How To Use This Mets Roster

The Mets just recalled Michael Conforto from AAA Las Vegas, with fellow left-handed outfielder Brandon Nimmo being sent down in his place. (The latter move follows as a matter of course; Nimmo, a top prospect, needs to get consistent playing time, which he's definitely not going to get with the Mets with Conforto back.) Conforto was shockingly great last year after being called up directly from AA, was Ted Williams levels of great in April this year, and then was pitcher-with-a-bit-of-pop levels of awful from May 1st onward. May 1st was the day when he was kept in the lineup against Madison Bumgarner, one of the best left-handed starters in the world. I dunno if that's what caused the slump, but it makes for an awfully convenient marker. Anyway, he went down and was raging hot at AAA (his first exposure to the level! actually!), so now he's back. Makes sense.

Except it creates a bit of a sticky situation regarding the outfield configuration. Conforto is strictly a corner outfielder; until his stint in Vegas he had only ever played left field as a professional. Curtis Granderson is, at this point, also a corner outfielder, and like Conforto he's left-handed. Yoenis Cespedes, meanwhile, is the Mets' best position player. To start the year, he was playing a lot of center field, flanked by Conforto in left and Granderson in right, with the team thinking it could live with Cespedes's below-average defense in center in return for getting those three bats into the lineup simultaneously. But Cespedes keeps being banged up with minor injuries, and he suspects that the toll center field takes on his legs may be contributing to that. So they'd really like to keep him in left field as often as possible, where, as it happens, he's a Gold Glove defender. That, of course, leaves them with no center fielders, but not to worry, because we've got Juan Lagares, who ought to be a legitimate contender for the Platinum Glove award (given to the Gold Glover in each league who's the best overall defensive player) any time he plays a full season, and who's also been hitting well to start the second half of the season (as well as on the entire year to date). Great! We've got four legitimately major league quality starting outfielders! Hooray!

...except, of course, you only typically play three outfielders. I mean, you could play four of them, but then you'd only have three infielders, which is probably a bad idea. So we have four deserving candidates for three spots. Whaddaya do?

Here's what: you play everyone. Some of the time.

Juan Lagares is Getting Victimized by the Mike Trout Phenomenon

Continuing on the same theme as my last post. Terry Collins gave the following explanation for why Juan Lagares is not in the lineup tonight:

"Juan is the center fielder," Collins said Friday afternoon. "We’ve got to somehow get his stroke back. He’s starting to expand the zone a little bit right now. When we get him back to where he’s taking some of those pitches, his defense is something we need, and we need very much. But we’re not scoring. So we’ve got to figure out how to get some runs."

The Mets Will Never Be Good As Long As Terry Collins Is Their Manager

Tonight the Mets play the Washington Nationals in the first game of a three-game series. They're two games behind the Nats for second place in the division (though they are themselves in fourth), so, say, sweeping the serious could be huge. Here's the lineup the team is going with tonight:

Eric Young, LF (S)
Daniel Murphy, 2B (L)
David Wright, 3B (R)
Curtis Granderson, CF (L)
Bobby Abreu, RF (L)
Lucas Duda, 1B (L)
Anthony Recker, C (R)
Ruben Tejada, SS (R)
Jon Niese, P (L)

They're lucky the guy they've got in the #9 spot is good at pitching, 'cause this is an awful lineup. It's not so much that it's awful offensively. Particularly the way Granderson hits away from Citi Field, it's more like mediocre, and could almost be good on a good day. But hooo boy the defense. I count two spots in the field, other than the one on the mound, where we've got good defensive players, and that's third base and left field. That latter is arguable, given the way Young's been misplaying balls of late. But you've then got Tejada and Murphy up the middle, who are solid enough if a bit lacking in range, Duda at first who's probably fine but nothing special, and, well, Curtis Granderson at this point in his career might be a good defensive right fielder. He might also be the third or fourth best defensive center fielder on the team. Abreu has basically no business playing the field.

Notable by their absence are Wilmer Flores and Juan Lagares. Flores was called up a few days ago to be the starting shortstop instead of Tejada. He was hitting .307/.360/.500 in AAA. Tejada is slugging .240 on the season. As for Lagares, well, he's perhaps the best defensive outfielder in all of baseball right now, and is also one of the three people on the roster right now with at least 10 plate appearances and a league-average wRC+ or better. Oh, and he's shown a minimal platoon split for his career. So he's not someone you'd want to take out of the lineup. Say, ever. Certainly you'd think he'd be in there on an essentially regular basis, with maybe the occasional day off against a really tough right-hander.

As it happens, today might be one of those days. Tanner Roark, the Nationals's starter tonight, has for his career allowed a .254/.315/.396 line to lefties, perfectly unimpressive for a pitcher, but a, well, .180/.215/.208 line to righties. He makes righties hit like a pitcher. So this would seem to be a good day to minimize the number of right-handed bats in the lineup. Sitting Chris Young, for instance, is an obvious call, since he has a huge platoon split. Both the catchers are right-handed so there's nothing you can do about that, and you're not gonna take David Wright out for anything. Arguably getting all three left-handed bats in your outfield is justifiable, although I'm honestly not sure I think, even with Roark's splits, that present-day Bobby Abreu will provide more value than Juan Lagares + not making Granderson play center. As for shortstop, well, they are both righties, but Tejada has a big platoon split and Flores a little one, so playing Tejada, who's a worse player overall, is just weird. He should only get the occasional start against a lefty, and probably not even then.

But the point isn't really today. It's that Lagares also sat out the last two days, also against right-handed pitching, in favor of an outfield of Young, Young, and Granderson. He also say out the first game at Yankee Stadium, and Flores sat out all four Subway Series games. Note that Chris Young is also right-handed. Note also that he is unambiguously a worse player than Lagares, probably on both sides of the ball right now. Note further that, had the amazing Lagares been patrolling center field last night when Alfonso Soriano doubled in the game's only run, he probably would've gotten to the ball an awful lot quicker and prevented Brian McCann from trying to score in the first place. So even with their offensive futility the Mets might not have lost the game in regulation, giving them a chance to outlast the Yankee bullpen and do something in extras.

Juan Lagares needs to play every day, or at least six days out of every seven. It's as simple as that. And yet, he keeps not playing. The only time he's been in the lineup in the last five baseball games was when the team was not only facing a left-handed starting pitcher but also had the DH spot available, allowing them to play four whole outfielders. The previous game, they also had the DH spot, but that went to Abreu, who went 0-3, and Lagares sat out while Young, Young, & Grandy got the call. This is ridiculous. So is the Flores thing. It's not even so much that lineup construction, in the sense of finding the best permutation of nine batters for nine batting order spots, has been a problem, it's that they've been picking the wrong nine guys on a daily basis. And it's been costing the team.

The bottom line is that I think well over half of the Mets losses this year have felt like they were in part on the manager. Certainly last night's was. Tonight's could well be again, depending on how Abreu and Granderson hold up in the field. And I haven't even mentioned all the shenanigans regarding his pitcher usage, which has been execrable. I think this could be a good team, honestly, if they would just deploy the players right. That shouldn't be the hard part. But it's been, jeez, like five years now, and Terry Collins has never once demonstrated that he is capable of doing that. I also don't see that much evidence that he's a great "leader of men" or whatever. For instance, right now David Wright is in a huge slump during the course of which he has started swinging at everything. You'd think a manager would be supposed to get him to stop doing that, and to be willing to take his walks if the pitchers don't want to pitch to him. That has yet to happen. And it looks like it's about attitude, because he's had a great eye at the plate his whole career.

By around the end of this season and certainly by the beginning of next one, this Mets team is going to have the talent to compete. It's gonna have a rotation featuring the likes of Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, and Zack Wheeler, plus perhaps Jon Niese, Dillon Gee, Rafael Montero, or Jacob deGrom. The bullpen will feature power arms like Jenrry Mejia and Jeurys Familia, perhaps rejoined by Bobby Parnell. Cesar Puello may become a contributing outfielder. It's a team that will be loaded with promise. But if Terry Collins is still the manager, I betcha they're gonna have another disappointing, because he just won't use what he's been given right. He'll keep turning winnable games into losses. Not every one of those will be a true marginal loss, because you don't win every winnable game, but it doesn't take that many marginal losses to turn a playoff team into an also-ran.

They need someone new. (And from what I hear it shouldn't be Wally Backman either; he's been decidedly odd as their AAA manager.)

How the Mets Should Run Their Outfield

One of the running questions in Mets spring training this year has been, the way it's phrased, whether Juan Lagares or Eric Young, Jr. should be the team's third starting outfielder. The assumption is that the first two are Curtis Granderson, the Mets' biggest free agent signing since Jason Bay, and Chris Young, one of their other notable signings of the off-season. Phrased that way, the answer is obvious: Lagares should start. Last year, while hitting .242/.281/.352 (an OPS+ of 80, well below league average), Lagares was worth something in excess of 3 wins above replacement. Since that was in just 421 plate appearances, he was a couple of wins above average. His defense is ridiculous, making him an incredibly productive player even if we regress the defense a little bit. Eric Young, meanwhile, even after coming to the Mets (when his performance improved) was in that zone between average and replacement-level. He was a passable left fielder, though not deserving of his Gold Glove nomination, but really his only virtue was his speed, and though he was a great baserunner last year there's a limit to how valuable that is if it's all you offer. The argument for Young to start is just that Terry Collins wants a base-stealer at the top of the lineup. Well, Lagares has the same base-stealing numbers as EYJ this spring, 3 SB/1 CS, and as he's not likely to be outhit at the plate by Young there's no reason to think he'd be a worse leadoff hitter.