As currently constructed, the New York Mets’ bullpen is projected to be one of the best in baseball for this upcoming season. We all know to take projections with a grain of salt, but it’s better than the opposite end of the spectrum, right?
This area of the roster is projected to accumulate a total fWAR of 5.0, ranking third overall and first in the National League. This projection obviously comes with a fair number of if’s, and the biggest ones that immediately come to mind are Edwin Diaz, Jeurys Familia, and Dellin Betances.
Diaz and Familia are both coming off nightmare campaigns in Queens and are looking to regain their past form, which was part of the reason why general manager Brodie Van Wagenen acquired each of them in the first place. Betances isn’t coming off a nightmare season from the perspective of his on-field performance — it’s just that he barely got on the mound at all in 2019. Even if he’s healthy right now, it’ll be a relief to see him toeing the slab on a consistent basis while racking up all those strikeouts once again.
What if these three all bounce back and Seth Lugo remains an elite bullpen weapon in 2020, though? That gives manager Luis Rojas a lot of flexibility on a daily basis when it comes to handling the starting staff. New York’s rotation has been one of baseball’s best in both 2018 and 2019, but the majority of this top-level production came from three members: Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, and Zack Wheeler.
With Wheeler now in Philadelphia, Marcus Stroman steps in as part of this three-headed attack, which is backed up by individual fWAR projections. ZiPS is projecting 4.8 fWAR for deGrom, 3.4 for Syndergaard, and 2.7 for Stroman. If we make the assumption that Steven Matz and Rick Porcello will take the final two rotation spots, their expected production is much lower (1.9 for Matz and 1.4 for Porcello).
If the Mets actually do get elite production from their bullpen this year, it’ll immediately provide some relief to the rotation in all the obvious ways. DeGrom and Syndergaard won’t always need to go deep into games when they’re pitching well, even if they’re the ones that will likely do so more often than others. Having a dominant bullpen effectively shortens a game for the team that has those types of arms to call upon, which is the potential the Mets have here.
On any given night, at least the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings could all be accounted for and locked down (hypothetically speaking, of course). With that in mind, I was curious as to how each of the five Mets hurlers being discussed have performed when the opposing lineup turns over for the third and fourth time. Here’s what I found, with ERA being the only determination used (which I know can be a little deceiving when presented on its own):
It’s a good idea to mostly ignore the final row in the above table because the sample sizes are so small. Syndergaard was the only pitcher of these five to throw more than three innings in that situation, and he accumulated just over four frames himself.
The pitchers that really stick out when looking at how they performed when facing an opposing lineup for the third time include Matz and Porcello. Matz doesn’t last more than six innings all that often (he did so just four times out of 30 starts in 2019), so one would imagine that the presence of a lockdown bullpen could potentially make Rojas’ hook a little shorter for him. The same can be said for Porcello — while his ERA wasn’t great in any situation, there are noticeable jumps each time the lineup turned over another time.
As mentioned before, the benefits of having a consistently productive and above-average bullpen are rather obvious. The daily pressure to get deep into games would hypothetically go away, along with keeping starters a little more rested for the second half and a potential stretch run if the Mets find themselves in another playoff race. It’d also conceivably keep hurlers like Matz and Porcello in situations where they can be the most successful and productive, which would in turn allow them to add more fWAR to the cumulative rotation number by season’s end.
The only thing that’s left for something like this to come to fruition is for the above relievers to either get themselves healthy or back on track…or both.
