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).

When Wins Matter

One of the traditional baseball statistics most eschewed by modern sabermetric types is pitcher's Wins (and, implicitly, losses). Like Runs Batted In and Runs Scored, these constitute assigning credit for a team accomplishment somewhat arbitrarily to an individual player. There's just so much confounding the causal link between individual performance and the statistical record that the latter is a really terrible tool for measuring the former. It's just not hard for even a mediocre pitcher to put up 15+ wins on a really great team, especially if it's a great offensive team, and conversely even a great pitcher can have a hard time getting much above a .500 record on a poor team. You want to look at things like the pitcher's ERA, or even to go beyond that in looking only at those things that are most under a pitcher's control.

But I think there are cases when the Win is a very good way to measure a player's performance. Take last night's Mets game, for instance. They were playing the Twins, in Minnesota, in fact. The Twins recently acquired an open-air stadium, and in April in Minneapolis that can lead to games being played in some odd weather. Specifically, when the game began it was snowing. The Mets put up five runs in the first inning against Twins starter Vance Worley. Then Jon Niese gave up a couple of runs in the bottom of the first. Then the Mets put up five more in the top of the second, against Worley and a relief pitcher who came on with 0 outs in the inning and went on to pitch into the sixth. This was, rather clearly, a day on which it was going to be difficult to pitch well, due to the weather. In such a situation, with a huge lead in his pocket and in tough conditions, I would assert that what mattered was not so much that Niese pitch well in the conventional sense, i.e. prevent runs from scoring. No, what mattered was that he get the win. Go five innings, don't cough up the lead, and get into the clubhouse giving the bullpen only a moderately large amount of work to do. And he did just that, putting up zeroes in the second, third, and fourth innings before surrendering three runs, one earned, in the bottom of the fifth. Then the bullpen came on, shut the Twins down, and the Mets won the game. Mission accomplished.

Niese didn't have a particularly good line last night. He pitched five innings, he gave up five runs, three earned, while walking four and striking out just one. But he got the win. And he got the win by handling the adverse conditions better than the opposing team's starter. In these specific circumstances, that's really all that matters, even though usually you want a lot more out of your starter than just eking out a nominal Win. Jon Niese didn't pitch particularly well last night, but he did what he needed to do, and both he and the Mets were rewarded with a victory.