The best and worst stretches for Mets hitters after 38 games

One of the most-tired sports cliches is that you’re never as good as you look when things are going great, nor as bad as you look when you’re struggling. There’s no doubt this is a cliché – and you’re nowhere near as smart as you think you are if you’re passing this off as new-found wisdom. Still, things become cliché because there’s truth in them. And there’s no reason to ignore truth just because clowns say something ad nauseum.

The Mets have played 38 games this year, so let’s look at all of the hitters to have appeared in at least 30 games. The following chart lists those players, along with their season-long OPS, what they did in their best stretch of at least 10 games, followed by their worst stretch of at least 10 games. And just for clarity’s sake – there can be no overlap in these two stretches. Here are the numbers:

Pete Alonso – There’s perhaps no better indication of what a great start it’s been for the Mets’ first baseman than the fact that his bad stretch is a .909 OPS.

Luisangel Acuna – His good stretch is actually a touch better but we had to include the 10^th game of the year, where he had two hits, into his bad stretch. In his last 12 games and 45 PA, Acuna has a .681 OPS.

Francisco Lindor – How nice it is to see him hitting early in the season! And even his bad streak is better than most others on this list.

Brandon Nimmo – We can see some production here, yet the vast majority of that came in two games. Nimmo is the embodiment of trust the process here in the early going, without being 100% focused on the results. Yet at some point, we’re going to need to see results.

Juan Soto – Everyone has such high expectations from Soto that a season-long .863 OPS is viewed as a disappointment. May we all disappoint someone with equivalent production someway, somehow in our lives.

Tyrone Taylor – His hot streak numbers were the best of a similar batch with Lindor and Soto. However, Taylor had the fewest PA of the trio. Still, many people were saying Taylor wasn’t an MLB-starting-caliber hitter and it seems that’s just false.

Mark Vientos – We’ve talked earlier about how Vientos’ season shouldn’t be defined by his poor start and here we get to see just how bad it was – the worst of the bunch. Like Taylor, he’s turned things around, albeit with strong production over a longer stretch.

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While looking at this table, one thing that we should all be asking is if this is the best or worst that we’ll see from these players in a 10-or-more-game stretch the rest of the way. Chances are, we won’t see a better stretch from Alonso, just because what he’s done has been so tremendous. On the flip side, chances are we won’t see a slide from Vientos as bad as what happened with him the first 13 games of the year.

The real interesting ones are the ones in the middle from those extremes. Specifically, do you think we’ll see better best-case stretches from either Acuna or Nimmo the rest of the way? Everyone is raving about Acuna’s start to the season but that’s been fueled by a .371 BABIP. What happens when the hits stop falling in and we’re left with an .068 ISO, which ranks 13^th among the 15 hitters who’ve played for the Mets this year? It’s ahead of just Jose Siri (.050) and Hayden Senger (.036) and 46 points behind the number-12 hitter, Francisco Alvarez. When you’re experiencing an ultra-high BABIP, you should be more productive than this. Seiya Suzuki had a .370 BABIP last year, the highest-mark among qualified hitters. And he had a 138 wRC+. Acuna has a 109 mark in the category, 29-percent worse than Suzuki.

As for Nimmo, we have to be aware that this poor stretch to start the season comes on his underwhelming numbers dating back to July of last season. Were the poor numbers last year injury related? That’s possible but by no means is it a slam dunk. Are the poor numbers this season due to hitting in bad luck? To a certain extent, yes. Still, at some point we have to face reality. And with Nimmo, the reality is that in his last 443 PA, he has a .197/.273/.359 line. Those numbers work out to a wRC+ of 80, right on the Galvis Line.