Last season, the New York Mets ranked in baseball’s top 10 in many offensive categories. They were second in batting average and on-base percentage, eighth in slugging percentage, sixth in OPS, fourth in OPS+, third-best in strikeouts and strikeout rate, sixth in wOBA, and third in wRC+. How did such a team, returning many of the same batters, regress so drastically in 2023? The Mets are...
What truly is an MVP? Is it the player who provided the most overall value to an individual team? The player who displayed the most prowess on a playoff-bound club? The player who rewrote the history books? Or is it the player who simply added the most value to his team’s win total, with respect to the club’s payroll? For small-market teams, it might be the latter. “Most Valuable...
As an avid reader– and now a graduate student studying sports industry management– I have done my fair share of reading and critiquing some good and some not-so-good books on baseball. While we all enjoy a quick-hitting game recap or a fast analysis of players, there’s something magical about flipping through the pages of a long-form, thought-provoking book about baseball. Whether you want to...
Back in 2004, the New York Mets hired their first full-time statistical analyst after the release of the New York Times bestselling book, Moneyball. The Mets were looking to invest in someone who could break down the numbers, analyze data for potential free agent signings and trades and offer evaluations on minor league players. What the club received from Dr. Ben Baumer was even more than they...
The analytic movement in Major League Baseball continues to gain further acceptance, as all thirty clubs employ statisticians and analysts to crunch the numbers in order to make better baseball decisions. We’ve witnessed teams alter their methods with the increased amount of data available at their fingertips, which includes defensive alignments, bunting, platoons, and utilizing their best...
Mark DeRosa was reportedly the sixth candidate for the Mets managerial position, but ultimately lost out on the job to Mickey Callaway. DeRosa, 42, played 16 years in the majors and currently works as a personality on MLB Network’s MLB Central. He is also a regular on Mike Francesa’s show on WFAN. While he has no prior coaching experience, DeRosa still felt disappointed he missed out...
We continue our widely-beloved “Know Your Stats” series with a “gateway stat:” Weighted Runs Above Average. wRAA is essentially wOBA converted into runs, but understanding wRAA is crucial to understanding Wins Above Replacement and Weighted Runs Created Plus, which we’ll be talking about this afternoon. One of the biggest issues with rate statistics like wOBA and...
For the next few days, I will be bringing back my “Know Your Stats” series that I began a few years back to highlight some important sabermetric stats and concepts. We begin this afternoon with OPS and OPS+. OPS, or On Base Plus Slugging was one of the first sabermetric stats to go mainstream. It is, as the name implies, On-Base Percentage plus Slugging Percentage. It’s crude...
Judging from comments on my twitter feed, I’d venture to guess that the prevailing emotion among Mets fans out there for this season is abject frustration. While there are times when we are offered glimmers of hope and slivers of consistency, they tend to be quickly snuffed out. The team itself is probably more likeable than it has been in a while, but the constant RISP and LOB trends tend to...
As the New York Mets near the end of their ongoing rebuilding process, it’s time for Sandy Alderson to re-evaluate the entire team and see who can help the team on a day to day basis over the next few years. Once that task is completed, it’s time for the front office to work to get rid of the dead weight, or those who aren’t seen as useful in the coming years, and to plug up...
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the...
Twenty men have sat in the Met managerial hot seat. Some have served as momentary stopgaps, Mike Cubbage for only seven games. None survived long enough to rival the longest surviving managers of the modern game, guys like Bobby Cox and Tony LaRussa. In fact, none wore the Met orange and blue for more than seven seasons. And, only five of the twenty; Davey Johnson, Gil Hodges, Bobby Valentine,...
