Raise the floor, David Stearns

What a difference a week makes.

We’re still too early in the season to pack our bags for a trip to Panic City, but losing as many as seven games in a row seems indicative of a deeper issue than a simple bump in the winding road that is the marathon of a baseball season. It, at the very least, gives us insight into the depths to which the team can sink should all the wheels fall off at the same time. Those depths, it turns out, were horrifyingly cavernous considering how soundly outplayed the team generally was during this stretch.

It’s unclear what dark sorcery was cast on the team when the belated June swoon started on Friday, June 13^th, but the offense contributed -0.2 fWAR with a scorching 70 wRC+, the bullpen matched that -0.2 fWAR, and the rotation looked like regular world-beaters in comparison with their robust 0.0 fWAR during the losing streak. Those were all bottom five in baseball, a stark contrast to the before times ( before June 13^th) when all three of these units were top five in baseball.

Perhaps the questions shouldn’t concern how the Mets collapsed so fantastically for such a prolonged stretch, but how the heck their perch got so high that the fall was that much more jarring in the first place. Sometimes the simplest, if unsatisfying, answer really is just a regression to the mean and bad injury luck finally catching up to a roster that seemed to be paradoxically both over-performing and under-performing at the same time.

At this point, what is there to do? You look to plug the holes, of course, though which way to go about it is less clear. Which parts of the roster were really just slumping terribly and which are too flawed to ignore?

Griffin Canning had phenomenal results in his first 31 innings across March and April, but he’s been progressively worse since then. Tylor Megill turned back into a pumpkin after looking great to start the season, and he and Kodai Senga are on the shelf with injuries that further strain a starting staff that defied expectations after opening the season with Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas on the injured list. Even so and barring a surprise deadline move for an upper-tier starter, the rotation largely appears to be a case of holding on for dear life until the cavalry arrives.

The Mets will almost certainly make various moves regarding the bullpen, so any further discussion here seems a tad moot. Still, it may be time for David Stearns to really assess where he needs to move on in order to stabilize the pen as a whole.

That leaves the lineup, or more specifically the bottom of the lineup and the bench. There isn’t a ton of wiggle room at the top here considering Pete Alonso, Juan Soto, Jeff McNeil, and Francisco Lindor all have wRC+ values above 120 (with Starling Marte close as well) and are carrying the offense despite the somewhat violent ups and downs of their performances (and Soto’s polarizing debut) so far. Brandon Nimmo is in the midst of a consecutive relatively disappointing season, though he’s still hitting at an above average clip, and even Jesse Winker was technically performing at an above average level while healthy.

Every other hitter that has gone to bat for the team this season has been a below-average (less than a 100 wRC+) performer. This includes the likes of Mark Vientos, Brett Baty, Francisco Alvarez, Luisangel Acuna, and various others that have had plate appearances. That’s 1,210 plate appearances out of 2,933, or just over 41%, the team has had this season with a below average performance.

The expectation obviously shouldn’t be that your team has an All-Star at every position, and there’s not a ton you can do when even bench players like Winker catch the injury bug. The amount of faith placed in young players like Alvarez and (especially) Vientos and punting on offense in center field all seemed somewhat reasonable heading into the season based on roster construction, but being locked into the likes of Baty and Acuna as fallback options has exacerbated the tailspin.

What’s there to be done beyond hoping for health and a turnaround? Well, raise the floor of the team as much as realistically possible.

There’s not much else to do for the rotation to achieve this beyond waiting for health as Stearns has done a remarkable job building depth here. The bullpen will also undoubtedly continue to be tweaked as needed. From the perspective of the lineup, however, the team should aim for deals like the 2015 additions of Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson. Despite their acquisitions being romanticized at this point, they were at the very least the type of average, veteran players that stand more of a chance to stanch the bleeding than the current crop of reserves appears capable of doing.

It may be possible, even likely, that this stretch represented all that could possibly go wrong at once and remains an outlier for the rest of the season. Perhaps health and normalization of performances gets and keeps the team on track for another exciting October run. What happens if a similar bout of injuries and slumps hits at the wrong time, and we’re watching the same below-average players attempt to keep the ship afloat during the stretch run or during the playoffs?

We extol Stearns for his ability to squeeze as much juice as possible out of every inch of a roster, particularly on its fringes, but at the moment its the fringes that are performing even worse than could be expected for the end of an ostensibly competitive roster. The floor of this team will need to be raised a bit to at least attempt to head off another free fall of this nature, and if anyone is equipped to do it in terms of both money and capability it is this iteration of ownership and front office.

You’re never as bad as you look at your worst and so on and so forth. The 2024 Mets endured two five-game losing streaks, for instance, though that team was certainly not the model of consistency. There’s just over a month until the trade deadline, which should be a fair amount of time for the team to solidify its assessment on where this roster can be tweaked to raise the floor and stabilize its baseline to mitigate prolonged, costly team-wide skids such as the one it just endured.