Mets Minor League Preview: Las Vegas 51s

While the big league regular season gets going on Sunday night, the minor leaguers have to wait until Thursday evening to begin their 2016 campaign. So, welcome to the preview for the Mets’ full-season affiliates. We’ll start close to the big leagues with the Triple-A Las Vegas 51s and move down the system to discuss the Double-A Binghamton Mets and the full season Single-A affiliates in Port St. Lucie and the (new) Columbia Fireflies next week.

There is usually little point in discussing whether a minor league team is going to be good relative to the other teams in the league. Minor league teams serve the purpose of the big league team, primarily to develop future major league-caliber players. In the case of Triple-A, the team is designed to hold depth and provide insurance for the season’s inevitable injuries and churn. My point is that in most cases, discussing a team’s composition is a fool’s errand. Instead, focus on the prospects that matter at each level.

(Jeff Paternostro’s 2016 Mets Top 10 Prospects is absolutely required required reading. Relatively little has changed in the last five weeks, so in most cases, I’ll spend less time on those Top 10 guys.)

With relative stability on the big league staff following a successful 2015, the upper reaches of the minors saw very little churn among the field staff. The managers and coaches–like the players–aspire to reach or return to the show. The 2016 Las Vegas 51s return the same identical coaching staff as the 2015 version of the team with Wally Backman serving his fifth season as manager, Frank Viola his third as pitching coach, and Jack Voigt in his second as hitting coach. Keep this in mind: it is a matter of when–not if–Viola will get a shot as a big league pitching coach.

Brandon Nimmo

Nimmo’s spring was slowed by a torn muscle in his foot. While Jeff rightly wondered if this–combined with a history of knee problems–would force Nimmo from center field to left field, I wonder if this foot injury is an indication of something else. Nimmo is one of the hardest workers in the system, and I’ve admired how he seemed to come to Spring Training in bigger and better shape than he ended the previous year. Maximizing one’s natural gifts is usually the goal. However, for guys on the margin–and Nimmo now falls into this category–the level of effort required to push their body to keep up with their more talented roster-mates can induce breakdowns.

Anyway, while Nimmo has not hit enough in the upper minors to suggest that he’s an everyday player, his platoon splits do argue strongly that he’ll find a big league job. Combining his time in Double-A and Triple-A in the 2014 and 2015 seasons, he’s run a .174/.290/.225 line in 208 PA against lefthanders with exactly zero homeruns. That’s not good. On the other hand, he’s hit .285/.369/.425 in 713 PA against righties with a 17.1 percent strikeout rate and a 10.7 percent walk rate.

It just does not seem like that much of a stretch of imagination to see Nimmo as the left-handed half of a platoon.

Dilson Herrera

With 169 PA over the 2014 and 2015 seasons, Herrera no longer has rookie eligibility and thus does not appear on Baseball Prospectus’ Top 101 or any other prospect list. Despite that, he’ll be the best Mets “prospect” in the minors to start the 2015 season, and would easily belong in a Top 101. He did enough good in 31 games in the majors in 2015 to post a 0.5 WARP while hitting .211/.311/.367 with three home runs and a pair of stolen bases … at 21 years old.

The Mets temporarily blocked Herrera’s return to the show by trading for Neil Walker to play second base, and that pushed Herrera back to Las Vegas. His primary mission will be to become a more selective hitter; he walked in just 7.7 percent of his plate appearances in Triple-A in 2015. If he hits, there could well be opportunity back in the big leagues this year. In the event that David Wright cannot play every day, and Herrera beats up on Triple-A again, the Mets could shift Walker over to third to play Herrera at second while keeping Wilmer Flores in a super-sub/Lucas Duda’s caddy vs. LHP role.

Other Hitters

Jeff’s No. 4 Mets prospect, Gavin Cecchini, is headed to Vegas to start the year in his age-22 season. There’s a big leaguer in here, but probably a below-average starter. It is worth pointing out that Cecchini exhibited outstanding strike zone control in Double-A in 2015, walking in 8.7 percent of his plate appearances while fanning in just 11.3 percent, over 485 PA.

I suppose this is the place for a quick note about outfielder Travis Taijeron, who won the Mets’ John J. Murphy award for top Spring Training performance by a rookie. All together now: SPRING TRAINING STATS DO NOT MATTER. Taijeron, who turned 27 on January 20, hit .274/.393/.536 in 127 games in Las Vegas in 2015. He’s patient and strong; when he connects, he can hit a ball a long way as evidenced by his 50 extra-base hits. However, this is a swing big league pitchers will exploit in a way minor leaguers can’t. He has a very deep load, with a near-armbar that will leave him vulnerable to fastballs in. Even in Triple-A, he struck out in 30.8 percent of his plate appearances. Big league pitchers will eat him alive.

Pitchers

Things are a little leaner on the mound here after the Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, and Steven Matz parade through the upper minors in the last few years.

Instead, the “big” names in the Triple-A rotation will be a pair of pitchers with decent fastballs, reasonable command, and not quite enough breaking ball. And they both need to prove they can miss enough bats to compete as upper level starters. For all the excitement about Robert Gsellman’s hair in Spring Training, the right-hander fanned just 12.7 percent of opponents in 16 starts in Double-A during 2015 on his way to a 3.51 ERA. As Jeff noted, Gsellman has a nice potential curveball, he just does not throw it enough. Still, his future might be dialing his fastball up from the low 90s as a starter to 94ish out of the bullpen in short bursts. There’s still a chance that he’ll open up at a Double-A, rather than in Vegas.

The details are a little different for Gabriel Ynoa, but the punchline is awfully similar: with a strikeout rate of 12.9 percent in Double-A, he did not miss enough bats in 2015 to suggest that he has a future as a big league starter. Still, he can run it up to 95 at max effort, so perhaps there’s a viable reliever in here as well.

Lefty Josh Smoker, a former first round pick of the Washington Nationals, has bounced back from multiple shoulder surgeries to find his mid-90s heat. The Mets added him to the 40-man roster in November, so it’s a pretty good bet he’ll get a look at some point in 2016 as the bullpen churns.

Photo Credit: David Kohl-USA TODAY Sport