that they often provide mediocre batting averages, striking out way too much and offering up lackluster OBP numbers.  Chicks may dig the long ball (per Tom Glavine’s long ago TV commercial), but it’s better if they can also get on base themselves.  No one wants a team composed of 8 starting Dave Kingman types who can hit the ball a mile but do not very much of anything else.

Stolen Bases

Who here is old enough to remember the days of the St. Louis Cardinals, Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds among other teams that could positively drive you to overindulging in your chosen adult beverages with their runners racking up many extra bases by virtue of their legs?  I’m not just talking about the steals themselves, though the Mets are in the bottom of the majors in that regard.  It’s also about learning to hit behind runners, to lay down bunts and to be aggressive on the basepaths.  The Mets as they are currently constructed are a station-to-station team which is fine if your only method of scoring runs is the long ball, but as other teams have demonstrated, you also need to look at a base at a time as well.  

Since we are Mets fans, think back to what it was like when guys like Mookie Wilson, Lenny Dykstra, Jose Reyes, Roger Cedeno, Vince Coleman and others wreaked havoc on opposing pitchers.  Francisco Lindor is a great example of someone capable of doing more with his legs than he’s shown.  In 2019 he had 25 SBs.  Brandon Nimmo seems like he has good speed but doesn’t use it.  Javier Baez has eclipsed the 20 SB mark as well.  Why has the team abandoned this offensive weapon?

Fundamentals

Who here can remember Little League baseball when you were forever doing practice drills to field effectively, to turn the double play, to hit the cutoff man with throws, to take pitches outside the strike zone and to take chances to force the other club to make mistakes?  I’m sure it’s still done today, but watching the Mets makes you think a lot of these fundamentals have become obsolete in their way of thinking.

As much as players are treated like specialized athletes (and sometimes prima donnas), the fact is that the club is not performing particularly well now and hasn’t done so for the past few years.  It would seem that players who take for granted the basic tenets of the game need a hard core refresher course in order to add scoring and defensive aspects to their game that
don’t currently exist.  

Pitching

Just as folks became enamored of home runs, the same thing happened with both starting and relief pitching when it comes to the strikeout.  Make no mistake about it, there’s nothing more satisfying that seeing a hurler make a batter look weak and ineffective by having him either flail helplessly at a pitch or leave the bat on his shoulder when a ball breaks inside the strike zone.  In order to succeed you need to be a big strikeout guy, right?

What if I told you there was a pretty dazzling Hall of Famer who spent 20 years starting games in the majors yet only averaged 6.8 strikeouts per 9 IP?  That hurler would be none other than Tom Seaver.  Look a little deeper and there’s another effective arm who played for the Braves who notched just 6.1 Ks per 9 IP.  That would be Greg Maddux.  On the Mets right now you have a pitcher like Marcus Stroman having the best year of his career with a 2.85 ERA and he’s crossed into his best ever mere 8 Ks per 9 IP.  

The point here is to find pitchers who know how to get batters out and not rely only on the strikeout as their exclusive effective tool for doing so.  How many Tommy John Surgeries can be traced to overthrowing to try to get an extra MPH or two with the goal to drive up strikeout totals at the cost of losing the pitchers for weeks, months or years at a time.