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Although the 2021 season started with a ton of optimism for the New York Mets, the train has essentially run off the tracks over the past month-plus. And I’m just talking about their performance on the field for right now.

The Mets are idle on Monday, and they could probably use a break. New York currently owns a 73-77 record after losing five of its last six games. There are likely a bunch of directions to throw some blame for what’s happened, but the biggest — and most frequent — result is the offense. And, it’s not wrong. Former MLB catcher and current SNY analyst, Anthony Recker, had this to say following Saturday night’s loss to the Phillies:

I don’t see any lies here. With regard to the offense, there have been two guys that have consistently been productive while on the field: Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo. ESPN’s Buster Olney pointed this out as he prepared for Sunday Night Baseball at Citi Field:

Honestly, that made me raise my eyebrows a little bit. I mean, it’s been a full 20 years since that’s happened. It’s obviously not easy to do, even if it tells more of a story about the offense’s lackluster performance than anything else. But then, later on, our old friend, Rob Piersall, pointed this out:

This made me raise my eyebrows even more because of how many fewer games Nimmo has suited up for due to multiple stints on the Injured List. Among Mets players with at least 200 plate appearances this season, Nimmo’s 80 games played are the second-fewest (J.D. Davis has the fewest at 71 games), yet his 3.1 fWAR leads the squad.

When discussing preseason expectations of both players, Alonso has more or less been right on target with projection systems such as Steamer and ZiPS. As for Nimmo, though, he’s outperformed each despite playing in far fewer games than either expected him to. Check out how his actual stats compare to his preseason projections, and how the sample sizes differ.

Obviously, some of his counting stats like home runs, RBI, and runs scored don’t come close to the projections, but that checks out. To rack up those numbers, he’d simply need to play more. Although Nimmo failed to accomplish that in 2021, his fWAR is currently the second-highest mark he’s posted in a single season. The highest came in his breakout 2018 campaign where he accumulated 4.5 fWAR in 140 games.

While the focus here will be on his offensive production, Nimmo’s improved defense has also played a part in his overall performance. Between 2016 and 2020, his glovework has been worth -4 Defensive Runs Saved, but he’s been worth 4 Defensive Runs Saved 612 2/3 innings in the outfield this year.

When Nimmo has been active, he’s been incredibly consistent at the dish, too. Outside of collecting just four plate appearances in May, he’s stepped to the plate at least 20 times in every other month this season and hasn’t posted a wRC+ below 123 yet.

How did he get here? Well, there are lots of things that are what we’d expect of Nimmo during regular-season play. His 15.0% walk rate is on pace to be at or above that number for the fourth time in five seasons. His 21.3% strikeout rate is similar to what he did in 2020 (19.1%), which is in stark contrast to the four years before that when it never dipped below 25.0%. This is backed up with Nimmo’s usually excellent plate discipline, and it seems like the biggest change has come in his batted-ball profile.

The outfielder’s career .349 BABIP suggests that he’s just one of those high-BABIP guys, but this year, it’s even higher at .383. If he can sustain that over the last couple of weeks, it’d easily become a new single-season career-high. As we can see in the table below, there’s been a significant change in his ground-ball rate, fly-ball rate, and hard-hit rate over the past three seasons.

While the 28-year-old enjoyed a fruitful 2020 season, combining his quality of contact numbers with his .326 BABIP didn’t have me sold that the performance he put together was sustainable. Judging from the numbers he’s put up thus far in 2021, we thankfully haven’t had to really find out.

An obvious trend in Nimmo’s batted-ball profile is a heavier reliance on line drives and ground balls, along with not as much of a reliance on fly balls. That’s limited his power outlook, but if a player is going to hit more grounders, they must make sure it’s worthwhile.

For the Mets’ center fielder, it has been.

Nimmo currently owns a .306 batting average and 73 wRC+ on grounders, which are both on track to be career highs. It’s not necessarily a good thing to see these numbers so high because grounders are the least successful batted-ball event, but it’s been an area Nimmo has been pretty good at overall. His career wRC+ on ground balls is 46. What’s also encouraging for him when comparing this year to last season is that his current hard-hit rate (31.6%) is significantly better than what it was in 2020 (9.0%).

Outside of using the middle of the field more, Nimmo’s results on line drives haven’t changed much, but it’d be just fine to maintain what he did last season (418 wRC+ in ’20, 411 in ’21).

One of the great things we’ve seen from Nimmo since he debuted is he’s consistently found ways to improve on offense without sacrificing the approach that got him there in the first place. In a year that’s been more frustrating than not, Nimmo has solidified himself as an important offensive cog of this club moving forward.

The next step will be to see what he can do to stay healthy and do it over a full season.