Reflections on consecutive tough Mets losses

“When you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose”

How does it feel? Well, it feels pretty lousy, honestly. After Friday’s game, in the Game Chatter my comment said something about it being a pretty depressing loss. And then came Saturday, which turned out to be more depressing.

“An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice”

For me, the nadir of 21st Century Mets fandom was May of 2013, when night after night after night Terry Collins would write the names John Buck, Ike Davis and Ruben Tejada into the lineup, even though all three were hitting like pitchers. They were dubbed the Terrible Trio and watching the games with those three in the lineup was nothing more than a chore.

In 2013, Collins should have had the freedom to try something else, to be creative and take chances. But he chose not to. Here in 2016, he doesn’t have that freedom. This team is supposed to contend and if he benched Player A for Ty Kelly, people’s heads might explode.

Is it worse to have nothing to lose and play it safe or to play it safe when you have something to lose and watch it all slip away?

It’s easy to get caught up in Talk Radio emotion and propose all kinds of radical moves. Don’t just sit there – do something!

Fire Tim Teufel!
Sign Jose Reyes!
Invite the press in and hold bunting practice every day!
Never take out a starting pitcher with a lead!
Trade the farm for the day’s hot trade target!

There’s this point of view in all walks of life, not just sports, where if you do something, anything really, it’s better than doing nothing. But just as the mere utterance of an oral remark doesn’t make you clever – the mere action of making a move doesn’t make your team better, if the move itself doesn’t really address a fundamental need.

Is Reyes an upgrade on Asdrubal Cabrera? It’s not impossible but I wouldn’t wager on it with your money, much less mine. So why do it?

It’s depressing to watch the Mets right now. But as bad as it is, my fear is the solution is even worse. My prescription is from the movie Alice in Wonderland. “Don’t just do something, stand there!” It doesn’t mean literally to do nothing; it simply means to think through the process and make sure that the right things are getting done the right way.

The lineup was constructed with the idea that there were no superstars but that everyone could contribute and keep the ball moving forward. The lineup would succeed because there were no sinkholes.

Let’s look at the lineup. Who are the sinkholes, the guys hitting like the May 2013 Terrible Trio? Okay, catcher stinks but hopefully that gets fixed next week. Who else? Who else is performing so poorly overall that they just need to go?

We know what the problem is, that the team simply doesn’t hit with Runners in Scoring Position (RISP) Some like to employ narrative here, that this team-wide failure is a character flaw, that somehow our guys just don’t want it enough when they’re up at bat in these situations. If only there was some grit here, that everything would be okay. Meanwhile, here’s the reality:

Curtis Granderson has a .782 lifetime OPS with RISP. This year he’s at .446
Cabrera has a .717 lifetime mark and this year he’s at .622
Michael Conforto had a .931 mark last year and this year he’s at .743
Wilmer Flores put up marks of .762 and .723 the previous two years but is at .422
James Loney has an .805 lifetime mark but is at .516 so far
Kevin Plawecki had a .779 OPS last year and a .647 mark this year

The Mets’ failure to produce with RISP is random. It’s not a character flaw. It’s painfully brutal to watch six guys fall between 95 and 336 points off their career marks in this category. But you know what? Sometimes this stuff happens. And fans of every team thinks bits of random bad luck happens more to them than to other teams.

Is it really random though? Here are David Wright’s yearly OPS with RISP marks, starting in 2006:

1.060
.976
.703
.827
.836
.765
.940
.775
.687
.910
.706

He had a .703 mark in 2008, when he finished 7th in the league in MVP voting. And he had a .910 mark in 2015 when no one considered him one of the elite players in the game. Mr. Clutch himself, Derek Jeter, was all over the map in his career, posting RISP marks as low as .571 and as high as four digits. In a three-year span in the heart of his career, he posted back-to-back-to-back marks of .741, 1.063 and .882 in years where he finished 10th, 2nd and 11th in MVP voting.

If stars like Wright and Jeter can bounce up and down year to year in their RISP productivity, should it be any surprise when others do it?

Someone, likely Chris F., asked me earlier in the year how I could not be upset by this. And it’s not that it isn’t upsetting to watch because it surely is. But what’s your defense against randomness? You can bitch and moan and complain – but all that does is bring you down even more. So why do it? The last two nights have been tough and I fear that bitchiness has encroached upon me. But I’m trying Ringo. I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.