Part I: Home/Road differentials for the Mets

If you’ve been reading this site regularly, you know that the Mets have been a good offensive team on the road and quite the opposite at home. They’ve scored an average of 5.47 runs per game on the road, compared to 3.41 runs per game at Citi Field. And it’s not just the batters, as the pitchers have allowed 5.12 runs per game on the road and 3.64 runs per game at home. And the pitchers have been let down by their defense in Citi Field, as errors have led to 16 unearned runs. In their home park, Mets pitchers have a 2.81 ERA.

Citi Field has always been a slight pitcher’s park but this year it’s playing as an extreme one. Here’s how all 30 teams have done this year scoring runs home and away:

These numbers are staggering! There’s no team in baseball – in either direction – that comes even remotely close in having such a wide difference between what they do at home and what they do on the road. The Mets lead the majors in runs per game in away games and they’re 27th in runs per game at home.

People are hesitant to believe that a home park could make that much difference. If it wasn’t happening to the Mets, it would be difficult for me to believe, too. But let’s see if we can isolate any other factors. How about quality of opponent? Here’s who the Mets have played both at home and away and we’ll compare the teams by their opponent’s ERA in overall games for simplicity. This is choosing expediency over completeness but hopefully it gives a reasonable estimate. Certainly, we’ll find out if they’re facing good pitching at home and worse on the road.

Home Games
3.93 – Brewers
3.41 – Tigers
3.42 – Royals
3.86 – Pirates
4.25 – Cardinals
3.81 – Cubs
3.47 – Braves

Away Games
4.03 – Reds
3.47 – Braves
3.17 – Dodgers
4.51 – Giants
4.43 – Rays
4.25 – Cardinals

Here we certainly see that they’ve played tougher teams at home then on the road, ERA-wise. But if we operate under the assumption that Citi Field is depressing runs in a significant fashion, we would expect that the teams that got to pitch in Citi Field would have a lower ERA than the ones that didn’t. So, let’s remove what the Mets did from their opponents and see what we get. For the two teams that they’ve played both at home and on the road, we’ll remove both numbers.

So, fewer than a quarter of a run difference in ERA between home and road opponents. That closes the gap some but it’s still an overwhelming difference between what the Mets are producing at home and on the road this year.

In Part II, which will be posted later today, we’ll look at the individual pitchers the Mets have faced this year.