Games #67-69 (39-30) - A Rough Patch in the Bronx

The Mets hot streak hit a bump this weekend, losing the last 2 of the 3 game set in the Bronx.  Here's some notes from all the weekend's play.

• Santana has now given up 3 grand slams this year - before this year he had given up 2 in his career.  Wow.  With each start it becomes more and more clear that Johan is no longer an elite pitcher, but merely a very good one.   That's not a bad thing, except he's owed $97 million over the 2011-2014 season (although the Mets do hold a $5.5M buyout option on 2014).  At this point, I'm pretty firm in my belief that the Mets will need to add a Cliff Lee or Roy Oswalt at the deadline to win a playoff series - more on that tomorrow.  Santana/Pelfrey is just not a strong enough 1/2 punch right now.
• Interesting note - the Mets have gone 13-4 in the month of June, and their starting pitchers have only 3 losses this month.  Santana has 2 of those losses, and Pelfrey has the other.
• With a 3-3 split, the Mets and Yankees have now split 6 of the 14 interleague series.  The Yankees have also won 6, and the Mets have won twice.  Of course, the only series that really mattered, in 2000, was an easy Yankees win.
• No idea what to do with Tatis - he is clearly floundering at the plate right now.  Minaya has done yet again a terrible job of providing this team with depth.  Their bench is among the weakest in major league baseball, and there isn't really anyone on the bench who strikes opposing teams as a threat right now.   Carter can only hit righties (and mediocre at that at best), Tatis can't hit, period, the Other Feliciano does not belong in the major leagues, and well, Alex Cora is arguably the worst offensive player in the major leagues.  Is it time to call Jermaine Dye and see if he'd be willing to play once a week for the Mets?  I'm sure he could learn to play a little 1B and spell Ike as well.  What about Joe Crede to be a pinch hitter/OF/3B/1B backup?  Those guys CAN'T be worse than what Omar has provided Jerry with.
• Jose Reyes hit 2 HR on Sunday, and he's now hitting .322 for the month with 4 HR and 7 RBI while posting a .950 OPS.  However, underlying those standard numbers is an extremely low 10.2% line drive rate, and number which needs to prop back up for Jose to continue this success.   His HR/FB rate has jumped to 18.2% this month (vs. his career 6.2% rate), and his pop up rate has shrunk to a miniscule 4.5%, compared to his career 11.7% rate.  Tough to credit all of his June success to luck, but the outliers suggest his been more lucky than good this month.  Would be nice to see that line drive number get closer to normal in July.
• Jason Bay, David Wright, and Ike Davis combined for 5 hits over the 3 games.  There's just no chance the Mets are going to beat teams of high quality like the Yankees with that production from the 3-4-5 positions.  I'll give Davis and Wright a break here, but Bay is just terrible at the plate right now.  He's been sneaking in a few more hits of late, but I don't think he ever feels confident at the plate, and I doubt the opposing teams fear him right now.  Certainly not playing up to his contract, as we've constantly discussed here.  
• Very little question anymore about who the best pitcher in New York is.  The real question now is if Phil Hughes is #2, and if he's not, is Pelfrey, or is Johan.  I'm not even gonna go there.

Tomorrow we'll take a look at the Mets approach to the trade market, and especially pitching, in the next month or so.  The Mets will return home to Citi Field on Tuesday to host the Detroit Tigers, with the red-hot Jon Niese taking on Tigers ace Justin Verlander.  The way the Mets respond from this weekend's thumping against the Yanks will go a long way towards telling how the rest of this season will play out;  will it give us reasons to celebrate, or reasons to lament that being a Met fan sucks?

Game #55 (28-27) - Home is where the heart is

Just a few quick notes on last night's game, cause it actually wasn't terrible and I don't have a ton to complain about after finally breaking a 6 game losing streak against the Marlins.

• How ridiculous is it that R.A. Dickey is the Met's #3 starter this year?  Unfortunately, I'm in the camp of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Dickey has never posted an ERA under 5 in a season in which he made multiple starts, so it's tough to see him maintaining a sub-4.00 this year.  The biggest reason for Dickey's success has been his 81.9% strand rate, a whopping deviation from his career rate of 70.4%.  If he's unable to maintain his strand rate, which is likely, he'll return to the mediocrity that has defined his career to this point.  That's going to be bad news for this Mets team.
• The home/road split drives me crazy, and I really wish I had any idea why it happens.  It's tough to decide which team is the real Mets, but it would be great if they'd stop teasing us by playing like the best team in the NL when they play at home, and then the worst as soon as they leave Queens.  Just pick one and go with it!
• Jason Bay continues to swing a hot bat, the only problem is that it's got an Ichiro amount of pop in it.    His ISO is a career low .152, and his HR/FB% of 4.5 is the lowest of his career by a WIDE margin. Hopefully he can return at least to his 2007 rate of 11.4%, which was the lowest of his career in a season in which he managed only 21 HR.  His .299 average is propped up by an unsustainable .387 BABIP, but I'd happily trade some of that average for getting some power out of the 3 hole, especially with Ike and Wright continuing to struggle.  Bay is OPS'ing at a 1.034 clip at Citi, and .624 away with it - that goes a lot towards explaining the overall team home/road split. doesn't it?
• At this point, I'll take any save from K-Rod I can get, but I cannot remember the last time he closed a game with a 1-2-3 inning.  Watching him is just brutal, isn't it?
• One last thing - am I the only one who feels like it's a minor victory in any game when Wright doesn't strike out?  It gives me hope that the switch is turning on - of course until the next game when he goes 0-4 with 4 K's.

The Mets go for yet another home W today at 4:10 with Niese returning to the mound against lefty Nate Robertson.  Let's hope the success against lefties the Mets had in San Diego isn't blown by the bullpen like it was on Wednesday.  If it happens again, you can understand why being a Met fan sucks.

Revisiting an Old Debate

Once upon a time, I took part in a fantasy baseball league in which one of the members, an avid Yankee fan, proposed the outrageous idea that Robinson Cano was a more valuable and better player than Jose Reyes.  In 2007, when this idea was first proposed, it was flat out ridiculous.  Looking back, perhaps he was on to something.  In 2010, to propose Reyes as the superior player to Cano would be flat out ridiculous, no?  So let's take a closer look beneath the surface to see what happened here.  While the two players have completely different styles, and as such are difficult to compare, it's still fun to note the divergent trajectories their two careers are currently on.

Injuries, of course, are the first thing that come to mind when talking about the perceived diminished value of Reyes, but I'm not sure that tells the whole story.  In 2006, Reyes would hit .300 with 19 HR, 81 RBI, 122 R, and an impressive .354 OBP and .487 slugging.  Sadly, all of those numbers other than the OBP remain career highs.  He was 23 years old, and as Met fans we were ready to christen him the next great shortstop - if he could do this at 23, would 30 HR with 80 steals be possible in his peak years?  Fast forward to 2010.  Reyes has been hot of late, but even then, he's not close to the player he was in 2006-2008.  His walk rate is down to 5%, lowest since 2005, and has helped dragged his OBP beneath the Pudge line to .293.  His ISO, or isolated power, stands at .098, the lowest it's been in his career.  His flyball rate has jumped over 40 percent for the first time in his career, while at the same time his HR/FB rate has dropped all the way to 1.3%, far and away the lowest he's ever had.  I guess that's what happens when most of the fly balls you hit are weak pop ups.  His line drive rate is also at an all time low; in short, Reyes' offensive game has reached a nadir that none of us would ever have seen coming.  Unless, of course, we were seasoned Met fans.  Reyes' WAR currently stands at 0.5 - in his 2006-2008 peak he was at 5.5, 5.7, and 6.0.  In just two years, Reyes has gone from being an elite shortstop to one who is barely above replacement level.  Ah, the joys of being a Met fan.

On the flip side of the argument, you have Robinson Cano, the best homegrown talent of the 2000's Yankees crop.  While other more ballyhooed prospects like Chien Mien-Wang, Brandon Claussen, Eric Duncan, Drew Henson, and Dioneer Navarro have all but disappeared from the baseball landscape, Cano has flourished.  An undrafted free agent signed out of the DR at only 18, Cano was the Yankees #2 prospect in Baseball America's rankings in November 2004, but failed to crack their overall top 100.  Cano broke into the majors in May 2005 and took over a starting position immediately, posting solid offensive numbers at the bottom of the Yankee order while playing an atrocious second base.  From there, the rest is that storied Yankee history that makes me want to stab my eyes out and go Van Gogh on my ears.  With the exception of a blip on the radar in 2007, where an extremely unlucky .283 BABIP (a massive deviation from Cano's otherwise .335 career rate) drove Cano to a .271 average, Cano has become unquestionably the best offensive 2B in the American League (sorry Pedroia, MVP award aside, Cano is just better).  In 2009 and thus far in 2010 he's actually begun to challenge the mighty Chase Utley for the title of best in the majors, at least at the plate.  At the same time, Cano has even become a passable defensive player.  While advanced defensive metrics such as UZR, RngR, and UZR/150 continue to define Cano as below league average, he's gotten closer to the norm the past two years, and his massive bat more than makes up for it.  In fact, he's already started to draw media attention as a leading AL MVP candidate in 2010.  Sickening, isn't it?  While a pretty strong jump in HR/FB rate early on looks sure to drop off for Cano, the same exponential growth is what brought Joe Mauer the award in 2009 as he sustained it for the whole season.

Basically, what's happened is that Cano has continued to progess as a player from his age 23 to 27 seasons almost undeterred, while Reyes has first been derailed by injuries in 2009 and now by an incredible drop in performance in 2010.  Both players are 27, and as we've seen countless times before, anything can happen.  Perhaps Reyes will regain and expand on his 2006-2008 form, and perhaps Cano will be hurt or lose his swing.  For now though, the Cano vs. Reyes debate and how it's progressed is just another example of why BEING A MET FAN SUCKS.