Reese Kaplan -- Improving the Offense One Run at a Time

If you took a poll of Mets fans and asked what was wrong with the "horrific", "choking" and "loser" 101-win team of 2022, there would be a divided set of nooses thrown on the stage.  

On one side, there would be the ones labeled "Pitching" due to the late season breakdown by some of the heretofore stellar starters who collapsed when they were needed most.  

Then there would be an equally big pile of nooses labeled "Hitting" that reflected the large plurality of fans who felt that the club was just unable to score runs with the big guys on other clubs.  

Finally, there would be a smaller but still sizable set of nooses labeled "Front Office" who have never gotten past the mid-season AAAA type of players the club was seeking to improve themselves instead of All Stars.  

There's nothing really new with any of these arguments until dialog started this week regarding the team's need for improving its offense in the worst way possible.  It was a matter of pondering this line of reasoning that some surprising things came up when you study the numbers.

How bad was the Mets offense?  Would you believe...third best in all of baseball?  Wow, if you held a gun to my head and asked me to take a wild guess as to where they resided runs-wise, I would much more likely have guessed somewhere in the lower half of the majors.  

Third?  Like just shy of BEST?  That output is surprising considering how the team struggled at DH, at third base, at catcher (from an offensive perspective) and with the tremendous number of injuries.  

Now comes an even more improbable number.  When it comes to the long ball, a team that features guys like Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor, Eduardo Escobar, Brandon Nimmo, Starling Marte and Daniel Vogelbach must be somewhere near the top, right?

Wrong!  The Mets were at 15th in all of baseball -- smack in the middle of the pack.  Consequently the long ball loonies are all agog at the prospect of adding Aaron Judge onto the roster to solve the four-bagger quandary.  He's over 30 and looking for a long term deal, so a $50 million or so per year player with a long injury history is likely going to be difficult to gauge the return on your investment.

Billy Eppler has been quite vocal about the need for getting on base and moving runners along more so than swinging for the fences.  

Think about that for a minute -- which team would score more runs, one with 9 Tony Gwynns or one with 9 Dave Kingmans?  I know, I know...Gwynn is a Hall of Famer.

Kingman was a pretty good pitcher who could swing the bat until he gave up working from the mound and instead terrorized journalists and wore out his welcome nearly everywhere he played.  However, he's selected in this comparison to point out the foible of love for the long ball.  He was a guy who could turn on any pitcher's best and put it over the wall, but in order to watch that happen more than 40 times in the season you would also have to see him swing and miss in 25% of his at-bats.  

With that contrast in mind, go back and reconsider the security of the on-base machine who consistently hits the ball for a high average vs. the slugger who can deliver in 25% of his games but do nothing in 25% of his at-bats.  Which approach would generate more offense overall?

I think back to the days of when I used to indulge in variations of fantasy baseball in which I would watch a team owner sacrifice 2/3 of his budget to land 1-3 key players and then filled out the rest of it with whomever was left that they could afford.  Myself and my team-owner partner took a radically different approach, looking for the 20 home run plus and 80 RBI plus hitters whose batting average was north of .280.  

We never paid a huge sum for these players and were able to field an annoying roster filled with guys who were always involved in scoring runs themselves or driving them in.  When my competitive owners suffered injuries to one of their key players (let alone slumps) they were pretty much done for the season.  

We could withstand the loss of a handful of regulars and not really have it affect us all that badly.   (To be fair we never really found an equivalent on the pitching side of the ledger, but nowadays I'd be looking mostly at WHIP numbers to see who is doing the best job of not digging himself into a hole).  

So now it's time to rethink what Eppler has said in interviews about his vision for the team moving forward.  He wants to see the Mets improve on how they handle their at-bats and their on-base percentage.  That means going forward they may be looking for more Nimmo and McNeil types while bypassing the all-or-nothing home run hitters.  That approach might not sit well with the fans, but would it result in a better overall offense?  After all, isn't the objective to score the most runs and win the most games, not necessarily to chase the single season records of all-time bashers?  

Did we all forget that with a "mere" 40 HRs Pete Alonso also drove in 131 runners?  

Call me a small ball superfan, but I'm actually finding myself fairly well aligned with the Eppler approach and want to see how he complements the existing roster with new high OPS and OBP players while also making room for young talent to work their way into regular playing time.