The Mets don’t really seem to care about defense. No, really — looking at the scope of their offseason, it’s hard to find the Mets either picking up a player who is considered elite defensively or representing a specific upgrade at a given position.

Instead, they’ve gone out and picked up a series of versatile players with above-average bats or players at positions where the Mets already had a solid guarantee of production and shuffled the existing players on their roster. Jeff McNeil, who has only seen eight games of minor league action in the outfield, will be asked to learn the position during spring training; Robinson Cano, while a solid defensive second baseman for his entire career, is gradually getting older at a middle infield position where youthfulness pays; and Peter Alonso, despite Mets officials’ disingenuous characterization of his defense as justification for service time manipulation, has still drawn only mixed reviews defensively at first. But the Mets appear to not really care — and they may be wise to do so.

Let’s talk through this philosophy a little bit. There are two dominant approaches to pitching, with individual player strategies usually falling somewhere in-between the two extremes: pitch-to-contact and strikeout pitching. Pitch-to-contact relies heavily on hard-breaking pitches, throwing inside, and inducing ground-balls and soft contact for fielders — think Dallas Keuchel and Kyle Hendricks. Strikeout pitching, however, tends to rely on overpowering hitters with solid stuff and generating whiffs — think Chris Sale and Justin Verlander. From a fielder’s perspective, strikeout-heavy approaches limit balls in play and reduce the importance of fielding, whereas pitching-to-contact requires more chances, even though they’re easier.

The Mets are built like a strikeout-heavy team – of the five starters who pitched 100+ IP in 2018, all five starters recorded K/9 figures above the MLB average (8.53 K/9). Per FanGraph’s depth charts projections, only fifth-rotation member Jason Vargas is projected to record a below-average K/9. For Mets relievers, FanGraph’s depth charts projects the Mets’ bullpen to rank 6th in K/9, behind the Phillies, Padres, Astros, Brewers, and Yankees. Succinctly put, the Mets are not projecting to have that many balls in play — thus limiting the number of defensive chances that fielders might have. For a team with a great deal of uncertainty defensively, that’s a good thing — if the Mets are poor defensively, they won’t have as many opportunities on the field to show it.

And even then, the Mets have the opportunity to not be nearly as poor defensively as the sum of their parts might be — a defensive shift might aid them in hiding further their defensive deficiencies. In 2018, the Mets used a non-traditional infield defense on just 21% of pitches thrown — 21st out of 30 in the majors. With the recent expansion of the Mets’ analytics department, the Mets might be far more aggressive in shifting in 2018, and it could reap dividends — while publicly available defensive data is cloudy, it and other data tend to support the idea that the shift is saving teams runs. More importantly, it hides defensive deficiencies of poor-fielders — the shift on average reduces the distance from a fielder’s starting position to where they might need to end up to field the ball, and with a rather old/slow Mets infield (Jed Lowrie and Cano are approaching their forties and Alonso will never win any footraces with his teammates), having an extra half-step on average can represent a huge advantage.

This is not to say that the Mets are punting defense to the wind – the addition of Keon Broxton and the retention of Juan Lagares this offseason seems to indicate that the Mets might value defense a good bit more in high leverage situations, as both players are perfectly suited as gold-glove caliber defensive replacements. Sticking either (or both) of them in the field in close, late games could help keep the Mets either in the game or in the lead.

The end result of this is that the Mets can stack more bats in the lineup with less of a trade-off on defense — one can feel more confident about putting players who are poor defensively but solid offensively in the field knowing that any defensive deficiencies can be managed and limited through other factors. Yes, defensive is important — but for a team that finished 24th in the majors in OPS last season, the Mets could be forgiven for placing it in the backseat and valuing offense.