While many in the media seem focused on what’s happened to that great young Mets pitching that was going to stop and overcome that Kansas City Royals offense, what I want to know is what’s happened to the Mets offense?
The last two games have felt an awful lot like the pre-July 24 Mets team, the one that was last in the league in batting and runs scored. Where the team that scored a league leading 5.6 runs per game from August 1 through the end of the season?
It’s hard to fathom just how bad the team has been offensively in the World Series, and it’s not just two or three players, the whole entire lineup is mired in an offensive slump.
In Game 2, we made Johnny Cueto look like vintage Juan Marichal. If not for Lucas Duda, who went 2-for-3 with an RBI, the Mets would have gotten no-hit last night. The rest of the lineup went 0-for-25 with 4 strikeouts.
Before the game I predicted that our lineup would destroy Cueto. I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried. In 23 innings, the Mets have batted .165 with a .230 on-base and an appalling .432 OPS in the World Series.
Our cleanup hitter Yoenis Cespedes is suffocating us right now. Yo went 0-for-4 last night, and is 1-for-10 with three strikeouts in the series. In fact, he’s hitting just .227/.244/.386 in the postseason.
David Wright is yielding a brutal .171/.320/.220 slash line in 41 at-bats with 14 strikeouts this postseason, and Michael Conforto is hitless in his last 19 at-bats.
“We came into the series swinging the bat fairly well,” David Wright said after the game. “I thought we had some hard-hit balls; just seemed like they played us perfectly. We drew some walks, which was good. There were one or two times where we had opportunities to score runs and that was it.”
Curtis Granderson, Wilmer Flores, Michael Cuddyer and Travis d’Arnaud are a combined 2-for-27 in the World Series. And even Daniel Murphy has been silenced by Royals pitching, having had his home run streak snapped and being limited to just a 2-for-9 showing at the plate with an alarming – for him – four strikeouts.
“We’ve got to pick it up offensively,” manager Terry Collins said last night. “We’ve got to do a better job of using the field to hit. And we’ve done it. We certainly have done it. We’ve got to do it again.”
By the way, I found something Collins said yesterday to be very odd. He told reporters that he’s been reluctant to use Juan Uribe because he hasn’t played since late September, which begs the question, then why was he added to the World Series roster? Essentially the Mets are playing with a 24-man squad. That’s not to say that whomever would have replaced Uribe could have cured our offensive problems, I just thought it was weird is all.
This team is too damn good to be hitting so poorly. The law of averages say the Mets will breakout big-time during the next 2-3 games. I remain convinced that the Mets will benefit from some home cooking as they resume the series in what should be a supercharged and electric Citi Field beginning with Game 3 on Friday.
I’m confident that Noah Syndergaard will be able to tame that hard-hitting Kansas City Royals lineup, and the fact that we’ll be facing the backend of their rotation bodes well for us. But it won’t matter how great Syndergaard pitches if we don’t start hitting the ball and scoring some runs. So keep the faith my friends. Don’t stop believing and Let’s Go Mets!
