Fire Dan Warthen

The Mets' bullpen woes are, at this point, getting ridiculous. Their bullpen this year has lost 19 games, and while I don't think bullpen wins mean a damn thing and I tend to agree with the modern critique of wins and losses I do think that relief losses are meaningful. Relief pitching is an inherently situational thing, and the only way to get a loss as a reliever is to enter a game that your team is not losing and give up enough runs that they are. That's a bad thing, it's always a bad thing, and having 19 of the team's 44 losses come from the bullpen is absurd. For most of the year the starting pitching has been outstanding, primarily on the strength of Johan Santana and R.A. Dickey, but of late even they have been enduring a rough patch. In my opinion, it's time to get rid of pitching coach Dan Warthen.

Now, it's probably not necessary to go into much detail about why Warthen should be fired; he's been there since mid-2008, during which time the results have been sadly lacking, and for the last couple of years the pitching's been suspect. But just for fun I took a slightly thorough statistical look at the Mets' bullpen under Warthen, that is, from the second half of 2008 onward (a slightly rough proxy, since he got there in mid-June, but it'll do). Over that time-span, Mets relievers have had an ERA of 4.186. The total ERA for National League relief pitchers in that same time is 3.906. Mets relievers have struck out 7.7 per 9 innings, while walking 4.1 and allowing 9.0 hits; National League relievers as a whole have struck out 8.0, walked 3.8, and allowed 8.4 hits per 9. If Mets relievers had performed at league-average levels, they would have given up 55 fewer walks, 110 fewer hits, struck out 68 more batters, and allowed 68 fewer runs including 59 fewer earned runs since Warthen joined the Mets. That's around 6 or 7 wins below average for Mets relief pitching under Dan Warthen, and that's before you account for the fact that the bullpen typically pitches in higher-leverage situations so those runs below average might be even more damaging than that. (Oddly, the Mets seem to do a bit better than the league as a whole at not giving up home runs from the bullpen, though the difference is minute.)

So, long story short, the Mets' bullpen has been lousy under Dan Warthen. There's a pattern to it, namely god-awful in 2008 (which can arguably be blamed more on the loss of closer Billy Wagner, but it's just true that the team's famous bullpen troubles that year were entirely a second-half phenomenon), good in 2009 and 2010, bad in 2011, and god-awful in 2012. I'm not sure what to make of that pattern in terms of judging Warthen, but I think that at this point it's clear that, at the very least, he's not providing any value about replacement pitching coach. There's no reason not to ditch him. They should do so at soonest convenience.