Views from the Promenade

Mets fans will be understandably pessimistic heading into the second half of the season. The team is struggling, we’re still suffering through one of the worst rash of injuries the Mets have ever seen, and management doesn’t appear to be looking to make a big trade to improve the team and make a run.

All that said, let’s not give up hope yet. There’s plenty of talent on this team, even if some of that talent is on the disabled list. If the Mets hang roughly where they are — within 6-7 games or so of first — until they start getting players like Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran back, all is not yet lost. The Mets would need some help, because if the Phillies play as well as they can, it would be nearly impossible to catch them. But until the last two weeks, Philadelphia hadn’t shown the ability to start distancing themselves from the rest of the NL East; if their recent run proves to be the exception rather than the rule, there’s still a chance for the Mets to play themselves back into contention.

We’ll see how the Mets open up the second half tomorrow night in Atlanta, and hope they can start to turn things around — otherwise, it could be a long and boring summer. For now though, I want to give my take on the five biggest storylines of the first half:

1. Citi Field: The new home of the Mets quickly developed a reputation as being one of the most pitcher-friendly parks in the league, and commentators have noted all season long that home run numbers at the park are down significantly. Part of this is true, but some of the perception doesn’t quite match the numbers. According to ESPN’s Park Factors, Citi Field is near the bottom of the league in terms of how many runs it allows, ranking 26th out of 30. But this is mostly due to a big reduction in walks and doubles; homers are almost exactly where you’d expect them to be (technically, they’re up 0.7%) when you compare how the same players perform in Citi Field compared to everywhere else. I have a feeling this number will come down, and Citi Field will prove to have some effect on the long ball, but only a moderate one — not the extreme one we’ve been told about.
2. The Mets Power Outage: For a while, the new park made an excellent excuse for why the Mets weren’t hitting home runs. Before too long, it became apparent that the team was hitting even fewer away from home, making it obvious that something was up with the players themselves. At the midpoint of the season, the Mets are last in the league with just 52 home runs as a team, and they’re not likely to get out of the cellar; even 29th placed Pittsburgh has 62.
3. David Wright’s Strange Season: One player who has a large hand in the lack of power is David Wright, who is having the strangest season of his career. His home runs are down (5), his strikeouts are up (87), and he has gone through terrible slumps and incredible hot streaks. And yet, despite all this, you can’t say he’s having a bad year when his on-base percentage is at .410 — he’s just not having the same sort of good year he’s had in the past. Actually, his most recent slump has taken his numbers down enough that this season looks a little off from his career norms, but before then he had largely been making up for the lack of power. Hopefully he’ll get some of his pop back in the second half, because the Mets need some in the middle of the lineup.
4. The Injuries: Oh, the injuries. It’s often said that you can’t blame injuries for a team’s struggles, but rarely does a team get hit nearly as hard as the Mets have this year. Is there any doubt that the presence of Carlos Delgado, Carlos Beltran, and Jose Reyes wouldn’t have been worth at least a few games? And as much as they have struggled this season, wouldn’t a healthy John Maine and Oliver Perez have bolstered the starting rotation just a bit? The fact that the Mets haven’t fallen completely out of the race despite these injuries is one reason to feel just a little hope for the second half.
5. Church for Francouer: It probably won’t be the greatest trade the Mets ever made, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that the Mets can’t really lose. After all, they had no intention to actually use Church, so even if Francouer is a bust (and even after his hot start with the Mets, he probably will be), there’s no real loss involved. On the other hand, if Francouer really did just need a change of scenery, the deal could turn into a steal for the Mets.

Even though there have been a lot of complaints, the Mets have been far from terrible so far this year. They’re 37-34, two games better than they were this time last year — when the Mets had a much healthier roster. Much of the difference is rightly credited to the bullpen, which has improved dramatically over last year’s disaster.

There’s another reason the Mets have kept their heads above water, though, and I haven’t seen much written about it. The Mets have tremendous depth, in the sense that they have  a surplus of reserve players who can fill in and provide at least some value to the team. Some of these players — Gary Sheffield and Alex Cora, to name two — started the year on the bench and have stepped in with solid production after the Mets’ string of injuries left them shorthanded. Others, like Nick Evans, Omir Santos and Fernando Nieve have been added from the minors or free agency and have been critical in keeping the Mets in contention.

Baseball Prospectus’ Keith Woolner created a statistic known as Value Over Replacement Player, or VORP. I don’t want to get into the mathematics of this rather abstract statistic, but the Replacement Player portion of the title is relevant to this post. The idea behind VORP is that the best way to figure out just how much a player is worth to a team is by comparing him to what you’d get out of a “replacement player” who had the same amount of playing time, the type of player any team could pick up on a whim and get to fill in at their position. You can think of this replacement player as a free agent who nobody wants, or a typical AAA player who is not notably talented.

The Mets have been replacing their injured stars with lesser players, that much is true. But for the most part, these players have played above that replacement player level, which has helped prevent the Mets season from becoming derailed. While plenty of attention is paid to the big moves that are made (or not made) during the year, the Mets and Omar Minaya do deserve some credit for stockpiling solid backups and reserve players who can fill in and give the Mets a little more than most teams get from their second and third-stringers. When everything is going right, it’s easy to forget the importance of depth, but in an injury-riddled season like this one, it could be the difference between contention and a long, boring summer.

I want to take a second look at the rehab starts made by Oliver Perez and John Maine yesterday. The initial reaction, which I parroted yesterday, was that Perez’s start was a disaster, while Maine’s was good. But is there something else we should be looking at here?

Maine did allow just one run on two hits in four innings. However, he did walk three batters and record just one strikeout. Meanwhile, Perez gave up six runs in three innings, with seven hits allowed — but with just one walk allowed and three strikeouts, which is unlike the “Bad Ollie” we’ve become accustomed to. Remember that the number of hits a pitcher allows is largely impacted by the performance of the defense behind them (and some luck), and that defense in the Florida State League is probably not quite as consistent as in the majors.

With all that out of the way, it’s still a bad outing for Perez and a solid performance by Maine. Still, the results probably aren’t as dramatically different as they were presented in the media; strikeout to walk ratio is good at predicting future success, and Perez did outperform Maine by that standard. If scouts and team officials say Maine is ready and Perez needs more time, then I trust them, but our opinions shouldn’t be  influenced by statistics from a few innings of single-A baseball. It would be wrong to get too excited — or too concerned — over such a small sample of pitching.