The Mets Deserve Their Bad Record

If anything, they're lucky it's not worse.

The New York Mets’ quest to become the Dodgers East — combining lavish big-league spending with world-class player development to form a Voltron of perennial contention — has hit a snag. While last year, the second season of Steve Cohen’s deep-pocketed ownership, was mostly a step in the direction of sustained success, the third has seen New York start 31-35 and tumble into a deep hole in the NL East standings.

This would be nothing particularly notable for New York’s previous ownership regime. Heck, from my time at FiveThirtyEight, I had multiple Excel files named things like “mets-problems.xlsx” and “mets-problems-AGAIN.xlsx”. Things were supposed to be different under Cohen. Yet, somehow, the ghosts of the Wilpons have been harder to bust than anyone imagined.

The 2023 Mets have seldom strung together good performances for any extended period of time. They’ve won back-to-back games only seven times this year, and have only four winning streaks of at least 3 games. They’ve led the division only one day all season (April 2), and haven’t been within 3 of the NL East leader since May 1. That’s in sharp contrast with 2022, when the Mets led or tied for the division lead on 156 out of 162 game days during the regular season.

In a series against the Braves last week that was framed as “must-win” (or however close you can get to that in early June), New York blew a 3-run lead each game and were swept. It doesn’t get much worse than that… unless you then lose to the Pirates by a touchdown.

The Mets have earned their sub-.500 record this year, too. Their Pythagorean winning percentage — i.e., the deserved record implied by their runs scored and allowed — is actually worse (.465) than their real record (.470). And the record predicted by their BaseRuns (.446) is even worse than their runs scored/allowed suggest, indicating the team has gotten lucky to only be four games under .500 by this point. That’s half as many games underwater as they “should” be based on how they’ve really played — a sobering thought.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, from a pitching staff that ranks third-to-last in ERA+ and fourth-worst in FIP, to a bullpen that’s 10th-worst in Win Probability Added, and an overall roster that ranks dead last in average age and — perhaps not coincidentally — second-worst in dollars lost to injury-list stints. (Pete Alonso’s recent wrist injury, which will cost him 3-4 weeks, is just the latest key absence that makes the Mets’ upward climb even harder.) Along with David Robertson, who has actually been lights-out (1.91 ERA) in the bullpen, Alonso was the only Mets veteran who was substantially outplaying his established level of Wins Above Replacement this season.

Right now, an average of the playoff odds at FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference assigns the Mets a 25% chance of making the playoffs, with a full-season projection of 80.2 wins. If that holds, 2023 would represent the second-biggest year-over-year wins drop-off in franchise history (among full seasons), trailing only the team’s 22-win collapse in 1977. At least that team had a World Series appearance in recent memory (in 1973), with many of the principals from that run still slowly phasing their way off the roster. But what’s this version of the Mets’ excuse? This roster was supposed to be New York’s World Series team. Instead, it might just go down as the most disappointing team money can buy.

Filed under: Baseball