The Least You Should Know…

For a full recap and box score, check out SNY.TV.

Andrew Wharton, Contributor

What a letdown following the greatest day of the season yesterday. A lot has been made of Marcum’s bad luck, and rightfully so, but he just wasn’t sharp tonight. His breaking stuff was frequently hanging, and his command was very spotty. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t mention the very questionable officiating behind the plate tonight; it was almost comical at times early on. Nonetheless, Marcum has now given up 11 runs in his last 10 1/3 innings, which isn’t going to get it done no matter what the advanced stats say.

The offense still stinks. Young provides speed at the top of the order, and he instantly becomes one of the best outfielders on this team, but his impact will be little-to-none if there aren’t guys driving in runs in the middle of the order. Wright and Murphy aren’t slump-proof, and Byrd’s hot streak isn’t sustainable.

On a positive note, Duda looks comfortable at first base. Sure, he’s not an award-winning defender, but it’s very clear that’s his natural position. He should remain at first base until Ike reclaims the spot.

This Braves team really does baffle me. I can’t quite figure out how they have won so many games. They have really good pitching, which is the most important piece of the puzzle, but their offense is super-reliant on the long ball and they don’t really seem to have much chemistry or hustle. Either way, it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day they still win.

The Mets conclude their five-game series against the Braves tomorrow night at Turner Field, with Jon Niese (3-6, 4.15) facing Mike Minor (8-2, 2.68) at 7:10 pm.

The Good: David Wright collected his 1,500th career hit in the ninth inning of the second game last night with a single. Wright has at least one hit in seven of his last eight games, including four multi-hit games. During both ends of the double dip, Mets pitchers racked up 24 strikeouts, tied for the third-most in a doubleheader in franchise history

The Bad: Shaun Marcum hasn’t earned a win this season. The Mets placed righthanded pitcher Scott Atchinson on the 15-Day Disabled List today, citing a sore right groin. Infielder Justin Tumer is also on the 15-Day DL, retroactive June 17, with a left intercostal strain.

The Game: Shaun Marcum (0-8, 5.43 ERA) will start for the Mets. Marcum is the fourth pitcher in franchise history to start a season 0-8. Two of Marcum’s losses this season have come as a reliever. Kris Medlen (3-7, 3.09 ERA) gets the start for the Braves.

Andrew Wharton, Contributor

Young shocked a lot of people when he hit .316/.377/.448 in 98 games last year while posting an OPS+ of 110. So far in 2013, he has followed his career-best season with a very pedestrian .242/.290/.352 effort. But, compared to Collin Cowgill’s .180/.206/.311 line this year, it’s an improvement any way you cut it for the Mets.

I see this move as serving two purposes: 1) to provide the outfield with some major league depth in the event of future trades, and 2) to allow McHugh to pursue a career outside of New York, because he clearly had no future with this team.

Young makes a decent bench piece in almost any city, which means he could still be a part of this team if Sandy Alderson made a few moves to rebuild the roster. He’s also a switch hitter, which lessens the need to platoon every single outfield position and gives the team a little stability in the lineup, regardless of how (un)impactful his bat may be in a full-time role.

For the rest of 2013, I’d like to see him take the majority of the playing time in center field, while hitting leadoff. This allows Juan Lagares to slide over to left field while Lucas Duda holds down first base and some split of Marlon Byrd, Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Andrew Brown in rightfield.

It’s still not a pretty lineup, but I’ll take it for now.

What I don’t expect is for Young to be an everyday player in 2014. 
]]> http://metsblog.com/metsblog/what-to-expect-from-eric-young-jr/feed/ 0 awharton Eric Young Jr. http://metsblog.com/metsblog/what-to-expect-from-eric-young-jr/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metsblogfeed/~3/YQysqrBMqYs/ http://metsblog.com/metsblog/all-star-game-apples-minnesota-twins/#comments Wed, 19 Jun 2013 21:05:50 +0000 danasorkin http://metsblog.com/?p=182824 ]]> In preparation for the MLB All-Star Game at Citi Field, 35 apple statues have been placed around New York City. We’re  counting down the days to the game by posting a photo of one statue every day.  Today’s apple: Minnesota Twins…

Atchison left Tuesday night’s game after pulling his groin during his warmup pitches. He was activated off the DL earlier on Tuesday due to bone spurs in his elbow and numbness in his fingers.

This move brings the Mets back to 25 players on the active roster after the doubleheader on Tuesday, so no one will replace Atchison on the roster.

“Well, it would play a part in it, sure. … I think it should play a part, to be honest. Now, I also believe that whoever deserves to go, whoever deserves to start that game should get that. But all things even, then I think you look at something like that — a guy that’s in his hometown pitching.”

In the National League, Harvey is fourth in the league with 104 innings pitched, first with 115 strikeouts, fourth among qualifying pitchers with a 3.7 WAR, first with a 0.90 WHIP, and third with a 2.16 ERA.

Michael Baron, Contributor

The numbers speak for themselves. If this continues, Harvey deserves to start the All-Star Game for the National League, regardless of the venue. Hell, if this continues, Harvey will be in consideration for the National League Cy Young Award at the end of the season. Naturally, I can envision a scenario of Harvey being pissed about being removed from the All-Star Game after two or three innings because he didn’t do enough to help the team win.

As for the game being played at Citi Field, it would be a huge moment for the organization and the game itself; he would be representing one of the elite, young starters which are beginning to put their stamp on the game as they begin to steer away from an offensive-oriented game into a game dominated by finesse and pitching. And, it would be taking place on the Mets’ front lawn — during a time when the Mets are hungry for some positive attention, this would be a perfect opportunity to put the beginning of their plan on display for the whole country to watch.

Sam Page, Contributor

Listening to the SNY booth talk about the Mets’ franchise direction in the wake of Ike Davis’ demotion, you would think a brilliantly constructed team had tragically fallen apart. The reality is closer to this: a team that wasn’t very good to begin with has experienced normal amounts of both good and bad fortune — i.e. as bad as Ike Davis’ breakdown has been, Matt Harvey’s breakout has been equally brilliant.

Mets fans are down on their team, and understandably so. The Sandy Alderson/Terry Collins regime has been in power for three years and in a purely wins and losses sense, the Mets have not progressed at all. Unfortunately, stasis is the inevitable result of a team that not just fails to invest in its rebuild, but actively cuts payroll. If there’s any criticism to make of Alderson, it’s that he’s not creative — but even creativity requires some additional money.

Put simply: the Mets being bad was inevitable. But their long-term prospects as a franchise have improved. The failures of this team are failures of the short-term, which will look trivial in hindsight. The Mets’ successes this year, while seemingly modest now, can be built upon.

If the Mets are going to be contenders during David Wright’s career, it will be because they have a core nucleus of superstars surrounded by decent complementary players, a la the 2005-2007 Omar Minaya Mets. I don’t know if this blueprint is preferable to any others, or even advisable given the franchise’s current assets, but it’s where the Mets are headed.

There is, of course, another way to build a contender. It’s the way pioneered by Sandy Alderson’s protégé Billy Beane in Oakland, in which the A’s have managed to field competitive teams in nine of the past fourteen seasons, despite major payroll limitations.

The A’s model develops players, then flips them during their arbitration years for a handful of prospects. This philosophy captalizes on the reality that baseball players’ most productive years are also often their cheapest. Many onlookers errantly assumed that the Mets would adopt a similar system to tide over the Wilpons during the Madoff litigation. And while Alderson certainly brought over some of the personnel and player evaluation philosophies detailed in Moneyball, the book, he did not bring capital-M Moneyball, the codeword for systematic cheapness, to Flushing.

When the Mets signed David Wright to an eight-year, heavily backloaded contract extension, they officially eschewed the Oakland system. The Mets could have traded Wright for a handful of prospects, with the hope of becoming competitive on the cheap in the next five years. But not only did they not trade Wright, they structured the contract so as to suggest the Mets will be a fully-funded big market team after the Wilpon’s various bank loans are due.

Whether this implicit belief that the Mets will be able to pay David Wright $20 million per season and build around him proves to be a reality or fantasy depends entirely on the Wilpon’s ability to pay those loans. But, for better or worse, the Mets have committed to this plan.

The pitfalls of taking this “big market” approach instead of something closer to what Oakland does are twofold:

1. There’s a greater pressure on the organization’s top prospects to step in and fill big roles right away, because the fringes of the roster have to be cheap, and the farm system is necessarily thinner.

2. The team must develop franchise players, otherwise the team will miscast role players as core players and disastrously overpay them.

These tendencies ultimately undid Omar Minaya. Prospects like Lastings Milledge and Carlos Gomez were never able to effectively fill the team’s nagging corner outfield holes, while Minaya continually misidentified replaceable parts like Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez as players worthy of long-term commitments.

Alderson set himself up for similar missteps when he extended Wright. Granted, I don’t think his brain trust would allow contracts as on-face stupid as Oliver Perez’s 3-years, $36 million deal. Still, coming into this season, David Wright was the Mets’ only superstar, and the future of their rotation hinged on the performance of two fairly unproven young pitchers. To stake so much on two young arms before this season was a huge gambit, given the rate of attrition for pitching prospects. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario for this year in which one or both of Harvey and Wheeler underperformed — or worse, got hurt — leading the Mets to overcommit next year’s freed up money to starting pitching. Have we forgotten Mike Pelfrey and Phil Humber already?

The Mets needed two things to happen this season to ensure their long-term health as a franchise: both of their young phenom pitchers needed to progress in their development, and another top-tier franchise player, worthy of David Wright money, needed to somehow fall in their lap. As bleak as this season has seemed on the field, the Mets somehow achieved both of these goals.

Miraculously, Wheeler and Harvey both stayed healthy and pitched well. Even more miraculously, Harvey became arguably the best pitcher in the league. Many assumed Ike Davis would be the Mets’ next franchise player, but Matt Harvey has become a rarer, more valuable type of player than Ike Davis could have ever hoped to be as a first baseman.

Ideally, of course, Ike and Harvey would both be franchise cornerstones. Davis is no doubt this season’s biggest disappointment, and dreams of him as a star may be rightly dead in the water. His defensive abilities, however, significantly lower the threshold his hitting has to reach in order for him to be a complementary piece on a championship team. Same goes for Ruben Tejada, who still projects as a serviceable, if unspectacular, shortstop with his head on straight.

Beyond that? It’s not so bad. The bullpen continues to frustrate, due to a continuing inability to strand runners. But a good bullpen can be built on not too much money. With a little of next year’s spending money put toward a top setup man, everyone else in the bullpen will move down a rung and face easier competition. With a capable and affordable closer at the top in Bobby Parnell, the Mets task is much simpler than trying to fix a ninth inning Achilles heel — that’s when teams end up spending an unreasonable fortune on a Proven Closer™.

In the lineup, the Mets have a smattering of underperforming position players that just don’t matter that much in the long-run. Daniel Murphy may do enough of everything to stay at second base. But Jordany Valdespin, Lucas Duda and others having down years — while bad for this team’s hopes of being a surprise wild card contender — is inconsequential. They’re only borderline starters to begin with, and the outfield had to be replaced next season regardless.

That leaves the Mets with holes to fill before next year, but none they shouldn’t have anticipated as early as last season. Assuming Wright, Murphy, Tejada and some combination of Ike Davis, Lucas Duda, and Wilmer Flores can hold down the infield, the Mets really need only worry about the three outfield positions this offseason. Luckily for them, they can quickly fill their need for corner outfielders and franchise players in one move, the way teams are giving up on all-star right fielders these days. While they balked at Justin Upton, players like Carlos Gonzalez and Giancarlo Stanton seem like they might be available for less than they’re worth in the next few seasons.

It’s been a disappointing season, but only in the sense that it’s a losing season. If it can be said to be a surprising season, it’s only in the sense that the Mets are as bad as everyone expected and still produced a second Cy Young candidate, or even two.

Before this season, the Mets had one franchise player, a first baseman playing second, and a bunch of players who had “won” their jobs by default. Going into this offseason, the Mets will have two franchise players — maybe three depending on what Zack Wheeler does — and the money to finally put some of their scrub hitters and relievers out of a job.

The Mets becoming a “New York” team again requires two ingredients: a big payroll and — more importantly — people worth giving that money. This season, in spite all its frustration, already took care of the hard part.