The 2014 Mets, Part II: Corner Infield

So, it took me longer to get around to writing the second part of this series than I expected because of this. And also this. Obviously all of that changes the calculus quite a bit, but not necessarily as much as you might think. The trade didn't involve any players who were under contract for next year, and while Harvey will obviously be missed if he does miss the 2014 season, his replacements aren't going to be Chris Schwinden and it's not a certainty he will miss next year. So I'll keep on with the series, although to make my life a little bit easier I'm going to split the infield up into corner and middle. Up first: the corners! Note that I'm only considering the starters here, and will address the bench (infield and outfield, though not catchers since I've already addressed the backup catcher spot) in a separate piece. Also note that everything I said about catching stands exactly as I wrote it, despite the Harvey injury and the trade of Byrd and Buck. Perhaps, if anything, this makes it slightly more obvious that John Buck won't be back in next year, which I had considered obvious from the beginning. So here we go, the corner infielders.


The 2013 Mets
First Baseman Ike Davis
Third Baseman David Wright

How They Were
For Wright, this is not a complicated question. He's been awesome. He's currently on the disabled list with a hamstring problem, but prior to that he was producing at MVP levels. As in, .309/.391/.512, good for a 155 wRC+, the best of his career given declining offense around the league. Toss in solid baserunning and defense and you've got 5.7 fWAR through just 105 games played, on pace for about 8.8 WAR over a full 162. Not bad. Especially encouraging is that he's cut down his strikeouts a lot over the past few years, from 24% in 2010 to 16.6% the past two seasons. David Wright is an elite player and looks to be on track to make the Hall of Fame someday, the first Mets position player to do so.

As for Ike... Well, I'll discuss him in more detail in a later section, but let's just say that if you ignore the complications the results don't look too good. Overall he's hit .205/.327/.327, giving him an 89 wRC+, which is not very good for a first baseman. He's got eight home runs. His fielding's been kind of mediocre, and the end result is -0.2 fWAR. Replacement-level = not good.

2014 Default Projections
First Baseman Ike Davis
Third Baseman David Wright

Wright is on an eight-year contract extension. He's the face of the franchise. He ain't goin' anywhere. Pencil him into the starting lineup in the #3 spot playing third base pretty much every day. As for Ike, my feeling is that he'll get another shot. This is about the complications. Ike was hitting .161/.242/.258 on June 9th, and had accrued -1.3 fWAR. He then, justifiably, got sent down to AAA, especially since he had done the same thing last year, when he was hitting .158/.234/.273 on June 8th before slugging 27 home runs and hitting .265/.347/.565 the rest of the year when the Mets showed confidence in him. But after Ike repeated his "hey, I can't hit well enough to be a backup shortstop in the first half" routine this year, they demoted him. In 21 games with the Las Vegas 51s, Ike hit .293/.424/.667, slugging 7 home runs and drawing 17 walks against just 18 strikeouts. They brought him up again, and so far since his return to MLB he's hit .270/.436/.429. The power isn't there so much, but my god that on-base percentage. In 45 games Ike's drawn 37 walks against just 34 strikeouts. He's not exactly a high-contact hitter but that's not an excessive K-rate for a power hitter and it's an elite walk rate, something like second in the majors to Mike Trout over at least some subset of that time. Meanwhile he's hit 11 doubles and 3 home runs, and since he had his first extra-base hit on July 22nd he's been averaging 1.74 bases per hit. Pitchers have basically been throwing him junk out of the strikezone expecting him to swing at it as he was earlier in the season, and he's been laying off it. The result is an approximation of Joey Votto, statistically speaking. Given how much of the improved results seems to be driven by improved approach, and given that the only thing missing from Ike's second-half performance is power and we know he's got plenty of power I think there's enough there that they'll give him one more chance.

Desired Moves
Keep David Wright as starting third baseman
Keep Ike Davis as starting first baseman
Have a plan B for Ike

The first part of that is the most obvious move the Mets have to make for next year. The second one I kind of explained the logic of in the previous section. If Ike Davis hits like what Ike Davis is supposed to hit like, he's a great player. Remember how I said he was worth -0.2 fWAR for the season as a whole, but had -1.3 WAR when he got sent down? That means he's at +1.1 fWAR since coming back up, in 45 games, a rate of about 4 WAR over a full season. Now, because of Ike's struggles against left-handed pitching (a wRC+ of 9 against lefties [where, remember, 100 is average] versus 108 against righties) he probably doesn't deserve to be a properly full-time player, and would need a right-handed complement to take some of his at-bats against lefties. Still, he's an above-average player if he keeps playing like this, and that's without even flashing his power all that much or playing the kind of defense he's capable of. If he comes particularly close to reaching his ceiling he's above average verging on All-Star, and though he will be arbitration-eligible he'd still be cheap given a roughly $5 million price for 1 WAR on the free agent market. That's worth taking a chance on.

It is not, however, worth committing to without a fallback plan. You can't have your first baseman hitting .160 for the first half of the season as a chronic thing. Not acceptable. We've seen it twice from Ike. We can't see it again. That means the leash has to be short. A lot shorter than three months. Maybe three weeks. If Ike Davis goes back into the mode where he's swinging at every terrible pitch out of the strike zone he sees and swinging through the handful of fastballs down the middle that he does get, he needs to stop being on this team, immediately. As long as he keeps laying off the junk, taking his walks, and punishing a fair number of hittable pitches, he's your starting first baseman, but the minute he stops doing that we need a replacement. That might, ultimately, mean that the Mets will have to be a bit less aggressive about trying to trade away various of their players who wouldn't otherwise seem to have a place on the team, like Lucas Duda or perhaps Daniel Murphy. It definitely means that they need to keep Josh Satin around, partly to be a platoon partner for Ike and partly to be part of that backup plan. Unfortunately the team doesn't really seem to have any suitable backup plans in the minor leagues. Allan Dykstra, a left-handed 1B/DH type, has hit pretty well for AA Binghamton, to the tune of .273/.436/.497, with 20 home runs and 101 walks in 120 games, but he's not MLB-ready yet, not by any stretch of the imagination. He could perhaps help the first-base situation in the second half of the year if Ike is indeed incapable of being a Major League hitter again, but couldn't be part of an immediate plan B. So one wonders whether the Mets need to go out and, say, sign some veteran first baseman to a minor-league deal or something. I don't think they can sign anyone to a Major League deal without abandoning Ike outright before the season, and I don't know whether they could sign anyone non-terrible to anything less, so I'm not sure exactly what the correct answer is, but they need an alternative waiting in the wings. I like Ike and I both hope and am hopeful that he can continue the improvements he seems to have made, but that doesn't mean I trust him to do so and it doesn't mean he gets another three-month opportunity to show he can be anything better than a .200 hitter.