Paul Articulates - Wooden you?

The crack of a wooden bat is a familiar sound in a MLB stadium, but it is much softer and more infrequent at Citi Field this year.  The Mets’ hitting woes this year seem to be worse than ever, and there have been quite a few light hitting teams wearing orange and blue over the last six decades.  The epic underperformance of what looked like a solid lineup brings into question everything about the hitting philosophy in the organization.  

How bad is it?  Here is a comparison between the 2022 season and the 2023 season with numbers that have been normalized to the number of games for fair comparison.

The loss of 22 points of team batting average from one season to the next is difficult to understand given the number of common players from last year’s lineup to this year’s lineup.  It is not the ball or the pitching rules – in 2022 the batting average for all MLB was .243.  This year that average is .249, so if anything one might expect an increase rather than a decrease.  So this is a team issue – and it is not personnel.  The players from last year’s team that are not on this year’s team in order of at-bats are JD Davis, James McCann, Dominic Smith, and Darrin Ruf.  None of them hit better than the team average last year.

Last year the Mets had a solid year at the plate, recording the sixth best OPS in baseball at .744.  That performance led to a lofty 772 runs scored and over 100 wins in one of the franchise’s best regular seasons.  How can things change so quickly?  For starters, they have a new batting coach in Jeremy Barnes who replaced Eric Chavez when the latter was promoted to Bench Coach.  The team has also struggled with the role of the analytics group in providing feedback to the hitters, which was something that Chavez was able to buffer last year.  

I think the hitting problem this year is rooted in the hitting approach.  There are many more strikeouts, pop-outs, and weak ground balls with players in scoring position.  When there are less than two out, even a hard hit out can be helpful if properly placed, but there seem to be many fewer productive at-bats that advance runners.  With runners in scoring position, the Mets are batting .242  this year versus .269 last year.

But here’s some confounding information.  I went to Baseball Savant to get some analytics on how the Mets weren’t hitting the ball very hard this year and found just the contrary.  This year’s hard hit ball rate is 40.5% compared to last year’s 37.1%.  This year the barrels per plate appearance are 5.6% versus last year’s 5.6%.  Average exit velocity is down about 0.6mph this year but that doesn’t seem to make the case.  So if it is not how hard they hit it, is it where they hit it?  Have the Mets outsmarted themselves by overcorrecting for the lack of a defensive shift?   The league average has improved this year without the shift so it makes the Mets situation all the more perplexing.

I don’t have the qualifications to solve this problem, but I think it is among the highest priority issues for  this team to resolve.  Run production will be extremely important next year because the Mets have a long way to go to regain the pitching dominance that fans are accustomed to.  So if I were setting the priorities for the off-season, I would make this the number one issue.  Wouldn't you?