With the season opener drawing ever so closer, MMO is buzzing with excitement, optimism, scorn and dozens of other emotions. As much as I am looking forward to the upcoming campaign, I do have a few concerns with the makeup of our lineup. Below are three roster issues that I believe could come back to hurt the Mets this season.
1. Lack Of A Baserunning Threat
There are a lot of positive signs during spring training that point to a much improved offense for the upcoming year. However, there will still be nights when a pitcher like Jordan Zimmermann or Clayton Kershaw is cruising along for 6 or 7 innings without a hard hit ball against them. In these situations, the best chance to disrupt that pitcher’s flow could be to have a pinch hitter lay down a bunt, slap a weak ground ball for an infield single or bloop a hit into the outfield and distract him on the basepaths.
As much as fans detested Eric Young Jr as a starter, he was a great utility player who you can use as a pinch runner and draw the attention of a pitcher. When an opposing starter is in a groove, you may only have a couple of chances to rattle him. This year, we have no such player in our starting lineup or off the bench. With our RHH dominant lineup, it wouldn’t surprise me if we run into the occasional 2 or 3 hit shutout.
2. Lack Of Second LHH Off The Bench
As it stands now, Kirk Nieuwenhuis will be our only lefthanded batter available to pinch hit. Our second set of options against RHPs are Eric Campbell and Anthony Recker, who have more or less even splits against RHPs and LHPs. Our final line of defense are John Mayberry and Ruben Tejada who have major drop offs in productivity when facing RHPs.
This will surely hurt in situations when we need to pinch hit for the pitcher with a man on base and late in the game. Maybe Sandy’s plan is to use Jacob deGrom as the second LHH.
3. Cuddyer In LF & Granderson In RF
Earlier in a spring training game, Michael Cuddyer and Juan Lagares collided on a fly ball which may have been due to the fact that Cuddyer who is deaf in his left ear, did not hear Lagares calling him off. I would think that taking every step possible to protect the most valuable position player on your team from injury should be reason alone to move Cuddyer over to RF.
On top of this, Michael Cuddyer is known as an abysmal defender and is now being asked to play a position which he has registered a grand total of 38 innings in his 14 year major league career. Most outfielders may find this transition easy but can we be assured of this from one of the worst defensive players in baseball?
Now if there is one aspect that Cuddyer does well on defense, it is his ability to make a solid throw. This is a complete contrast to Curtis Granderson‘s spaghetti arm which no baserunner has ever had a nightmare on.
All of these factors tell us that the logical thing to do is swap Granderson and Cuddyer’s positions yet the only explanation we have received about why this switch was not made was because Granderson was already familiar with the real estate in RF. This explanation would make a sliver of a sense if we hadn’t actually moved our walls in from RF.
At this point, I personally do not care about our outfield defense giving up some hits or an extra base here and there but if Lagares gets leveled or tripped up by Cuddyer at some point in the season, I want heads to roll.
Wrapping it up…
The first two issues could have been addressed in the offseason by simply moving replacing Ruben Tejada with a speedy LHH shortstop to backup Wilmer Flores. While there will be instances where these disadvantages do not affect the outcome of a game, I do believe that these three issues combined will cost the Mets at least two or three games over the course of the season.
