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.

Let’s throw this out there first: Ryan Church is an average outfielder whose production has declined in the last two years, possibly in some part due to the concussion madness he went through last season. For whatever reason, it was clear he just wasn’t well liked by Jerry Manuel, and so even the limited value he did have wasn’t being taken advantage of. Because of this, the people who are considering this trade a disaster are wrong, because no trade where all we lose is Church can be a big loss. I liked the guy, but he wasn’t a critical part of the team by any stretch.

When a friend and I first discussed the trade for Jeff Francoeur, I thought it sounded interesting. I wasn’t sure he’d actually be an improvement, and I hadn’t looked at what he’d been doing in a while. I just remembered vauge impressions: he strikes out a lot, doesn’t walk, has a cannon for an arm, and hits for some power. That sort of player didn’t sound too bad, and he’s still young (just 25), so maybe he could grow into a more complete player.

Then I thought about it some more, and started to like it less.

Then I took a look at Francoeur’s numbers over the last couple of years, and wondered if we could send him back to the Braves.

A lot of what I’ve heard in defense of this trade — from those brave  enough to defend it — is that Francoeur is young, and has a lot of everyone’s favorite word: upside! That’s one of those sports words that should immediately cause you to want more information, because it doesn’t mean much, and avoids talking about what the player can actually do.

So, let’s look at what Francoeur does. As mentioned, he strikes out a lot, and doesn’t walk; he’s gone down on strikes over 100 times each of the last three seasons, and hasn’t walked more than 42 times in any year. He did hit 29 homers in 2006, but then fell to 19 in 2007, and 11 last year.

The most damning statistic for Francoeur shouldn’t come as a surprise when paired with those K and BB totals above. One person I talked to about this trade compared Francoeur to David Wright, saying they’re a similar type of player, and had concerns that Francoeur and Wright together in the lineup would generate way too many strikeouts. While the part about the strikeouts is true, it’s important to point out that Wright is an infinitely more valuable player than Francoeur — it’s not even close to being close. Why? Well, historically, Wright hits for more power and a higher average and is much better on the basepaths, but my real point is that they differ significantly in the one number that sums up why Francoeur just isn’t very good at all.

Lifetime on-base percentage:

Wright: .392 (.416 this year)

Francoeur: .308 (.282 this year)

Yikes! .308 is a bad OBP, no doubt about it. But this season’s .282 isn’t just bad, it’s horrific. It’s the kind of thing that kills an offense, because it means Francoeur is making 72 outs every 100 times he gets up to the plate. Even worse, he’s not hitting for any power this year, with just 19 extra-base hits all season. He’s simply an awful offensive player right now.

But what about the upside? Francoeur is still young, and can improve, right? It’s true that Francoeur is 25, but 25 isn’t that young in baseball terms. Even worse, his numbers have declined over the last two seasons, showing that he might be regressing rather than improving.

Surely, for a player to be tauted as having so much upside, he must have shown something at some point, right? We might expect to at least take some hope from what he did in the minors — maybe that’ll give us some insight into the player everyone hopes he’ll become. Unfortunately, he wasn’t even a very good career minor leaguer: a .285/.332/.480 line (that’s batting average/on-base/slugging) isn’t awful, but it’s not impressive against low level competition — and the numbers got worse as he moved up from Rookie ball to A and AA leagues.

All the “upside” people see in Francoeur is thier hopes for what they want him to be. There’s nothing, other than some limited success in his first couple years up in the majors, that suggests he’ll ever develop into a good major league hitter, and right now he seems to be a very bad one. I’m hoping he’ll prove me wrong and develop a better eye and/or more power over the next couple seasons…but I think any positive expectations anyone has right now are little more than wishful thinking. The Mets didn’t give up much in this trade, but they probably got even less back.

The Mets lost tonight. It was pretty awful. Moving along…

On SNY, they mentioned the Phillies’ record when Jimmy Rollins scores a run. It was, of course, very good. They’ve mention this several times in terms of Jose Reyes, too. The idea is that these players are the sparks that ignite the team; when they score, the team wins, and when they don’t, the team struggles.

Part of that is true. When they score, their respective teams do win a lot of the time. The problem with the stat is that it’s not only true of them. In fact, whenever you look at a game where you already know at least 1 player in particular scored at least 1 run, there’s a good chance that their team won the game.

This season, the Mets are 11-6 when Reyes scores a run (this number is so low due to his injury, but it’s similar to his numbers over a larger sample in previous years). That’s good for a .647 winning percentage. Not bad! What about the Mets record when other players score a run, though? These numbers were hand-compiled (so slight errors may be present), and do not reflect tonight’s game:

• David Wright: 24-17 (.585)
• Carlos Beltran: 20-10 (.667)
• Luis Castillo: 20-10 (.667)
• Daniel Murphy: 14-11 (.560)
• Ryan Church: 12-9 (.571)
• Gary Sheffield: 17-11 (.607)
• Alex Cora: 8-6 (.571)
• Fernando Tatis: 9-5 (.643)
• Omir Santos: 12-3 (.800)
• Carlos Delgado: 10-3 (.769)

I bolded those last two because the Mets have by far the gaudiest records when they score runs — much better than any of the players you’d expect to be the “spark plugs” of the team.

What’s really going on here? Nothing, of course. The entire idea of teams doing better when a particular player scores is meritless — the differences you see above between players are mostly statistical noise, since the samples are too small to mean much. But the Mets have a good record when any of them score a run, because while it doesn’t matter if a specific player scores, it matters a great deal whether any players are scoring! Players like Jose Reyes do score more often, so they have more games in their win-loss records (assuming they’re healthy), but the team as a whole doesn’t care who is doing the scoring, as long as someone does. A run by Reyes is worth the same as one by Carlos Delgado or anyone else.

Despite this, you’ll continue to hear this statistic all year long, because most commentators do very little analysis of the data they’re given. Next time you hear this, remember that every player becomes a spark plug when they score a run, whether it’s Jose Reyes or Omir Santos.