Giving context to the Mets scoring fewer than three runs 49 times in 2024

In yesterday’s article about the weakest part of the 2024 team, Bill made a comment that piqued my interest. He said:

The Mets scored two or less runs in 49 of 162 games, a little over 30%. Without doing further research on other teams, that seems a bit high to me.

One of the guiding principles of this blog is the need for context. And Bill’s musing here was an excellent chance for context. And it was even more interesting to me because it was far from clear – at least in my mind – if this was good, bad or indifferent. So, here’s a chart showing how many times each team scored fewer than three runs in a game. And for additional context, a team’s runs per game and overall record are included.

You can sort this chart by clicking on the columns, if you wish.

To answer Bill’s question, 49 games scoring fewer than three runs was almost exactly average in MLB last year. The Mets’ total ranked 15^th in the league and the MLB average was 49.53 in 2024. Also, you can see that for the most part, the teams with low totals of 0-2 runs scored generally had both high runs per game totals and good Won-Loss records. Which is pretty much what you would expect.

The interesting teams are the ones who don’t quite fit the bill in some way. The Giants had the third-fewest 0-2 runs scored games in the league yet finished under .500 at 80-82. And the flip side of that are the Mariners and Tigers, who both finished in the top third of most games with fewer than three runs scored yet finished with winning records. Both of those teams had very good pitching numbers, showing that there’s more than one way to construct a winning team.

As for the Mets, their number of games scoring fewer than three runs seems a tad high, given both their record and their overall runs per game. But not outlandishly so, as they were fairly close to several teams in those low-scoring games, who also finished comfortably above .500 for the season. The Mets had one more game with fewer than three runs scored than the 92-69 Guardians.

And there’s one main factor that we have to consider. Any regular reader of this blog last year heard me continually talk about how Citi Field suppressed offense the first two months of the season. Thru the end of May, the Mets played 32 games at home and 14 of those they scored fewer than three runs, a total of 44% of their games. Ignoring their “home” game in London, the Mets played 48 more home games the rest of the season and scored fewer than three runs 10 times, a total of 20.8% of their games.

You simply cannot consider the Mets’ overall total of games with fewer than three runs scored at face value. You have to make some mental adjustment for the way their home park played early in the year. And it wasn’t just a “runs scored early in the year are always down” type of thing. In 25 road games the first two months of the season, the Mets scored fewer than three runs six times, a total of 24% of their games. That 24% number is much closer to what they scored at home (20.8%) the final four months of the season, than the 44% number they produced at Citi Field the first two months.

If the Mets scored fewer than three runs per game the same rate at home as they did on the road the first two months of 2024, they would have had eight games – rounding up from 7.68 – instead of the 14 that they did. That would have given them 43 games all year with fewer than three runs scored, which would have them jump from 15^th to eighth in the MLB universe. That would have placed them just one ultra-low-scoring game behind the 93-69 Brewers.

We all want the Mets to live in Lake Woebegone, where all of the players and all of the splits are above average. Yet while the Mets’ number of games with fewer than three runs scored felt bad, it was actually a league-average total. And what kept them from having a better mark in this split was the way that Citi Field played early in the year. While we may never be able to pinpoint why it was such an extreme pitcher’s park early in the year, that simply does not negate the fact that it was.

So, we now have terrific context for this split, at least in terms of the offensive level of 2024, which was 4.39 runs per game. If we assume a similar run environment in 2025, we should hope the Mets can have a total in the low 40s. And if we want to look at the best-case scenario, that total would drop into the 30s, which would rank in the top five in the league.