Once Sandy Alderson took over the New York Mets’ front office and began rebuilding the organization toward its consecutive playoff appearances in 2015 and 2016, there’s been a focus on filling the starting rotation with as much elite talent as possible. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight now, we just ended up getting another example of the best-laid plans going awry. Even with that in mind, though, we can confidently say the best past decade of baseball in Queens has involved quite a number of memorable starting pitcher performances — both on a single-game and single-season basis.
Upon looking back at the Mets’ rotation production between 2010 and 2019, this area of New York’s roster performed at least reasonably well rather consistently, and that includes before the rebuild toward competitive baseball was completed. When using fWAR as the determining factor, it was clear to see the Mets employed productive rotations throughout the past decade…except for one season in particular.
And yes, that season was 2017. Here’s a quick look at New York’s cumulative rotation fWAR from each season, along with the corresponding MLB rank.
Not every single year was a proverbial home run (and Jacob deGrom‘s back-to-back Cy Young performances put the icing on the cake from 2018-19), but it’s clear that 2017 was the worst — both from the perspective of fWAR and MLB rank.
Having a rotation mostly full of young arms means that bumps in the road are bound to happen. However, it’s crazy to look at the past four seasons and having 2017 being the only one to not produce a cumulative fWAR of at least 16.0. It’s not like they just missed, either — lots of stuff went wrong en route to settling in at that 7.9 mark.
Following those consecutive trips to the playoffs, it wasn’t outrageous to think the rotation was poised to once again be an asset to the Mets. There were some blips in 2016, but this squad was returning with all five of their young arms in tow: deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, Matt Harvey, and Zack Wheeler.
Harvey was a bit of a wild card because of his Thoracic Outlet surgery, while Wheeler was preparing to toe the slab in a big-league game for the first time since 2014. The other three were coming off campaigns that ranged from good to great, and at the very least, there was some kind of comfort in knowing all five would be taking up residence in the same rotation.
Unfortunately, as we all know, it was short lived. There were 12 different hurlers who started at least one game for the Mets in 2017, and only two of them surpassed 100-plus innings pitched as a starter: deGrom (201.1) and Robert Gsellman (115.2). Syndergaard, Matz, Wheeler, and Harvey combined to toss just 272 innings as a group thanks to injuries and ineffectiveness on the hill.
The Mets were so starved for bodies in the rotation that even Rafael Montero had the opportunity to toss 95.2 innings of his own despite posting a 5.08 ERA in that situation.
There are a lot of factors that go into a rotation’s cumulative ERA, but any way you slice it, New York’s 5.14 mark didn’t look great. It was the fourth-highest number in baseball, and the company they kept also wasn’t great. The only teams worse in this department were the Baltimore Orioles (5.70), Cincinnati Reds (5.55), and Detroit Tigers (5.20) — all either on the verge or already in the middle of rebuilding.
New York’s cumulative ERA didn’t necessarily get to that point because of just one or two hurlers. It was a collective effort from a number of them. When looking at the worst single-season ERAs in team history for starting pitchers with at least 50 innings of work, the 2017 campaign appears four times within the bottom 30 players.
Those occurrences belong to Harvey (6.70), Matz (6.08), Gsellman (5.29), and Wheeler (5.21).
Even though three-fifths of this rotation still currently plays for the Mets, we really never got to see what kind of potential this entire group had when it was firing on all cylinders from March to September. That’s a shame, but it’s also how baseball goes — Wheeler leaving for the Philadelphia Phillies this past winter was just another reminder about how fleeting this game can be at any given time.
Judging from what’s happened since then, deGrom could easily be the last one standing within the next year or two. Syndergaard won’t play at all this year, and both he and Matz are due to become free agents at the end of 2021.
While it would’ve been nice to have watched the Mets accomplish more as a team with the majority of their homegrown starting pitchers around, we did get some nice memories. DeGrom will thankfully be around to make a few more along the way, too.
With regard to the 2017 season, though, that year acted as the worst kind of outlier in recent franchise history.
