The Mets Are Overperforming. Good for Them!

Earlier today, the Mets beat the St. Louis Cardinals 4-1, finishing off a victory over the defending league champions in a four-game series, 3-1. The win improved their record for the young season to 12 wins, 10 losses. They're tied with the Washington Nationals, the consensus pick to win the division, for second place in the National League East. So far, they look... pretty good.

And yet, so far they look absolutely terrible. Including today's game, Fangraphs pegs the Mets' batters at 1.0 Wins Above Replacement on the year, 28th in baseball, ahead of only the Diamondbacks and the 220-losses-in-the-past-two-seasons Astros. Mets pitchers, meanwhile, they have at 0.6 WAR, 27th in the league, ahead of the D-Backs, the Pirates, and the Reds. Admittedly they think the pitching has been a little bit better by runs allowed rather than by fielding-independent pitching, at 1.4 WAR, 21st in baseball. But still, at best the team has been terrible on offense and bad at pitching. To put it another way, the offense is sporting a .218/.296/.316 batting line, "good" for a .276 wOBA (which is terrible for a middle infielder) and a 76 wRC+, way below league average. The pitching, meanwhile, has an ERA- of 110, a FIP- of 112, and an xFIP- of 104. That's 24 points below average on offense, and something between 4 and 12 points below average on pitching. That's a terrible team. It's not a team that's two games over .500 and looking, just on the basis of wins and losses, like a possible Cinderella contender.


So, ahhh... what gives? Of note is the fact that they don't seem to be outperforming their "Pythagorean" record, based solely on runs scored and runs allowed, by very much. Entering today they had scored 82 runs and allowed 89, leading to an expected record of 10-11, rather than their actual 11-10. After today's game that's now 86 runs scored and 90 allowed. By my very rough calculation of a Pythagorean expected record, their expected wins out of 22 games is around 10.56, which would round to 11-11, one win behind where they actually are. A little earlier in the season, at which point the odd disparity between the performance and the record had already become readily apparent, they had precisely the same number of runs scored and allowed, and were at .500 on the year. It's true that they've been distributing their runs somewhat efficiently, with a 12-run loss and a couple of 6-run losses but only one win by more than 4 runs (a 9-0 shutout in Arizona), but it looks like the bulk of the overperformance has been about sequencing of events to lead to runs, not sequencing of runs to lead to wins.

But it's a little tough to tell what exactly is causing that overperformance. Usually you'd think it would be "clutch" hitting and/or pitching. But, well, ERA is based on runs scored, which should incorporate clutchness, and they've not been very good by ERA, very similar to their FIP in fact. Meanwhile, the team is batting a whopping .226 with runners in scoring position with a .310 slugging percentage. A good walk rate means the team's OPS with RISP is better than its overall OPS, but walks don't typically drive in runners. And they've been particularly abysmal with runners in scoring position and 2 outs, hitting, uhhh, .163, with a .247 on-base percentage and a .213 slugging percentage. That's awful! That doesn't look like clutch hitting.

Now, we can perhaps spot a few reasons. I don't know exactly why this doesn't translate into the RISP stats, but they have concentrated their awfulness in low-leverage situations, hitting an anemic .206/.273/.261. Six of their home runs have come in high-leverage spots, in just 157 at-bats, a 1-in-26 rate that's kind of non-pathetic. By contrast they've hit one bomb in every 70 medium-leverage at bats, and one in every 95 low-leverage plate appearances. They've also done a good job of getting the runner in from third with less than two outs, succeeding 55% of the time compared to a league average of 50%. That might be three extra runs. They've also grounded into a somewhat below-average number of double plays (5% of opportunities, versus 9% league-wide) and been successful on all of their sacrifice bunt attempts, plus two bunt hits. And Fangraphs thinks they've been two runs above average at baserunning, and also one of the better defensive teams in the league thus far. All of that might be enough that, if we correct for it, we would get a Pythagorean record of something like 10-12 as opposed to 12-10, or even 9-13. 10-12 would be on pace for about 74 wins, which is where the team was projected to be at the end of the season.

So they look like they might be overperforming so far, although the baserunning and defense might well be real and in any event we're talking about maybe one or two or three wins over where they "should" be. But there are a number of reasons why I think these first few weeks have been a great, great time to be overperforming.

First of all, this isn't a year they're expected to contend. It was supposed to be, but then they lost a Cy Young-caliber pitcher for the whole year. Now next year is the year when the team's supposed to be good: it'll have a surfeit of good young pitching, it'll have Harvey back, and it'll have had more time to work on patching the holes in its offense. And because they project to be better next year than they were this year, because they projected for that before this year even started, if they do better this year than they deserved to based on the 2014 Mets' underlying true talent level, that won't mean we should expect them to "regress" next year, unlike, say, the 2012-2013 Orioles. Whatever happens this year is a bonus, because we think we'll be deservedly good next year.

Second of all, some of those improvements should start happening during the second half of this season anyway. Harvey won't be back, at least not for more than maybe a few games in September (or perhaps October!) if his recovery goes as fast as he seems to think it will. But Noah Syndergaard should be up sometime around mid-season, and he projects to be above-league-average already this year. Rafael Montero might join the team at some point, perhaps in a Cardinals-esque relief role. There are a bunch of other less exciting prospects who could contribute in relief at some point, plus recently-acquired former Pirates relievers Vic Black and Zack Thornton. Cesar Puello could provide outfield reinforcements at some point, depending on how his hitting progresses. And there's the lingering possibility of doing something to improve at shortstop, where Ruben Tejada has been worth a sparkling -0.4 WAR already. (That represents by far the biggest hole on the team other than Curtis Granderson, but there's a much greater chance Granderson will heat up than that Tejada will.) So if the team can keep "overperforming" enough to be, say, a few games over .500 around the All-Star break, well, they might be able to raise their true talent level for the second half and sneak a chance at contention.

Third, the Mets have had a pretty tough schedule to start the season. So far they've faced the Nationals, the Reds, the Braves, the Angels, the Diamondbacks, the Braves again, and the Cardinals. Let's use the Fangraphs projected "rest-of-season" winning percentage as a proxy for those teams' true talent, because I can't find archived pre-season projections. The Nationals are fifth in baseball at .534. The Reds, at .496, are a little below average. The Braves are eighth at .525, the Angels are 11th at .519, the Diamondbacks are 22nd at .487, and the Cardinals are fifth at .537. That averages out to a .518 expected rest-of-season winning percentage based on the number of games the Mets have had against each of those teams. Obviously you expect this stat to be very near .500 for the whole season, though unbalanced schedules and interleague play could in principle screw with that. But the point is that the Mets have been predominantly facing good teams so far, and yet they've been managing, somehow, not to get crushed. They thereby secure themselves the opportunity to face less-good teams over the rest of the season with some undeserved wins already banked. This weekend is a perfect example: after beating the Cardinals, they get to face the Marlins. Note that so far they're 5-1 against the two below-average teams they've played, with a series win over the Reds and a sweep of the Diamondbacks.

Finally, though the team has certainly been overperforming so far, it has also been underperforming in some pretty key ways. Most systemically I would point out their .282 team batting average on balls in play, far below the league average. That should stabilize over the rest of the season at something more like .300. So far the average team BAbip is .296, a very ordinary figure, with a standard deviation of .022, giving the Mets a z-score of -0.64. Last year the standard deviation for team BAbip was .012, so if balls in play converge to the same extend they did last year, the Mets' current z-score would give a BAbip of .288. That's still not good, but it's better, and there's reason to think that past results don't really predict future results with BAbip very much. This should get better, which should help the team out.

Meanwhile, the team has been scraping by without any power from Messers Wright and Granderson, its two big bats. Wright's hitting .275/.330/.330 on the season, with one home run. Granderson is hitting .137/.247/.233, also with one home run. The former is, well, okay, especially the OBP, but not very good and not up to David's usual standards. The latter is awful. It's somewhere between "backup shortstop" levels and "pitcher" levels. He's supposed to be our slugging right-fielder. Now, Granderson is sporting an hilariously low .188 BAbip, so despite the nearly 30% strikeout rate, he should improve. We've said this before, about one Jason Bay, but there's just no way he's gonna keep being this bad. And as for David, well, for someone as consistently productive as he I have a hard time believing he'll keep being this mediocre at the plate. In particular, his home run per fly ball rate is 5.0% this year, down from a career average of 13.6%. The past four seasons he's been right around that rate, maybe a tick or two below it. I doubt he's just lost the majority of his ability to hit fly balls over the wall. His swing just hasn't really looked right all year, but it will, and when it does, the power, and the production, will follow.

Also, and this is purely speculative, but I kind of like the idea of Daisuke Matsuzaka as the team's closer while Bobby Parnell is out. He doesn't have typically dominant closer stuff, being rather a guy who relies on a varied arsenal, deception, and pitching around the edge, but I've always felt that a closer who has lots of pitches and can mix and match them has an advantage. You can succeed as a reliever with only two pitches, because you're only seeing each batter once, but if you have four or five or eight different pitches to throw during your one inning of work, well, hitters really won't be able to have a clue what's coming. Plus, his more deliberative pace plays better in relief, as does the high-walk/high-strikeout kind of game that's been his typical profile. I doubt the team will have room for him in the rotation this year, but he might be able to provide an actually solid presence in the back of the bullpen, and that's something they could dearly use.

So, to put it all together, the Mets have been doing a somewhat better job of actually winning baseball games than their production would seem able to support so far. But they've been doing it with mediocre results on balls in play and no production, yet, from their two best hitters. They've been doing it against a tough part of their schedule, one they don't have to face again; these wins are banked for the part of the season when things should, perforce, get easier. They've been doing it during the part of the season when they're having to make due with a mediocre team that hasn't yet received the reinforcements it can expect to get during the season. And they've been doing it in a year that, mostly because of Harvey's absence, isn't expected to be their year of contention quite yet. That is, I think, the ideal way to be overperforming. If they were playing as badly as their production would seem to suggest, well, that would just be what we expect, even given the relatively optimistic take on the team's short-term future. And the fact that they don't deserve how well they're playing now doesn't mean that they won't deserve to keep playing that well, or better, over the next few seasons, because there are legitimate reasons to think the team will get continually better. So even though they haven't been as good as the results they've been getting, there's no reason to worry. There's only reason to be glad they've got two or three undeserved wins in the books.