Coming off the Mets series, still thinking about that team, which is just what they want, I bet. Anyway, I don’t do this often, but a fairly long post about the Stem after the jump, feel free to ignore it if you so desire.


So, the Mets are pretty much dead. This is not all that surprising to me, except for how completely they’ve fallen apart. The blame is going to injuries (injuries that were not all that unpredictable; more on that later) but the real story is the collapse of their pitching staff, something that was easy to see coming if you looked hard enough. Alex and Cary, if they’re here, will recall some emails I wrote early in the season making the point that their rotation was made up, after Santana, of one bad lefthander and three righthanded finesse pitchers. John Maine is okay, and struck out 7.8 men per nine in 2008, but had walk issues. Mike Pelphrey’s 3.72 ERA in 2008, however, was an obvious illusion, as he struck out less than five men per nine innings, and Livan Hernandez (backed up by Tim Redding) throws nothing but pure slop at this point.

Behind these three righthanded pitchers ranged a defense without one truly plus infield defender. Reyes and Wright are average, and on the right side of the infield they sported a 33-year-old second baseman with hamstring problems and a 37-year old DH the size of a bulldozer, with almost as much lateral agility, playing first base. It is no surprise that was Pelfrey’s ERA has skyrocketed, that Livan has been useless, and that Redding, a pitcher who was extremely lucky in 2008, is on the verge of release.

The collapse of the pitching staff — it is very bad after Santana, and even he has only been good instead of inhuman this year — has been hidden by the park effects of Citi Field. Their ERA at home is 3.70, but on the road it is 5.12, which would be the second-worst in the league after the Nats, a horrible team with one of the worst defenses in living memory. It is a curious thing that most mainstream analysts will accept the existence of park effects, but only negative park effects. They are all too eager to blame Citi Field for David Wright’s power outage (even though he’s hit more home runs at home than on the road, and that last season he hit only 12 homers in road games) and for the Mets’ offensive woes in general (even though they’ve hit almost exactly the same on the road as at home, to such a degree that the Baseball-Reference park factors consider Citi Field a neutral park). But they refuse to recognize that the Mets’ pitching is not just below-average, but actually the second-worst in the league. I’ve noticed the opposite with players at Coors Field; the announcers always make excuses for the pitchers, but steadfastly maintain that Todd Helton really is one of the best hitters in baseball and not Wally Joyner armed with a bazooka. It is the Lake Wobegon Theory of Park Effects; everyone is above-average.

At any rate, their defense took another hit when their one really good defensive player went down with a knee injury. (In addition, their manager took a dislike to their only other good defensive outfielder, Ryan Church, and started looking for reasons to bench him, like in order to play a 20-year-old “hot prospect” who hasn’t really hit in the minors yet, eventually getting management to trade him for a factory-damaged ex-prospect.) The injury to Beltran was not a surprise, really. Beltran played 161 games in 2008, but in his previous seasons with the Mets had missed an average of 17 games a year with various injuries. Also, he’s an all-out player, a guy who makes a lot of diving catches, and diving failed catches, and has been involved in at least one major collision in his career. Playing 161 games and trying to keep a team in the pennant race almost singlehandedly as the rest of the offense collapsed around him couldn’t have helped matters. It can’t be a surprise that he eventually went down. Jose Reyes is a similar sort of player, though not nearly as good (with the bat or the glove); he throws himself around a lot. He played 159 games in 2008, and clearly wore down as the season went along. For his career, he is a .248/.307/.378 hitter in September and October, a sign that he was playing too much. Carlos Delgado’s injury is the least surprising of all; the most surprising thing is that he has lasted that long without a major injury. He’s a big guy — not fat, but very large — and extremely slow. I’ve been predicting that he’d fall apart for about three years now.

That takes us to the final leg of the Mets’ collapsing stool, the lack of depth in the system. The Mets’ system hasn’t been very productive of late — really, not since Frank Cashen left. Wright and Reyes are the only homegrown stars they’ve had since Edgardo Alfonzo. Daniel Murphy, who has sabotaged the defense at two positions and hasn’t hit, is the only other current regular player developed in the system. The lineup, behind the four stars, as well as the bench are populated mostly with veteran mediocrities whose prior organizations didn’t want them anymore. They had a couple of hits — Tatis had a good year in 2008, though now he’s showing why he was out of baseball, Castillo has at least gotten on base, and Sheffield was playing well — but a lot of misses. They didn’t have much choice, though, because the cupboard is bare at AA and AAA. Pelfrey is their only homegrown pitcher of note. Maine is, in all honesty, the best starting pitcher they’ve developed (ignoring guys they traded away before they got established) since Dwight Gooden and Ron Darling, and he is not really that good. [AAR notes that Maine was actually picked up from the Orioles as basically a finished product who had made some major league appearances, so the Mets’ development system is worse than I thought.] Maine is basically a #3 starter who can win like a #2 with the offense the Mets thought they had. To shore up the bullpen, they signed Francisco Rodriguez — giving up their first-round pick — and traded almost everything left in their system for JJ Putz — an oft-injured reliever who pitched poorly and then went on the DL.

What the Mets had was money. Bernie Madoff took care of a lot of that, and the financial downturn of most of the rest. In the past, they could spend big money in the offseason on free agents (Beltran, Santana, Rodriguez) and both then and during the season offset the poverty of their farm system by taking on contracts to add players. It’s not too likely they can do this now. The Mets dynasty lived and died in 2006, when they faded down the stretch after running away from the division. They’ve really just gone from losing to the Braves every year to losing to the Phillies. This is progress?