The 2014 Mets, Part e: Starting Pitching

This is out of order. Also I think the series as a whole is on hold, both because I'm dealing with a nagging shoulder injury and because stuff is just happening too rapidly that's changing the landscape. But I wanted to respond to a thing Sandy Alderson said in a recent interview on WFAN, namely that the injury to Matt Harvey means that he'll try to acquire a veteran free agent starting pitcher over the offseason. I think that's a mistake. The Mets' projected 2014 rotation prior to the Harvey injury was Harvey/Wheeler/Niese/Gee/Mejia/Montero, which is too many pitchers already all of whom deserve a spot, and then throw in Noah Syndergaard at mid-season. You were already going to have to squeeze Gee/Mejia/Montero into two rotation spots, unless someone got injured, which they did. Even though Mejia just underwent surgery, it was of a rather routine variety, so there's no reason to think any of those pitchers other than Harvey won't be ready for Opening Day. And although I don't think the Mets should just punt on 2014, I do think that it would be a mistake to commit every fifth start to a veteran pitcher and take those innings from the team's promising youngsters.

That's not just because the resources could be better allocated somewhere else, because they could. It's because Wheeler/Niese/Gee/Mejia/Montero is a very good rotation. For the season the first four of those guys have pitched 387.1 innings, which is obviously not enough innings for four starters but that's because Wheeler came up mid-season, Mejia had only a few starts between coming off an injury and needing further surgery to complete coming off that injury, and Niese had anomalous issues related to having pitched in the vicious cold early in the year. Over those 387.1 IP they've allowed a combined 150 earned runs, for an ERA of 3.49, which is very very good. It's not good enough for an ace pitcher, but it forms a deeply solid rotation overall, and note that that includes significant stretches of mediocrity or worse from Niese and Gee and Wheeler. Oh, and Rafael Montero's put up a 2.78 ERA over 155.1 minor-league innings, including a 3.05 ERA with AAA Las Vegas in a terrible pitching environment.

If these guys stayed healthy, you'd have the kind of rotation that doesn't (unless Wheeler progresses significantly) have a single dominant ace but it also doesn't have a single bad pitcher in it. That's important. It's how, I think, teams like the Braves and the Reds end up with great team pitching numbers without feeling like they have any dominant starting pitchers. Aces are nice but a "full house" rotation of two #2 pitchers and three 3# pitchers is pretty good as well. It's those #4 or #5 pitchers, guys who might just blow up on any given day or at best will labor through five or six innings of three-run baseball or whatever, who really kill a team's rotation over a full season, and even without Harvey the Mets aren't currently projected to have any bad pitchers in their rotation. And also, as I noted, if something goes wrong or even if it doesn't they've got the guy with the career minor league ERA of 2.64 who's got three more career strikeouts than walks and hits combined to come in sometime in the middle of the season.

Now, I'm obviously putting a lot on "if these guys stay healthy" here, and that's an issue. None of them exactly have a big history of staying healthy. So a fair question is what happens if things go wrong. One answer is "well, contending in 2014 is a stretch anyway without Harvey so if something goes wrong they'll just wait until 2015." I'm okay with that, honestly. This team has the opportunity to be very good for a very long time by building around a foundation of young pitching. They should definitely work to add useful pieces over the off-season, say by signing a reasonably big-name outfielder to a multi-year deal or something, but I think it would be a mistake to do anything that would impede the development of the team's young pitching even if it would be necessary to make the 2014 team more competitive. So I'd try pretty hard to avoid signing any veteran pitchers to any guaranteed Major League contracts.

But if Alderson can find someone who a) would be willing to take a Minor League deal, and pitch in Vegas until needed, and b) would be better as a fall-back option than the likes of Jacob deGrom or Matt Fox or Chris Schwinden (that one's not hard) or Darin Gorski, who might either be a backup starter option or a lefty reliever option, then he should sign them as a way of raising the team's performance floor. Actually, though, now that I think about it Carlos Torres has done a pretty good job as a swing-man/spot starter this year, so really you'd need someone who'd seem like a better option than conscripting Torres into the rotation should someone get hurt. And that's already, really, if two starters get hurt; if only one goes down, you can bring up Syndergaard mid-season to take his place. So we're talking about an eighth starter, really, even with Harvey injured. That's the only place I think a veteran starting pitcher would fit in on the 2014 Mets. Sandy Alderson should, if he wanted for some strange reason to take my advice, shy away from any big-name or even middle-name free agent starters, and should indeed spend the money instead on an outfielder, like Shin-Soo Choo.

And with that I'll conclude this series until at least the end of the Mets' regular season. I might resume it in October, when only the non-terrible teams keep playing and therefore less stuff will be happening to change the Mets' prospects (in the non-baseball term, heh).

An Embarrassment of Pitchers

The Mets have a bit of a problem on their hands. Well, okay, it's not an actual problem, or at least it's not a problem as a net matter, but it will have some problematic aspects. They have too many good young pitchers. Too many good young starting pitchers, that is. By my count it's about six guys, not even counting a few players who seem like they might be able to be MLB-average inning-eater types like Dillon Gee. They've got Matt Harvey, 24, who just set a new Mets record for lowest ERA in his first 30 career starts. They've got Jon Niese, 26, a lefty whose career 4.09 ERA is probably quite a bit worse than he's actually pitched. They've got Zack Wheeler, 23, who's just made it to the majors and is off to a 4-1 start that's better than he's pitched but who has similar stuff to Harvey (read: 98-mph gas and wicked breaking balls). They've got Noah Syndergaard, 20, the centerpiece of the R.A. Dickey trade, who sports a career 2.54 minor league ERA with 298 strikeouts and just 77 walks in 269.2 career innings. They've got Rafael Montero, 22, with just 58 walks in 303.2 career minor league innings to go with 282 strikeouts. They've also got a bunch of exciting young arms like Domingo Tapia, 21, career 3.79 minor league ERA, and Gabriel Ynoa, 20, career 2.55 minor league ERA, who are further from the majors but at least a few of whom should be similarly situated to Montero and Syndergaard in another couple of years.

And then there's Jenrry Mejia, the Mets' original highly-touted pitching prospect of recent years. In fact, he was highly touted so long ago that he feels like a failed prospect at this point. After being misused throughout the 2010 season, bounced around between starting, relieving, the majors and the minors, he developed a need for Tommy John surgery after just five minor league starts in 2011. Upon his return from that surgery late last year, which was a pretty quick rehab anyway, he lost the natural cutting action on his fastball that had made him such an exciting prospect. He looked like he might, at best, end up as a competent middle reliever, but it seemed that neither quality starter nor dominant late-inning reliever were in his future anymore. Until today, his 2013 MLB debut in a spot-start role for a double-header. Apparently he's made some mechanical adjustments and the cut is back on his fastball. So far he's thrown 6 innings, during which time he's struck out 7, walked none, allowed 7 hits, and gotten 8 groundball outs. Oh, and all the hits were singles, of which only one or two were at all hard-hit. All on just 84 pitches. Oh, and he has yet to allow a run. He's not on track for a complete game or anything, and has allowed his fair share of hits, but this is a dominant outing so far.

And if he's back in the conversation as a potentially above-average starting pitcher, then the 2014 or 2015 rotation starts to look very crowded. Harvey, Wheeler, Niese, Mejia, Montero, Syndergaard. That's one too many. Oh, and you've got Dillon Gee on the outside looking in, which is perhaps appropriate given his career 4.06 ERA but he's shown, at times, that perhaps he can be better than that. So the Mets are seriously loaded with starting-pitching assets, and will need to figure out whom to trade and whom to slot into the rotation. This is how good Mets teams look, with a glut of good young pitching. It's pretty exciting.

The Mets Are Idiots

Finally, a break from con-law! Unfortunately, it's not a particularly refreshing break. The news today is that the Mets fourth starter, Dillon Gee, has been hospitalized with numbness in his fingers, then was discovered to have a blood clot in his pitching shoulder, and then hit the disabled list. This is bad; Gee has sported a 4.10 ERA thus far this year, but as that's around his career ERA and his strikeout and walk rates have both improved dramatically this year, it looks like he's really been pitching better than that. For instance, SIERA, considered by many to be the most sophisticated peripherals-based ERA estimator, pegs Gee as a 3.53 pitcher this year. That's what we call "good." The Mets have already been dealing with one rotation spot whose designated occupant, Mike Pelfrey, is out for the year, and while Chris Young has filled it rather well so far it's a real shame to have another one. (Obviously, the more major concern goes something like "blood clot?!? Eeeep!" with the focus being on his own personal health.) The Mets' plan is apparently to use Miguel Batista as Gee's replacement; Batista has a 4.92 SIERA to go along with his 4.20 ERA this year. This will not end well, although I guess it has the upside of getting Batista away from the eighth innings of games started by R.A. Dickey, Johan Santana, or Jon Niese.

But consider that it didn't have to be this way. The Mets have, after all, a highly regarded pitching prospect who has prospered this year as a starter for their AAA team, the Buffalo Bisons. No, I don't mean Matt Harvey, although that description fits him too; he's widely regarded as not quite ready yet, and I have no way of second-guessing that judgment. I mean Jenrry Mejia, rehabbing from the Tommy John surgery that knocked out his 2011 season. Overall, in his journey from the High-A St. Lucie Mets to the AA Binghamton Mets to the AAA Bisons, Mejia made 7 starts this year, with a combined line that looks something like 35.0 IP, 26 H, 15 R, 10 ER (although admittedly the 5 unearned runs were on his throwing error), 9 BB, 23 K, 3 HR. That's a 2.57 ERA, a 5.9 K/9 rate, a 2.3 BB/9 rate, an 0.8 HR/9 rate, and a 2.55 K/BB rate. All of that is pretty damn good. His strikeout rate was lower at Buffalo, but that's largely because he appeared to be working on pitch efficiency, getting through his short-ish starting assignments with sparklingly low pitch counts and dozens of ground ball outs. Pitch efficiency, of course, is something you look for in a starting pitcher. As is the possession of multiple effective pitches, which Mejia has.

So, what did the Mets do with poor young Jenrry? They converted him to a reliever, of course! The thinking behind this was something about how the Major League team's bullpen has sucked this year, and they want help there, and people have always been tempted to think of Mejia as a reliever anyway, for some strange reason. Anyway, it hasn't gone very well. In ten relief appearances with Buffalo, Mejia's thrown 11.2 innings, allowing 11 runs, 10 earned, on 16 hits, 2 of which cleared the fence, walking 8 while striking out just 6. Those numbers make Miguel Batista look like a good pitcher. And now, of course, that they've put Jenrry in the bullpen, he's not available, not immediately anyway, to come up and start games for the Mets. Which they could use him to do. Because the alternative is Miguel Batista.

In any event, I do see Mejia as a starter down the road, so here's hoping they realize that just because the bullpen has been so awful and just because they had been having a period of relative rotation stability doesn't mean they should mismanage their players. That means stretching Mejia out to be a starter again, and then down the road when Batista's struggles have reached the point where they can't be overlooked any longer, bring him up. As things are, though, I'm having trouble not considering this a big fat error on Sandy Alderson's part.

Mejia Watch

Jenrry Mejia has pitched three games at the AAA level in his career. In the first, he pitched eight innings, taking a no-hitter pretty deep into the game before allowing a solo home run, the only run he allowed. The next two came this season; in the first he threw 6 innings, in the second 6.2, and he allowed a total of 0 runs on 6 hits. This brings his minor-leagues innings-pitched total to 265, with an ERA of 2.51. After the 1983 season, the Mets' top pitching prospect had thrown 269.2 career minor-league innings with a career ERA of 2.57. And he hadn't pitched above the level of A-ball. Those numbers look eerily similar to Mejia's numbers as of this instant, don't they? That pitching prospect was, of course, Dwight Gooden, who did some pretty good things in his first few years with the Mets. My point is, of course, that I think a point is fast approaching in this season after which Jenrry Mejia will be ready to be a Major League starting pitcher. I don't know that we've necessarily reached that point yet; after all, I think a lot of people think Doc was rushed to the big leagues and that it hurt him down the road. But the Mets don't exactly have the starting rotation of the Phillies these days. Pelfrey's been struggling, Chris Young is dealing with some sort of (hopefully minor) injury, neither Niese nor Dickey is really getting the results so far, and Chris Capuano's only had one start, which was only so-so. With the exception of Pelfrey, who has been struggling the very worst so far, none of these players has pitched more than one good season in the last few years. Hopefully at some point one of them will get bumped to make room for the return of Johan Santana (and hopefully Santana will be good upon his return). But suppose one of them gets injured or just plain can't cut it? At what point will the Mets say, hey, we've got one hell of a pitching prospect ready to go down in Buffalo, let's give him a shot?