What the Mets' top offensive team can tell us about the 2026 squad

Using park and league-adjusted wRC+

This is the 65^th year of the Mets’ existence. In how many of the previous 64 years do you think the Mets have had a team wRC+ of 100 or better? It’s been done just 16 times. Care to guess which was the best team by this metric? I’ll give you 10 guesses and you probably won’t get it, even if it makes sense once you consider it. The best hitting team in club history was the 2020 Mets, with a 123 wRC+. It makes sense because it’s easier to put up good numbers in a small sample, as 2020 Michael Conforto and Dominic Smith will tell you. It didn’t quite work that way for the 1981 Mets, though. That team placed 41^st in team history with a 90 wRC+.

In what probably won’t be a huge surprise for you, the 101-win 2022 Mets are the club with the best wRC+ mark in team history among those that played at least 100 games. That year’s squad put up a 113 wRC+. It’s my opinion that’s the type of offense the Mets should be looking to duplicate. Let’s look at the individual players to amass 200 PA for the ’22 Mets. And we’ll compare an equal number of 2026 Mets, taking those with the most PA to date.

It’s fun to see that 2022 team, which had six starters with a 124 or better wRC+ and a seventh that was in triple digits, too. A top reserve checked in with a 104 mark, leaving just catcher and DH as weak spots. And DH wasn’t bad at all – it was just split among a bunch of people, with the three players with the most time there posting wRC+ numbers of 147, 123 and 110. So, the 2022 squad essentially had one sink hole in the lineup – catcher.

Several years ago, we identified an 80 wRC+ as the equivalent of The Mendoza Line, which was based on a .200 AVG. This was dubbed The Galvis Line, in honor of Freddy Galvis, who had wRC+ marks of 81, 76, 74 and 79 in his career, much like Mendoza had batting averages of .180, .185, .198, .218 and .198 in his career.

Currently, there are five Mets below The Galvis Line, with three of them being worse than ’22 Tomas Nido. Welcome to the intersection of rotten offense and small samples! We should feel very confident that by the end of the season, both Bo Bichette and Francisco Lindor will be above The Galvis Line. Hopefully, both Jorge Polanco and Marcus Semien will clear that number, too, with Polanco reaching a triple-digit mark.

Which brings us to Carson Benge.

Life’s a lot easier for the 2026 Mets if Benge hits. But how confident are you in that supposition? We saw the ’22 club carry one weak link, so perhaps Benge will fill that role with this year’s team. But that ’22 team had six players that were at least 24% better than league average. Do you believe that Bichette and Lindor can reach that level? Do you think that Francisco Alvarez, Luis Robert Jr. and Mark Vientos can stay above that mark?

Even if you answer yes to all five names directly above, how confident are you that Brett Baty, Polanco and Semien can approach the 99 wRC+ of 2022 J.D. Davis? No matter how you slice it, the bottom line is that it’s going to take a lot of things going right for the 2026 Mets to have an offense that resembles the squad from four years ago.

Of course, you can say that it’s not a fair standard to demand duplication of the top full-season mark in club history. That’s a valid point. However, hopefully you can see that running out a lineup with multiple sinkholes isn’t the way to run a good offense. No one expects that once the dust settles that the Mets will have five hitters with numbers similar to ’22 Nido. But what if they have two that are beneath The Galvis Line and get north of 400 PA?

My belief is that you can’t will your team to have six hitters at least 24% better than average like the ’22 Mets. Yet you can will your team into having multiple sinkholes in the everyday lineup. My opinion is that, for the most part, the Braves are an incredibly lucky franchise. But one thing that they do to create good fortune is that when their team isn’t being wrecked by injuries, they don’t give a ton of playing time to guys who can’t hit.

The 2022 Braves that chased down the Mets had 14 players with 200 or more PA. Of that group, 13 were above The Galvis Line, with Eddie Rosario being the exception. Rosario was 10^th on the club with 270 PA. Seven of the eight hitters with the most PA on that Braves team had a wRC+ of 117 or greater, with the exception posting a mark of 90.

We don’t have any idea what’s in store for the hitters on this year’s Mets. Yet my hope is that there are no sacred cows, players who have their names written into the lineup day after day after day, despite what they’re doing offensively. And it doesn’t matter if it’s their top rookie, or their top trade acquisition or their top free agent signing – no one should be exempt from the idea that if you want to stay in the lineup, you need to pull your weight offensively.