Steve Cohen continues clearing the necessary hurdles to officially purchase the New York Mets. As it currently stands, a new era in Queens is on track to turn from dream to reality shortly after the conclusion of the World Series.
Wild, right? Many of us never thought this day would come. It still doesn’t feel real at times because dealing with the bologna of the Wilsons was ingrained in my mind at a young age. It’s nice to pinch myself and realize this is actually happening, though.
While Cohen aims to make an impactful change from top to bottom of this organization, the most immediately visible change we could see resides with the major-league roster. Attention hasn’t turned to the Hot Stove yet with the Fall Classic in full swing, but there’s already been plenty of virtual ink spilled about impending free agents and potential trade candidates.
On the position player side, it feels like the three most common names mentioned thus far for New York include Francisco Lindor, J.T. Realmuto, and George Springer.
Will the Mets pursue all three? How many — if any — could they land? We’ll find Out soon enough, and although they’re all different, they share some common characteristics.
The obvious one is offense. Whether it was in 2020 or the recent past, each of these three have proven to provide premium offensive production at their respective positions. Given the rise of certain Mets hitters and how the unit has performed overall the last couple years, it’s not as if the Mets would be hoping for one (or more) of these three to carry the load — they’d get plugged into an already-pretty-deep lineup.
That’s not the similarity I’m thinking about, though. Today, I’m thinking about defense, which seems to be something the Mets haven’t thought much about in recent years.
As a squad, New York accumulated -22 Defensive Runs Saved in 2020, which ranked 26th in baseball. This was just a continuation of unfortunate events, and to briefly depress myself, I decided to look back at the team’s DRS and MLB rank since 2015. None of it looked pretty, but the general performance since 2017 made me throw up in my mouth a little.
Not something you want to see for a squad that was focused on rebuilding with elite pitching.
The old adage is that good teams are strong up the middle on defense (catcher, shortstop, second base, and center field). As you might imagine, that’s been an issue for the Mets with regard to the players getting the majority of innings at those positions. If we just look at the past two seasons, Wilson Ramos (-12 DRS combined), Amed Rosario (-13), Robinson Cano (-10), and Brandon Nimmo (-8 in center) didn’t exactly make the Mets the strongest team up the middle.
While it’s great, flashy, and sexy that each of Lindor, Springer, and Realmuto are offensive assets to any club they’re on, they all bring solid defensive reputations. If we’re looking solely at DRS (which obviously isn’t perfect but makes it easy to compare), here’s a gander at how Lindor, Springer, and Realmuto stack up against Mets players at the same position since 2019
(Only Springer’s center-field stats are used below.)
That doesn’t look like much of a difference for Realmuto and Mets catchers in ’20, but it should also be mentioned that the impending free agent has been among the elite in pop times to second base and pitch framing — two things New York clearly hasn’t had. There are also three Gold Glove awards between them (one for Realmuto and two for Lindor).
As many of us know, the Mets didn’t even have a single finalist for this year’s Gold Glove awards…again.
Although signing Realmuto wouldn’t do much from a roster crunch standpoint, either signing Springer or trading for Lindor would create more decisions for the front office to make, especially if there’s no designated hitter in the National League next year to stash a bat. One of the attractive parts of pursuing Lindor is that New York could alleviate some roster issues by sending players back to Cleveland, of course. Acquiring one of these three would just be the first step in what will hopefully be a transformative winter — there’s still plenty of work to be done on the pitching staff, and more specifically, the rotation. So, the roster crunch could get solved in making unrelated deals.
It doesn’t matter which one of Lindor, Springer, or Realmuto the Mets get (or, if they’re lucky enough to nab more than one). Any of them would be a huge upgrade to the lineup. More importantly, though, moves like these would bring an athletic and quality defender to the middle of the field, which is something the Mets have lacked greatly over the past couple seasons.
