The Mets have gotten off to a very mediocre start, with a 5-5 record and all of their wins coming against a bad Miami Marlins team. There have been several issues; including non-existent offense in Milwaukee, but the most troubling has been the pitching.
Let’s face it – on paper the Mets had a fantastic starting rotation and very solid backup heading towards the end of spring training. Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander were the headliners, both having brought home Cy Young hardware in the past. Then you had the Japanese phenom Kodai Senga and a back end of the rotation that featured Jose Quintana and Carlos Carrasco.
Quintana went down with an injury, but Mets fans were still confident because both David Peterson and Tylor Megill had shown great promise in prior seasons. Then Verlander went down with what should be (?) a brief muscle injury. But we still had five solid starting pitchers, right?
Once again, on paper that sounded good but we all had this nagging feeling that this aging pitching staff could break down – we just hoped that this was not the year. Those feelings were somewhat exasperated by Scherzer’s pre-season – he had some dominant innings and some real head scratchers. We rationalized it as “Max is just testing the limits of what he can get away with concerning the new pitch clock rules”. Well, it may have been more than that.
It seems to me that the pitch clock has introduced a new vulnerability. Aging pitchers like Max (38 years, 8 months, 14 days as of today) and Carlos (36 years, 20 days as of today) seem to run out of gas quicker when they are pitching so rapidly.
When the Mets’ offense is not clicking, those 1-2-3 innings leave our senior hurlers huffing and puffing, as their velocity dips. With the decreased velocity, a location miss turns into a very troubling time as witnessed by the back-to-back-to-back homers recorded by the Brewers against the once-mighty Max Scherzer.
The Mets’ staff is currently 20th of 30 teams in baseball with a 4.81 ERA. That is not the kind of output that we expected in the pre-season and it is not the level of performance we need to make the playoffs in a tough division. Senga and Megill have held up their end, recording 4 of the 5 Mets victories and each sporting an ERA under 2.0.
David Robertson has been as good as we hoped in the closer role, and Stephen Nogosek has turned in some quality innings. After that it heads south quickly. Peterson, Smith, Santana, and Raley have had real rough spots.
Help is not just a phone call away. Our AAA club is staffed with pitchers that are good at that level, but not plug-in replacements at the major league level for faltering pitchers. There is some arm talent moving up through AA, but I don’t think any of them are near ready to come save the day in Flushing. We need some strong outings from the current staff and we need Verlander to heal quickly. That is not going to be easy with a series against the Padres starting today.
Those Padres just scored 25 runs in four games (winning 3) against an Atlanta Braves team that also had a promising rotation coming in to the season. Scherzer, Peterson, and Megill are going to need to summon everything they have to limit a San Diego club that is averaging 5.0 runs/game.
The Mets offense needs to put people on base and prolong innings to give their pitchers some rest time. That would be a reversal of the current trend, with our team posting a lowly .325 on-base percentage so far.
I have watched too much baseball to panic this early in the season, but that nagging feeling about the age of the staff and the gap to the younger talent is giving me some concern. I’m sure that many of the readers feel the same way.
2 comments:
Sounds a little like panic to me! Hey,let Alvarez play, it’s not like Mido is doing much.
Yes, there has been some bad outings, but it this team was hitting as advertised, they would have three more wins going into today's game.
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