The Mets already (half) know what’s coming

Translated by José M. Hernández Lagunes

If the highlight of the American League postseason has been the brave Tigers, who rode a wave of chaos to ring the bell, the highlight of the National League table has been, without a doubt, the crazy and crazy Mets , who have eliminated two of the three best teams in the Old Circuit. At times, it has seemed like the team was making its way at will, driven solely by its vibes. But the open secret about the club is that the lineup has been one of the best units in baseball for more than 75% of the season. After moving to Francisco Lindor At the top of the batting order on May 18, the Mets’ .760 OPS was the fourth-best in baseball, as were their 585 runs scored.

However, for much of the first two rounds of the postseason, opposing starters were able to keep that lineup in check. The Phillies’ rotation only allowed six runs in 21 ⅓ innings against them, giving them a 2.53 ERA; Brewers starters had a 2.84 ERA in their Wild Card series against the Mets, allowing just four runs in those three games.

If you watched those series, you know the Mets didn’t score just four times against Milwaukee or six against Philadelphia; That means they did a lot of damage to two of the best bullpens in the League during the regular season. That’s not to say all of their success can be attributed to their dominance against relievers—they also strung together the Phillies’ lineup using a familiar script—but their ability to handle some of the league’s toughest pitchers has been the driving force behind his repeated theatrics in recent games.

And the relievers they’ve done this to are very unpleasant indeed. The Phillies sent a pair of high-risk arms to the All-Star Game in Arlington, Texas. Jeff Hoffman y Matt Strahmand the Brewers bullpen has perhaps the best reliever in the League in its closer, Devin Williams. These weren’t the type of late-inning teams that typically blow up in the postseason, yet the Mets did exactly that in both series.

It’s possible that this is just a function of a particularly small subset of events—they have only 127 plate appearances against relief pitchers in the postseason—but it’s worth noting that this team was almost on a level of its own in terms of how they performed against relievers compared to starters during the regular season. Using SEAGER as a measuring stick for the batter’s process at the plate, the Mets had the greatest disparity of any team in the quality of their hitting against relievers (y-axis) compared to starters (x-axis), improving significantly once that the opener came out:

So there are signs that this could be something unique to this group of hitters, perhaps in their skills or their collective approach. But how does this division occur? My mind naturally goes to the number of options in a repertoire for starters compared to relievers. Perhaps these hitters would have the ability to prepare and recognize pitches better if they could narrow down what they look for to a few different types of pitches.

To test that effect, I grouped each of the pitchers they faced throughout the season based on the depth of their arsenals. If a pitcher threw a pitch 10% of the time or more throughout the season, that counted as another pitch hitters had to worry about. So it was as simple as taking a weighted average of the Mets’ performance (OPS, y-axis) against different depths of the arsenals (blue starter, orange reliever).

There’s probably a survivorship bias here, since starters who have five pitches they use frequently are probably already very good, but it certainly seems like the kind of effect we had in mind. His OPS against relievers who use only two pitches is equally due to the fact that they are likely to be the totally dominant fireball pitchers that only a few teams have; They have one of the best examples in the League in their own bullpen, Edwin Díaz. Otherwise, the team’s best performance against both starters and relievers is against those with three-pitch repertoires, a description that matches much of the Phillies bullpen, including Jeff Hoffman, Matt Strahm and Carlos Estevez.

In the first game of the series, Zack Wheeler dominated the Mets for seven innings, before Jeff Hoffman came in with a 1-0 lead to protect in the eighth. True to form, he threw eight sliders in that inning—he was the backbone of his arsenal this season, with a 45% swing rate and a .198 average against—and the Mets converted on five of them, including 100% of those in the strike zone, subtly implying that they were aiming the pitch. It’s nasty even when hitters are looking for it, so Lindor missed a couple before eventually working a walk, but two of Hoffman’s sliders were brought into play. Crucially, one of them was the driving hit of Mark Winds on a count of 1 and 2:

It’s just a theory, but it’s not too hard to imagine that a team employing JD Martinez would be exceptionally well prepared every time a new pitcher takes the mound. That includes knowing what pitch you’re likely to throw on certain accounts and being prepared to rule out other possibilities. During the postseason, they have taken it to another level. Who knows how long they can keep him against the Dodgers’ deep and varied bullpen, but he’s certainly been a big part of their journey so far.