Paul Articulates – Give me a break!

The break on pitches in MLB makes all the difference.  In today’s game, the elite pitchers must miss bats to dominate.  Batters are trained to barrel up 100mph fast balls and they turn hanging curve balls or spinning sliders into low earth orbit satellites.  The best in the game are able to avoid solid contact with sharp, late break on their pitches or deceptive speed changes.  When you think about elite breaks, think about Dwight Gooden’s curve ball or Jacob deGrom’s slider.  

There are pitchers on the Mets’ staff that can do this effectively.  Certainly Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander have made a living on missing bats.  Their art has been more deception than devastating break, as they mix multiple pitches from the same release point to always keep hitters off balance.  Kodai Senga has the wicked break in his “ghost fork” working for him and when he is spotting his fastball the ghost is a perfect out pitch.  Edwin Diaz is sorely missed after his outstanding 2022 season where his late breaking slider was almost unhittable.

It gets thinner after that, as the rest of the Mets’ staff has struggled this year to keep the ball out of batters’ swing plane.  Statistically, the Mets are in the unfamiliar position of having given up more home runs than all but three clubs so far this year (Oakland, CWS, and Washington).  They are also in the bottom half of MLB for strikeouts – another very unfamiliar position for the typically strong pitching Mets.

There have been several flashes of the old brilliance on the mound recently.  A couple of solid Carrasco outings, Scherzer looking like his old self in a seven inning, 9 strikeout performance to close out the Phillies, and Senga’s gem on May 30th attains the Phils.   However, there have been just as many days where the pitching falls apart.  Early runs given up, particularly long balls have put the Mets in a hole that they struggle to climb out of.  Yesterday they got out of a 0-4 hole only to fall back in as a usually reliable Danny Leone gave up consecutive ropes to Guerrero and Belt.

I have struggled to understand the inconsistency because it is not just one pitcher who has “lost his way” like David Peterson did.  It is the up-and-down Megill.  It is Scherzer dominating one game and then squabbling with the umpires in the next.  It is Vintage Verlander followed by Vulnerable Verlander.

There has to be a root cause, but even the Mets’ well-staffed analytics group has not yet figured out why we miss bats one day and get abundantly barreled the next.  I worry about guys like Adam Ottavino and Drew Smith, who seem to have great stuff in most outings and then have an outing where everything seems flat.  Smith in particular seems to have more horizontal than vertical break on his pitches, which is much easier to hit.  Then I worry about the weather, as the difference between awesome Senga and average Senga seems to be the air temperature.  What is going to happen in September?!

I have seen quite a few barbs thrown at Buck Showalter in recent media posts, and I feel great empathy for him.  How can he know if he is summoning “good Otto” or “bad Otto” from the pen tonight?  I don’t think he can predict it, but maybe he can tell the analytics guys to back off a little.  Maybe there are too many adjustments going on between games that are causing the inconsistency.  You may remember back in 2021 when all the good hitters stopped hitting and it turned out that the batters were being confused by the deluge of information being thrown at them pre-game by the analytics guys.  Eric Chavez came in the next year and filtered all that noise and the Mets got back to business.   So if that is the case with the pitching this year, then stop tweaking and start trusting your instincts.  There are 102 games left this season and we have to win 60+ to make the playoffs.  There is no more room for inconsistency.