Musings
The New York Mets are a disaster at the moment. We have seen the return of the dreaded June Swoon with this team. They are 6-16 this month, and you can only see things getting worse.
The NL East is no longer within reach, and the same may be true for the Wild Card. The Mets are 16 games behind the Atlanta Braves. They are 8.5 games back in the Wild Card race. In the NL, only the St. Louis Cardinals, Colorado Rockies, and Washington Nationals have a worse record than the Mets. The Mets have lost a series to all three of those teams.
During this time, Buck Showalter has been a disaster.
The lineups are not analytically driven. Starling Marte has never been the option to bat second, and he’s even less of one when he is not healthy. Really, Showalter has flaunted his disdain for analytics by pointing out how he used them to tell Tommy Pham what they had to say about him.
Showalter is getting testy with reporters who are finally seeking accountability. When pressed as to why he didn’t use David Robertson in the eighth when the game was on the line, Showalter sounded dumbfounded as to how he would use his closer during the most important part of the game.
What made that worse was while Showalter was espousing Adam Ottavino was unavailable, Ottavino was saying he was good to pitch. Fast-forward to the next game, we see Showalter using Robertson, Ottavino, and Brooks Raley in a loss. It would be difficult to argue he wasn’t being passive aggressive.
At this point, you have to start to wonder if Showalter is trying to get fired. Steve Cohen pumped all this money into analytics only for the manager to ignore it. That’s all well and good when you’re winning, but at the moment, no one is playing worse baseball than the Mets.
For some reason, Cohen is not acting. He is sitting idly by as all the money he has invested has been absolutely wasted. The analytics investments have been wasted by the manger. The money for payroll has been wasted by Billy Eppler who built a flawed roster. Moreover, the player development investment is being wasted.
We get back to Showalter here. Showalter would rather lose with veterans than try to win with rookies. He’s gone out of his way to marginalize the young players on this roster.
At some point, the focus needs to be on Cohen,. Why is he so content to allow his GM and manager to just waste hundreds of millions of dollars? Why is he not motivated to take action when the Mets are becoming laughingstocks again?
Yes, Eppler built a poor roster. Certainly, Showalter has gone out of his way to make things worse. However, in the end, Cohen has the ability to make changes, and he is not making them. Sooner or later, we need to hold him accountable for his inaction.
On the surface, the New York Mets supposed plans to eat a bad contact to get a good player makes a lot of sense. After all, it’s what we say he Los Angeles Dodgers do when they first started their current run.
It’s also a great way to maximize Steve Cohen’s financial muscle. Go after teams at the mercy of a bad contract and see just how badly they need to get rid of the deal. For an owner like Cohen, that bad contract may be nothing more than a rounding error.
Who knows? Maybe the Mets can turn that bad contract into something too.
Take Steven Matz as an example. He’s had success in the past with the Mets. He’s got a good relationship with Jeremy Hefner. His splits against left-handed batters suggest he could be an effective left-handed reliever/long man.
Who knows how much the St. Louis Cardinals want to me rid of him. Do they give up a decent prospect? Maybe a decent reliever? It’s worth gauging interest.
Going back to the Dodgers, the plan worked beautifully because Andrew Friedman was in charge. Friedman is among the best there is.
As for the Mets, they have Billy Eppler. He’s the same GM who couldn’t win with Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani. More recently, he’s the one responsible for the current Mets roster issues.
To execute trades like this, you have to trust your current GM. Looking at Eppler’s Mets trade history, the only trade that hasn’t proven to be a debacle has been the Chris Bassitt trade.
Based on that trading history, you really can’t trust Eppler with executing trades of this nature. He is going to be inclined to attach a prospect with real value for what will amount to little more than a salary/contact dump.
The obvious retort is he is the GM, and you need to be able to trust him to make these (or any) trades. However, Eppler has a long history as a GM now, and nothing there suggests he can or should be trusted.
Put another way, Eppler should not be the GM. In fact, he never should have been hired. It’s better to not let him screw things up more and reset in the offseason. After all, Eppler has shown he can make any situation worse.
It had gotten to the point where it was no longer whispers. It was now fair to question if Max Scherzer was no longer a top of the rotation type starter.
Pick your reason. Pitch clock. With the ejection, maybe more scrutiny with his hands. Injures. Certainly, age.
Whatever the case, Scherzer wasn’t the pitcher this year he was in his career. He wasn’t even close to the pitcher he was until his last few starts of last year.
Through his first 10 starts, he was 5-2 with a 4.45 ERA, 1.235 WHIP, 2.2 BB/9, and a 9.5 K/9. His FIP was 4.36.
There have been some glimpses of the Scherzer of his prime. Mostly, he’s had some unexpectedly poor starts getting hit harder than he ever has been. His pitches are a hair slower.
All told, Scherzer has not been Scherzer. At least, he wasn’t that until his start against the reigning World Series Champion Houston Astros.
Scherzer was effective and economical. It’s a big reason why he was able to go eight innings throwing only 91 pitches.
Scherzer struck out eight and only allowed one earned on four hits and a walk. The Astros were completely dominated.
There are some caveats here. The Astros are in a stretch where they played 23 games over 24 days. Yordan Álvarez is on the IL.
Make all the excuses you want to make. None of those excuses made Scherzer fix his slider. That slider was nearly unhittable as evidenced by the Astros meager display.
More than anything, the Mets needed that. It’s been their vaunted rotation that has let them down this year. In many ways, Scherzer is the poster boy for that.
He could also be the poster boy for a Mets resurgence. If Scherzer is the pitcher he was against the Astros, the Mets are formidable again.
We can buy Scherzer turning his season around and being the pitcher he was against the Astros because he has been that pitcher in his career. That was the pitcher the Mets signed and built their World Series aspirations around.
The Mets needed Scherzer to be great against the Astros. He was. Now, they just need him to be Scherzer for the rest of the season.
For the second time this season, a New York Mets pitcher was thrown out of a game for having an illegal substance on their hands. Both times, there was an MLB official involved.
With Max Scherzer, he was told to clean his hands because of the rosin residue. He would wash his hands in the presence of an MLB official. When Scherzer returned to the game, he would be thrown out for having an illegal stick substance on his hand.
What was interesting with Scherzer was David Cone did an experiment on Sunday Night Baseball which effectively exonerated Scherzer. In essence, he showed how what Scherzer claimed was absolutely true, and yet, Scherzer was still suspended.
In the opener of the Subway Series, the umpires did a check of Drew Smith before the top of the seventh. Umpire Bill Miller determined Smith’s hands were too sticky and ejected him from the game. After the game, Miller would say he didn’t know what the substance was, just that Smith’s hands were too sticky.
Ron Darling was frustrated asking for a standard to be put in place. This might be more fantasy than reality. It’s really difficult to adopt a uniform standard, and that is part of the shortsightedness of MLB implementing this rule.
However, that’s not the most troubling part of all of this. The most troubling part is an MLB official did not find Smith’s hands sticky in a post-ejection inspection.
Drew Smith says he had an MLB official check his hands in the tunnel after his ejection.
He says the official laughed and said there was "nothing there." pic.twitter.com/Vc1AfdCxA3
— SNY (@SNYtv) June 14, 2023
Now, there is the caveat here that either Smith or the MLB official was not exactly being truthful. That said, it is alarming Smith was told there was nothing there after he was ejected. If the timeline of events are correct, Smith would not have even had an opportunity to clean his hands before this post-ejection suspension.
With Scherzer, an MLB official supervised and approved the hand washing. With Smith, an MLB official said there was nothing on Smith’s hands.
Of course, the obvious point here is that there is an MLB official right there. Why is that official not performing these substance checks?
The MLB official has the opportunity to see if there is anything illicit happening. The MLB official can easily check hands before or after an inning without any of the theater we see now. For a league hyper focused on pace of play, it would also make the game move just that much quicker.
We can also get more checks with that official able to do it each and every inning. Yes, that would also mean a need for an official in the bullpen. With Major League Baseball having record revenues that should not be an issue at all.
The end result would be the promise of a more unified standard for ballparks because you get the same person checking every time, and that person can be trained specifically for this one area. You also get more testing resulting in the appearance of a fairer game with less foreign substances. Moreover, you get the game moving slightly quicker by ending the umpires periodic checks.
Really, there is no reason why this isn’t happening. At a minimum, you take away the ability for players to claim the MLB official cleared them creating less drama and frustration with the sport. Overall, you’re just making the game better.
The first Subway Series was 1997, and it had all of New York enthralled. There was the upstart New York Mets led by Lance Johnson, Bernard Gilkey, and Todd Hundley, against the defending World Series champion New York Yankees.
The first Subway Series did something rare in sports. It exceeded the hype. Dave Mlicki is still a Mets legend for the complete game shutout to open the series culminated with striking out Derek Jeter to end the game.
The Mets would spoil a David Cone no-hit bid in the series finale and almost pull out a win. While the concept of the Mets and Yankees being rivals was a bit forced at the outset, we did see the beginnings of a rivalry.
The rivalry reached its apex in the 2000 World Series and with all the drama surrounding Mike Piazza and Roger Clemens. There was a lot more to it like former Mets greats like Cone, Dwight Gooden, and Darryl Strawberry returning to Shea.
Mostly, it was Bobby Valentine who knew the Mets underdog status. He embraced it, and he treated those games like they were must win. Typically, they were for him as it was usually a marker for how the Mets were performing that season.
Since 2000, we have seen the series go through ebbs and flows. There have been moments like the Luis Castillo dropped fly ball or Carlos Delgado‘s power display. Of course, there was the Shawn Estes/Clemens drama.
All that said, this series has never been the same since 2000. In reality, this series has never been at a lower point than it is right now.
The Yankees are in third place and nine games back of the Tampa Bay Rays, but they do have a half-game lead in the Wild Card race. The Mets are in fourth place, are four games under .500, and they trail by three games in the Wild Card race.
The Yankees are without Aaron Judge. The Mets are without Pete Alonso. The ticket prices are through the roof, and Citi Field still has not sold out the game. It’s also a two game set making the possibility of the teams walking away with a somewhat uninteresting split.
On the bright side, we are going to see Gerrit Cole, Max Scherzer, and Justin Verlander. The Baby Mets of Francisco Álvarez, Brett Baty, and Mark Vientos will get their first taste of this series, and more importantly, put their stamp on this series.
We may very well see competitive games with a number of storylines emerge. However, in the past, the storylines were already written because of all the intrigue surrounding the series. That intrigue is seemingly gone for now.
The absolute last thing the New York Mets needed was for Pete Alonso to hit the IL. He was on pace for a historic 60 homer season, and he was the Mets best player so far this season. Really, outside of him, Francisco Álvarez, and Brandon Nimmo, the Mets players have truly under-performed.
That said, the Mets did score 10 runs in the series finale against the Atlanta Braves proving they can score runs without Alonso. They just need other players to pick up the slack. Honestly, the Mets do have the talent to do that.
First and foremost, the Mets need Francisco Lindor to be more of an offensive threat. For much of last season, it was him and Alonso carrying the Mets offense. This year, he’s just at a 100 wRC+. The good news is this is the point of the year where Lindor typically takes off, and he’s right on schedule with a four game hitting streak.
In addition to Lindor, Jeff McNeil has to snap out of this funk he’s been all year. It seemed like the shift rules could help him chase history. Instead, he’s having one of his worst seasons mostly driven by an inability to hit on the road. He was last year’s batting champ. He needs to get much closer to that for the Mets to have a chance.
Brett Baty was supposed to be the solution at third. Instead, he has been mired in a deep slump for other a month. He’s really struggling hitting breaking pitches, and he’s pounding the ball into the ground. He’s coming off a two hit game, so maybe, there’s some hope for him still.
Buck Showalter has used every excuse not to play Mark Vientos, but now, it seems like he is out of excuses. Against the Atlanta Braves, we saw a rusty player who went from hot to fighting it. With Alonso out, Vientos can now finally get enough games to get into a groove and establish himself as a bona fide Major League power hitter.
These are all possibilities, and if these players can get going, the Mets will be fine offensively even without Alonso. However, that’s not going to be the biggest issue.
Mostly, the Mets need Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander to figure it out right now. This team is three games under .500 and in fourth place in the NL East. Much of that is because their co-aces have been more like deuces. They’ve been inconsistent and unreliable, and all we hear is that they are so close, blah, blah, blah.
Well, time is up with them. They need to finally deliver. We know the bullpen is unreliable and not going to get better. The Mets need length and quality innings from their starters. That starts with Scherzer and Verlander.
Finally, we go to Showalter. Look, at this point, he’s done enough to get fired by the team. He may treat this injury as an excuse for more Daniel Vogelbach and Mark Canha at first. He can’t. If he does, the Mets are sunk.
In the end, there are just a few Mets who have not under-performed. To a certain extent, that is actually good news. After all, that means if the Mets best players start performing, this team can start rolling off wins. Of course, the manager needs to let that happen, and the players need to start doing that now.
They have no other choice.