Mets Already Have Enough Offense to Win 90+ Games

There's a veritable All-Star team of unsigned free agent hitters heading into the new year.  Players like Chris Davis, Justin Upton, Alex Gordon, Denard Span, Dexter Fowler and yes, even Yoenis Cespedes are still available for any team to sign.  The Mets have signed two free agents in shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera and outfielder Alejandro De Aza.  They also traded for second baseman Neil Walker.

All signs point to the Mets being done as far as bringing in another big-name hitter is concerned.  This has made a number of Mets fans unhappy, as they claim that the team is not much better than it was last spring and early summer, when it struggled to stay above .500 until Sandy Alderson acquired Kelly Johnson, Juan Uribe and Cespedes.  But I disagree with those complaining fans.  In fact, as long as the Mets don't have a 1987-like epidemic of injuries to their pitchers, the team as constructed today should surpass last season's 90-win total.  Here's why.

Three men and a beanie.  (Screen shot courtesy of ESPN E:60)

In 2015, the brilliant quartet of Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz combined to start 89 of the team's 162 games.  The Mets' record in those games was 55-34.  When someone other than the fearsome foursome started, the team went 35-38.  But several of those games occurred after Michael Conforto was promoted from the minors, Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe were acquired and most importantly, Yoenis Cespedes was brought into the fold.  Once those four hitters joined the team, the team's offense was far better.

Conforto made his major league debut on July 24.  Johnson and Uribe made their first appearances with the Mets a day later.  And Cespedes wore blue and orange for the first time on August 1.  The day before Conforto made his debut, the Mets' record was 49-47.  So let's look at how the team fared in those 96 pre-offensive upgrade games when deGrom, Harvey, Syndergaard and Matz were on the mound and compare it to how they did in the team's final 66 games.  Let's also see what the club's record was when the other starting pitchers (Bartolo Colon, Jon Niese, Dillon Gee, etc.) took the hill in both instances.

• Jacob deGrom - First 96 games: (11-7);  Last 66 games: (9-3)
• Matt Harvey - First 96 games: (10-8);  Last 66 games: (7-4)
• Noah Syndergaard - First 96 games: (6-7);  Last 66 games: (7-4)
• Steven Matz - First 96 games: (2-0);  Last 66 games: (3-1)

In the days before Conforto, Johnson, Uribe and Cespedes were on the team, the young core of homegrown starting pitchers combined to start 51 of the club's 96 games.  The Mets had a 29-22 record in those games, for a .569 winning percentage.  The team did not fare as well when the other starters were on the mound in the first 96 games, going 20-25 (.444 winning percentage) in those 45 contests.

In the final 66 games, when the offense was among the best in the game, the Mets went 26-12 in games started by deGrom, Harvey, Syndergaard and Matz.  They also had a winning record in games not started by those four hurlers, going 15-13 in those 28 affairs.

Think about that for a moment.  The Mets were 90-72 during the 2015 regular season.  That's a .556 winning percentage.  Yet through July 24, when the likes of Michael Cuddyer, Eric Campbell, John Mayberry Jr., Darrell Ceciliani and Kevin Plawecki were starting games regularly, the team had a .569 winning percentage when deGrom, Harvey, Syndergaard and Matz started games with those offensively-challenged players in the lineup.  That's a 92-win pace.

After starting just 89 games for the Mets in 2015, the big four may combine to start around 120 games for the team in 2016, with deGrom, Harvey and Syndergaard no longer having innings limits, which could allow them to make 32 or 33 starts each.  Although Cabrera, Walker and De Aza are not going to strike fear in the hearts of opposing pitchers the way Cespedes did in August and September, those three players are clearly better with the bat than Campbell, Cuddyer and Mayberry were during the first four months of the 2015 campaign.

(Adam Hunger/USA TODAY Sports)

While it's true that Daniel Murphy is no longer a Met, don't forget that Michael Conforto is going be a Met for the entire 2016 season instead of just the final third of the campaign as he was in 2015.  Conforto should hit for a high average, have more power and draw more walks than Murphy did (Conforto drew 57 walks in 597 plate appearances between the majors and minors in 2015; Murphy never walked more than 39 times in any season).  And also don't forget that Syndergaard and Matz didn't begin the year with the Mets either.  They're both poised to begin their first full season in New York in 2016.

So let's review.

When deGrom, Harvey, Syndergaard and Matz started games for the Mets in 2015 with their offensively-challenged lineup backing them up, the team won nearly 57% of its games.  But they only started 51 of the team's first 96 games, or barely more than half of those games.  Now, barring unexpected injuries, those four pitchers are going to start 80% of the team's games in 2016, with Zack Wheeler ready to contribute by mid-season.  The offense doesn't have the Daniel Murphys and Yoenis Cespedeses of this world, but it will have a full season of Conforto, as well as Cabrera, Walker and De Aza taking at-bats that would have gone to lesser hitters during the first four months of the 2015 campaign.

Just repeating the .569 winning percentage the Mets had in starts made by deGrom, Harvey, Syndergaard and Matz during the pre-Cespedes portion of 2015 would give the team 92 wins in 2016.  But more starts from those four pitchers in 2016, plus Zack Wheeler's return, which makes the bullpen deeper once Bartolo Colon moves there, added to a full season of Michael Conforto's production, while subtracting Cuddyer, Campbell, Mayberry, et al., from the equation should give the Mets a wonderful chance to have a higher win total than they did when they captured the N.L. East crown by seven games in 2015.

So you see, the Mets don't need to add any more top bats to what some people still consider a weak lineup.  They already have what it takes to improve upon last season's memorable performance and make another triumphant return to the postseason.

Studious Metsimus Presents The Happy/Crappy Recap For 2015

Another year has come and gone, Mets fans.  And for the first time since 2008, we're not saying goodbye to a year in which our favorite team had more losses than wins.  Does that mean this recap will be more happy than crappy?  Not exactly, especially if you've been following the goings-on in the National League East over the last few days.

The 2015 season began with Mets fans hoping the team would play their first-ever meaningful game in September at Citi Field and ended with the team playing their first-ever game in November in any of its three home stadiums.  In between, we saw new arrivals (Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, Michael Conforto), some departures (Kirk Nieuwenhuis left, came back and then left again) and some arrivals who departed with dignity and class (we hardly knew ye, Michael Cuddyer).

It was also the year Yoenis Cespedes gave us two memorable months and no one had any memory of Dillon Gee pitching for the team.  What else happened?  Let's see.  Daniel Murphy deep-sixed the Dodgers and Cubs.  Jeurys Familia became a lights-out closer who got lit up to close out the season.  Matt Harvey came back and then became the Pedro Martinez to Terry Collins's Grady Little in the World Series.  The Mets got no-hit by a player who had five career wins at the time and by another player who had two eye colors.  And oh yeah, there were three National League teams that had to supply with Mets with champagne and the extended use of the road clubhouse for party purposes.

Is that all?  Not exactly.  Here's more of what made us all happy in 2015 and what made us feel crappy.  As usual, let's all get happy first.

         
The Mets ripped off 11 consecutive victories in April, tying a franchise record.  When the streak began, New York was three games out of first place.  Eleven victories later, they led the N.L. East by 4½ games.  All 11 wins came at the expense of the Braves, Phillies and Marlins - teams that combined to go 201-285 during the 2015 campaign.  A non-believer in the Mets (let's call them Nationals fans) might say that anyone could have won that many games in a row against those three teams.  A believer (let's call them intelligent baseball fans) would say that one of the reasons Atlanta, Philadelphia and Miami had such poor records was because the Mets pounded them into oblivion early on, giving them no hope to be competitive for the remainder of the season.

Eric Campbell started more games at third base than David Wright.  Kevin Plawecki was behind the plate more times than Travis d'Arnaud.  The team's closer at the beginning of the season (Jenrry Mejia) was suspended not once, but twice, for the same drug.  Juan Lagares replaced his Gold Glove with one made of stone.  Michael Cuddyer reminded us of Jason Bay minus the concussion excuse.  Campbell, John Mayberry, Darrell Ceciliani, Danny Muno and Johnny Monell combined to have nearly 500 plate appearances.  And the Mets still won 90 games.  Just imagine what they could have done had they been healthy, made better decisions on which prescriptions to pick up at Walgreen's, and not been so dependent on Quadruple-A players.

Generation KO delivered a knockout blow every time one of its members took the mound.  Defending rookie of the year Jacob deGrom was better as a sophomore than he was as a Mets freshman.  Matt Harvey showed no ill effects from sitting out a year to recover from Tommy John surgery.  Noah Syndergaard was in character as Thor for the entire season, dropping the hammer on opposing hitters.  And Steven Matz made it back home, bringing his exuberant Grandpa Bert along for the ride to cheer him on after every victory.

The Mets entered uncharted waters in late July when Sandy Alderson decided to be a buyer at the trade deadline for the first time in his five-year tenure as the team's general manager.  First, he brought in Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe to be super subs.  Then he was hip to be square, deciding to keep the emotional Wilmer Flores, while balking at Carlos Gomez and his medical records.  Finally, as the clock approached midnight in Moscow (that's 4:00pm in the Eastern Time Zone) on July 31, the cold war being staged between Alderson and rival general managers reached a truce when Tigers G.M. Dave Dombrowski agreed to trade Yoenis Cespedes to the Mets for top pitching prospect Michael Fulmer and Luis Cessa.  The stage had been set for a magical summer at Citi Field.

Once the Mets swept the Nationals at a raucous Citi Field, then repeated the feat at Nationals Park a month later, it was a foregone conclusion that the Mets were going to win the N.L. East crown for only the sixth time in franchise history.  And when Daniel Murphy put the team on his shoulders in the division series and league championship series, the Mets played their way to an improbable pennant.

And that's when things got crappy...

The Kansas City Royals remembered all too well how close they came to winning it all in 2014.  This time, they would make sure no Mets lead was safe.  And in fact, the Mets led in all five World Series games and had the lead going to the eighth inning in four of the five contests.  But through poor fielding, a lack of hitting in the late innings and Jeurys Familia doing something completely un-Familia-r (blowing late leads), the Mets couldn't ride their October momentum to a World Series championship.

And once they lost Game Five on November 1, the dominoes started to fall.  Jon Niese was traded to Pittsburgh for Neil Walker.  Wilmer Flores lost his starting job to Asdrubal Cabrera, who had a Wilmer Flores-type season at the plate in 2015 but is six years older and is costing the Mets an extra eight million dollars-plus in 2016.  But hey, at least Bartolo Colon is back to provide comic relief at the plate.

Speaking of walking up to the plate, who will replace Murphy and Cespedes's production in 2016?  With Murphy gone to the Nationals and Cespedes gone fishing for a new team, the Mets have lost the man who tied for the team lead in RBI in 2015 (Murphy) and the neon-sleeved savior who made everyone forget about Eric Campbell and his clueless cohorts.  Will Walker and Cabrera be able to replace them in the hearts of Mets fans, and more importantly, in the stat sheets of those same fans?

Finally, the Mets acquired Alejandro De Aza to platoon with Lagares in center field.  Maybe Sandy Alderson goofed and thought De Aza's last name began with a lower case D and wanted to corner the market on similarly named players (he already has d'Arnaud and deGrom on the team).  But other than the fact that De Aza was probably cheaper than Denard Span, Gerardo Parra or Max Venable and was more likely to sign a one-year deal, why the fudge was he the guy targeted to be Lagares's platoon partner?  De Aza's dWAR hasn't been above zero since 2011 and he's started a total of 13 games in center field since the end of the 2013 season, or eight more games than Darrell Ceciliani started in center for the Mets last year alone and a baker's dozen more than you and I started.

I hope Sandy Alderson knows something we don't.  Then again, in 2015, he had all the right answers to all the question marks surrounding the team, even if he had to cough and clear his throat ten times before uttering each answer.

And there you have it, Mets fans.  You now know what was happy about 2015 and what was crappy about it.  Then again, if you've been following the Mets as carefully as the Studious Metsimus staff has over the past few years, you probably didn't need a 2,000-word blog post to tell you something you already knew.

One thing you may not have known is that our staff is heavily inspired by other Mets blogs.  And as we do every year, we'd like to give a shout-out to those sites in appreciation of their hard work and to thank them for not using a teddy bear as a roving reporter/culinary expert.  We'd like to think we've cornered the market with that.  So give a hand and show your support to each of the following Mets sites: A Gal For All Seasons, Faith and Fear in Flushing, Mets Merized Online, MetsMinors.Net, Amazin' Avenue, Metstradamus, Remembering Shea, The Daily Stache, Mets360, Rising Apple, Kranepool Society, Mets Police, MetSilverman, Converted Mets Fan and Mets Daddy.

On that note, we'd like to wish you the happiest of holiday seasons.  And by "we", we're talking about Ed Leyro (that's the guy pushing the word count of this post up near Bartolo Colon's cholesterol level), Joey Beartran (the aforementioned roving reporter/culinary expert), Iggy Beartran (your source for all things related to Cole Hamels) and Taryn "The Coop" Cooper (she's just here so she won't get fined).

And remember, Mets fans, if you see a team celebrating on an opposing team's field after recording the final out of the game, it doesn't always have to be Chris Heston or Max Scherzer celebrating a no-hitter.  Nor does it have to be the Kansas City Royals whooping it up as a World Series winner for the first time in 30 years.  Sometimes it might be a team decked in blue and orange celebrating a division title, division series victory or perhaps even a pennant.

Thanks so much for your support!  See you next year!

See, players celebrating on the field sometimes ARE the Mets.