MVN - Most Valuable Network

Evaluating the Mets Offense Through the First Quarter of 2008

The Mets have now played 41 games - just about 25% of 162 - in 2008 and have won 22 of them. If they were to continue that pace over the remaining three quarters of the season, they would win 87 games (one less than last year, when, well, I don’t think we need to go over that again, do we?). In order to win 90 games - a number I’ve picked because it’s a nice round number and because an NL team with at least that many wins has failed to make the playoffs just twice since 2000 - they will have to go 68-53 over the remaining 121 games of the season, a pace that would require a slight improvement over what they have done so far and is well within the realm of possibility.

So far, the Mets’ pitching staff has been a stronger unit than the offense. The pitching staff currently has an ERA+ of 106 (meaning that the team’s ERA has been six percent better than the league average once you adjust for the home ballpark), while the team OPS+ is 101 (meaning that the offense as a whole is putting up an OPS just one percent better than the league average once home park is taken into account). Curiously, there is not much of a difference between what the team is hitting at Shea (.250/.342/.392) and on the road (.266/.338/.403), but the Mets are doing a significantly better job of scoring runs on the road (5.45 runs per game on the road, the second-best rate in the National League) than at home (4.52 runs per game). One possible explanation is that the Mets have hit .236/.357/.318 with runners in scoring position at home (and the numbers for situations such as runners in scoring position with two outs and a man on third with less than two outs are even uglier) and .289/.370/.437 with runners in scoring position on the road (what they’ve done with a runner on third and less than two outs is particularly awesome). I’m trying to think of what might cause a team to struggle with runners in scoring position at home while doing quite well in such situations on the road (hint: it rhymes with “flu”).

Zooming in a bit, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at individual Mets players to see who is performing above and beyond what was reasonably expected of them going into the year and who is underachieving thus far.

For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to take a look at Equivalent Average (EqA), a stat that looks like batting average but incorporates walks, power and baserunning and makes an adjustment for the offensive environment. EqA is a “key statistic” in the percentile forecasts of Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA projections. I’ve grouped the Mets hitters by where their current EqA is in relation to their percentile forecasts; for reference, I’ve included the percentile forecast closest to the player’s actual performance as well as the weighted mean projection.

90th Percentile Or Above:
Brian Schneider (.280 EqA, 90th percentile projection of .271, weighted mean of .235)

Between 75th and 90th Percentile:
Ryan Church (.312 EqA, 90th percentile projection of .313, weighted mean of .283)
Angel Pagan (.270 EqA, 75th percentile projection of .270, weighted mean of .249)

Between 60th and 75th Percentile:
Luis Castillo (.265 EqA, 60th percentile projection of .259, weighted mean of .258)
Raul Casanova (.259 EqA, 75th percentile projection of .262, weighted mean of .244)

Between 50th and 60th Percentile:
Carlos Beltran (.295 EqA, 50th percentile projection of .294, weighted mean of .296)

Between 40th and 50th Percentile:
Moises Alou (.279 EqA, 40th percentile projection of .277, weighted mean of .296)
Jose Reyes (.273 EqA, 40th percentile projection of .271, weighted mean of .282)

Between 25th and 40th Percentile:
David Wright (.314 EqA, 40th percentile projection of .315, weighted mean of .319)
Marlon Anderson (.238 EqA, 25th percentile projection of .232, weighted mean of .273)

10th Percentile or Below: 
Carlos Delgado (.239 EqA, 10th percentile projection of .240, weighted mean of .280)
Damion Easley (.196 EqA, 10th percentile projection of .202, weighted mean of .259)
Endy Chavez (.129 EqA, 10th percentile projection of .184, weighted mean of .250)

A few conclusions can be drawn from this:

• The team’s core players on offense are a smidge below their expected levels of performance but within shouting distance of it.
• The Mets enjoyed pretty good offensive production from the guys who were here to fill in for an injured player.
• However, the main bench players have been abysmal in the early going.
• Church and Schneider have both hit quite a bit better than expected so far. I think Church can keep up the good work, but I’ll eat my hat (translation: a piece of chocolate shaped like a hat) if Schneider ends the season with numbers anywhere close to where he is right now.
• Delgado has been pretty awful, but there’s really nowhere to go but up. It’s worth remembering that he had a terrible (and by terrible, I mean even worse than this year) April last year but hit .274/.348/.489 from May 1 onward. Seasons like 2006 are behind him, but he can still be a reasonably productive hitter for the remainder of the year.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 9:23 pm and is filed under New York Mets, 7 Train. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.