On Matt Harvey and Steroids

Steroids! They're bad, right? They're "performance-enhancing drugs," and the people who use PEDs are cheaters who should be suspended for lengthy periods of time, possibly given lifetime bans, and certainly not voted into the Hall of Fame even if they did flat-out goofy things at the plate like getting on base more than half the time over a four-year span while drawing more intentional walks than strikeouts. (Yeah.)

But... why?

Because, y'know, "performance-enhancing drug" doesn't really narrow it down. Here's a performance-enhancing drug: water. Athletes who consume H2O on a regular basis will perform considerably better than those who don't, on account of those other guys being, y'know, dead. Maybe you say water isn't a drug, but "drug" actually has a remarkably broad definition: it's basically any chemical substance that has a physiological effect on you. Water definitely has one of those! And if that seems a rather trivial example, consider something like the Gatorade found in clubhouses, which is pretty deliberately chemically engineered to enhance performance as much as possible. I'm pretty sure they advertise about that, electrolytes and such. We want our athletes consuming chemical substances that are designed to enhance their performance. They're supposed to want to be good, after all. So what demarcates a "PED" as such?

There is, of course, an answer: a PED of the sort we like to ban is bad for you. There aren't a lot of downsides to drinking water. As far as I know there aren't major downsides to the electrolytes in Gatorade. There are, however, serious downsides to anabolic steroids, and other PEDs. These sorts of drugs essentially give players the opportunity to trade their own health for a performance enhancement. Perhaps in the abstract if each individual player could make that decision in a vacuum we might, in a nice, non-paternalistic way, let them, but of course the world doesn't work like that. There's a ton of pressure on players to be the best that they can, both because they want their teams to succeed blah blah blah and because, y'know, it gets them paid. And so in a world with a whole bunch of drugs offering health/performance trade-offs, we worry, sensibly, that everyone is going to be pressured into making those trade-offs, and we don't like that. It's sort of like how each individual worker has an incentive to offer to work for less than the other guy: it's individually rational but collectively disastrous. So we have minimum wage laws and PED bans designed to prevent these pressures from forcing everyone to give away their own welfare in an effort to out-compete the other guy.

So that's it, right? Competition is all very well and good and everyone should try to be the best, but you're not allowed to trade your own physical well-being for an edge on the field?

Rubbish. Of course you are. Hell, you're supposed to. We valorize people who do this, if they do it the right way.

Introducing the Bartolo Colon Saberhagenometer

In 1994, Bret Saberhagen, of the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, did something rather impressive, something no one had done since 1919: he had more wins than walks. In 24 starts, he went 14-4 (the season was, you recall, strike-shortened), and allowed a meager 13 walks. No one who's thrown enough innings to qualify for the ERA title has done that since the deadball era. Two of the three people who did it between 1901 and 1919 were Christy Mathewson. A few relievers have done it in the interim, and plenty of people who didn't pitch a full season or anything like it, but no one with at least 65 innings pitched. Of course, Saberhagen's feat is slightly tainted by the strike, since he didn't get to keep it up over a full season, but that wasn't his fault.

Anyway, the point is, Bartolo Colon. He just won his fifth game of the season, out of six starts (the other being a rather tough loss because the Mets' offense got atrocious for a while there). In his first start, on Opening Day, he walked a dude. He hasn't made that mistake again. So, yeah, that's 1 walk, 5 wins. So I am hereby introducing the Saberhagenometer, a statistic defined as Wins Minus Walks. Bartolo Colon 2015 is the all-time leader in the statistic, at +4. (Well, okay, Christy Mathewson put up a +4 season in 1913, with 25 wins against just 21 walks, Dick Hall was +4 in 61.1 innings over 32 relief appearances at 10 and 6, and Deacon Phillippe was actually +5 in 1910 in 121.2 innings over 8 starts and 23 relief appearances, but he's bloody well close enough.) And like, I dunno, it seems like he could keep it up. He really gives off the impression of simply having decided that walking people is a bad idea, so he's not gonna do it. So this will be something to keep an eye on over the course of the season. And if he does get it done, the fact that the only two to do it in the modern era will both have been New York Mets is just pretty damn cool.

Oh, also, Matt Harvey is currently at +1 on the Saberhagenometer at 5 W, 4 BB, as is Michael Pineda of that other New York team at 3/2. That doesn't seem like nearly enough of a cushion, although since Matt Harvey is going to go 33-0 this year I guess he's got a chance.

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).

Don't Look Now, but the 2013 Mets Might Be Good

Matt Harvey pitched his first Major League baseball game for the Mets tonight in Arizona, allowing three hits and three walks while striking out 11 in 5.1 innings of work. He was also 2-2 with a double at the plate, and since he had at least one chance in the field and didn't make any errors has a 1.000 fielding percentage. Obviously the main point is the 0.00 ERA and the 18.6 K/9 rate, and the real main point is just that his stuff looked amazing and he didn't appear remotely fazed by finding himself in the Majors. His 11 strikeouts in a Major League debut are tied for 7th-most in baseball history, and the most since the 14 from Stephen Strasburg. Perhaps you've heard of him? Anyway, Josh Edgin, another Mets rookie from the 2010 draft class, then came on in relief and pitched a perfect 5 outs of baseball.

All of this has me thinking that the 2013 New York Mets might be a pretty good baseball team. Hopefully Johan Santana will be able to pitch a full-ish season of Johan-ish baseball, with an extra year removed from his surgery. R.A. Dickey, at this point, is just reliably good, his recent slump notwithstanding. Jon Niese appears to be getting better and better. Harvey really looks like the real deal, although I'll admit it's a bit too soon to bank on that. And having options of people like Dillon Gee and Jenrry Mejia for your fifth starter's spot isn't bad. I continue to believe in Bobby Parnell as a high-quality relief pitcher, if not really someone who can be a closer (which I'm still not sold on!). Edgin looks fantastic. The infield of Wright/Tejada/Murphy/Davis should still be intact and, as none is particularly old, still getting better. (Although it's rumored the Mets are shopping Murphy; perhaps he might be replaced by Jordany Valdespin, who's been electric in his brief stint with the Mets so far.) Maybe we're not talking 1986 Mets good, not yet anyway, but it feels like it's shaping up to be a team that has a real chance of contending for the postseason from the beginning of the season. And what with the 2012 team's recent 1-and-12 skid seeming to put the ice on that team's chances of contending, I think it's time to start getting excited about next year. Because next year looks exciting.