Why Are The Mets Such A Mess?

And is it too late to fix them?

After winning 101 games last season — the second-most in franchise history — expectations were high for the New York Mets to replicate (or exceed) that output in 2023. After all, they went into the season with the highest payroll in MLB history, at nearly $311 million, and had improved their roster over the offseason despite losing out in the Carlos Correa contract/injury saga. With owner Steve Cohen pushing things forward, it was World Series-or-bust for New York this year.

But the Mets are still, well, the Mets. Roughly a quarter of the way into the season, they sit a couple of games below .500 (18-20) and have to be regarded alongside the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox as among the most disappointing teams in MLB so far. Here are six big reasons why New York has gotten off to such a rocky start in 2023:

• The starting rotation has fallen off a cliff. After ranking sixth in total Wins Above Replacement last season, Mets starters have dropped down to 29th so far in 2023. A huge factor has been health, as Justin Verlander, Carlos Carrasco and Jose Quintana have all spent time on the IL and Max Scherzer has battled his own injuries (to go with a suspension for using a sticky substance on the ball). But Verlander, Carrasco and Scherzer haven’t been great even when they are available; they’re collectively on pace for -0.6 WAR per 162 team games and have a combined FIP 44% worse than league average.
  
  The rest of the rotation has mostly struggled as well, with Kodai Senga, Tylor Megill, David Peterson and Joey Lucchesi all carrying FIP marks at least 15% worse than average. Senga, the Mets’ prized offseason acquisition from Japan, has struck out an impressive 26.4% of opposing batters, but he’s also walking 14.1% of them and is allowing 1.46 HR per 9 innings. As a projected cornerstone of the team, these starters must pitch significantly better if the Mets are to reclaim their preseason potential.

• The power outage has worsened. One of the perplexing things about last season’s Mets was that, even as they were winning, they did not strike fear into opposing pitchers’ hearts with their ability to mash — ranking just 15th in home runs and 16th in isolated power. This year’s edition has maintained that trend, sitting 17th in HRs and 21st in isolated power. While a few of the Mets’ regulars do carry an ISO above league average — a group that includes Pete Alonso (88% better than average), Francisco Lindor (32%), Eduardo Escobar (30%) and young catcher Francisco Álvarez (24%) — an alarming number of them do not, and it continues to hamstring an offense that is scoring the seventh-fewest runs per game in baseball.
  
  (As a positive side note, Álvarez’s development behind the plate does give the Mets reason for hope — while NY ranks third-to-last in WAR from catchers this season, most of that is owed to the poor play of Tomás Nido and Omar Narváez, both of whom are currently injured. Álvarez, on the other hand, is tracking for the 14th-most WAR of any player with at least 20 games at catcher, a ranking I expect could improve as the season goes on.)

• Veteran players are showing their age. In addition to having the highest payroll in baseball, the Mets also have MLB’s oldest roster — a ranking that includes both the oldest pitching staff and the second-oldest position-player corps. I talked about many of those old pitchers above, but we can see more pitfalls in relying on so many aging players when we scan up and down New York’s lineup for 30-something batters who are underperforming. For instance, Starling Marte (age 34), Mark Canha (34) and Escobar (also 34) are all tracking for fewer than 0.3 WAR per 162 team games this season after each produced at least 1.7 last year, and 35-year-old Tommy Pham (0.1 WAR/162) has not added much in a DH/corner OF role.
  
  More broadly, the Mets have a shocking lack of depth for a team that has spent so much on its roster. Adding up just the value lost to negative-WAR players, New York has thrown away the 10th-most WAR of any team this season on sub-replacement performances. And for a team that relies heavily on players acquired externally through avenues such as free agency, the Mets rank eighth-to-last in WAR from non-homegrown talent this season.

• They’ve been unlucky (sort of). For a team based around hitting for average — not power, as I pointed out above — the Mets have fallen from No. 2 in batting average last season to No. 22 this season. That’s a big problem! But some of that is due to bad luck. Their batting average on balls in play (BABIP) explains a lot of the dip, as they’ve dropped from seventh-best to fifth-worst in that department, and BABIP is a category that can bounce around quite a bit. (Of course, this is why you don’t build your offense primarily around batting average, but I digress.)
  
  However, the quality of New York’s hitting has demonstrably decreased as well; according to Statcast’s expected batting average — which uses tracking data to predict what a team’s AVG should be with neutral luck — the Mets have dropped from MLB’s second-best xBA to 18th-best this season.

• Health has been a problem. (But what else is new?) So far this season, the Mets have spent the second-most money of any team on players’ injured-list stints, trailing only the Yankees. That amount is heavily concentrated among pitchers, including the aforementioned injured starters and also closer Edwin Diaz, who was (probably) lost for the season after suffering an injury during the World Baseball Classic. But that’s really nothing new for the Mets, who specialize in finding creative ways to send players to the IL. They were also No. 2 in money devoted to IL players last season, yet still found a way to win all those ballgames.
  
  Remarkably, this season’s bullpen has held up just fine without Diaz; it actually ranks higher in WPA in 2023 — ninth — than it did in 2022 — 11th. The rest of the absences have been more damaging, to be sure, and the Mets certainly could blame injuries for this season’s problems… but how surprised should you really act about injuries when you build the oldest team in baseball?

• They didn’t clean up when the schedule was lighter. In the past month, the Mets have lost series to the Cincinnati Reds, Colorado Rockies, Detroit Tigers and Washington Nationals, on top of a split with the San Francisco Giants. Needless to say, that’s not the sign of a top-tier ballclub that takes care of its business against the weaker teams on its calendar. So far this season, the Mets have compiled their 18-20 record against the 23rd-ranked schedule according to the average Elo rating of its opponents (adjusted for location and opposing starter quality). An average team would have won 19.5 games against that schedule; a World Series-caliber team (Elo of 1560) would have won 22.4 times.
  
  The Mets are running solidly behind that pace, and the schedule only gets harder from here. While it doesn’t escalate to Red Sox levels, New York does have the 14th-toughest future schedule according to Elo, and the seventh-biggest leap in difficulty between rest-of-season and year-to-date schedule strength. The Mets could end up regretting not taking advantage of easier foes when they had the chance.

Where does all of this leave the Mets? Despite the poor start, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast projects 85 wins for New York and gives them a 58% chance to make the playoffs — thanks, extra wild card! — though it considers their division chances slim (9%). And that makes sense: a number of the team’s injured big names should return by mid-summer, and it’s fair to expect the other, healthy underperformers to tick up at least some through regression alone. With Baseball America’s fifth-ranked farm system this spring, New York also has the ability to go get talent at the trade deadline — to the extent any is available — and Cohen obviously has the will to spend whatever it takes to improve the roster.

So all is not lost for the Mets… yet. But at the same time, this was certainly not the start we expected to see from a team that seemed so close to a championship breakthrough last season — as well as one that seems determined to conduct an experiment in winning via sheer financial brute force.

Filed under: Baseball