During the Mets’ nearly unbeatable start to the season, I wrote about how the team’s pitching staff contributed, in part, by ensuring opposing runners who reached base rarely scored. Since then, the pitching has split between generally successful starts (a 3.74 starting pitcher DRA, good for sixth in baseball) and inconsistent relief appearances (a 4.95 relief DRA, 23rd overall) (note: the two DRAs are accurate through July 26); the difference between relief DRA and starter DRA is the highest amongst all teams. The focus on leads evaporating at the end of games, however, is as much about the end result themselves as it is that it seems like Mets starters rarely leave with the lead at all – during Saturday’s game, for instance, the broadcast revealed a disheartening stat that helped explain how a 1.82 ERA and 5-6 record could coexist.

Keith Hernandez: "Sometimes our truck will put this stuff up and it's just depressing." pic.twitter.com/YunAZFmC1Q

— Kate Feldman (@kateefeldman) July 29, 2018

A week prior to Saturday, Brandon Nimmo tied and broke the Mets’ single-season hit-by-pitch record previously held by Lucas Duda’s 2015 season at 14. What intrigued me about his breaking the record was not so much the HBP itself, but how the team’s offense responded. In addition to that, I decided to look at times reached on error, as well; both events, in some way, represent additional chances for the offense to score. For each statistic, the MLB average is 41 and 35, respectively, and the Mets are at 41 and 35 themselves.

Differing slightly from the way run expectancy is understood, I looked solely at what happened between the time a player was hit by the pitch or reached on an error and when they got out or scored. These 76 initial events, then, led to 169 scenarios; for example, Nimmo’s record-tying HBP led to baserunners on first and second with two outs and, as Asdrubal Cabrera subsequently struck out, was only associated with that one. The record-breaking one, occurring later in the same game, continued to keep the bases loaded with no outs, and then, following Devin Mesoraco’s double-play groundout, had a runner on third with two outs; both were counted for this article’s purposes.

This methodology was used because of the focus on the player reaching base via HBP or ROE – the situations are of interest for the purposes of seeing how a baserunner that might otherwise not have been there affects the offense for the time they’re on base. The following tables reflect the baserunning situations taking place across this time frame this season (e.g., column “12” row “2” means runners on first and second with two outs) and the number of runs scored from each situation during said time frame.

With runners on base over the whole season, the Mets have scored 13.2% of those who were on during a given plate appearance. While the percentage of runs scored over the number of baserunning situations I checked is higher than the aforementioned number, it’s clear that the Mets are overperforming in situations where few runs are to be had – they’re more likely to score a runner from first than one in scoring position.

Similarly, moving said runners into scoring position is an area where the team can improve. Though they outpace the league average in productive out opportunities slightly (366 to 363), they’re seventh-worst in actually producing a productive out. These three aspects work to characterize the offensive struggles as a whole: a failure to capitalize upon additional baserunners via moving them into scoring position and then being unable to drive them in if they were moved.

This won’t fix the entire problem, but with just a 10-19 record in one-run games, additional runs at the right time could have changed the season’s narrative completely. It’s not that they’ve been without chances to add said runs, but optimal situations (say, runners on first and second or bases loaded with less than two outs) have failed to turn into runs time and again. The benefit of an HBP or ROE is that you could view it as giving yourself yet another chance to score. What the Mets have found this season, however, is the opposite side of that mindset: that you missed an opportunity you didn’t even think you’d have in the first place.

My ideal reading of this article’s title would be to have it punctuated by that frantic swirling noise serving as the transition between scenes in classic superhero shows and/or contemporary scenes paying homage to them. Should you have participated, that’s likely one of the few Mets-related moments you’ve had since mid-April that could be characterized as pure fun (unless you find the sound annoying, in which case, ignore the previous two sentences). Instead, while there have been bright spots like Brandon Nimmo’s heroics and virtually each half inning commanded by Jacob deGrom, their historically prodigious start looks ensconced in the realm of what-could’ve-been. Now, the season isn’t even halfway over (okay, 48.1%), and while there isn’t a singular fix to spark the offense, there’s an event that has seemed to appear at the most inopportune times: grounding into double-plays.

During that 11-1 start, the Mets ground into 11 double-plays. In the 66 games since, they’ve accumulated a further 51. So, initially, their production of double plays hasn’t changed by pure counting standards since the quick start. But as a percentage, they are fifth in baseball with 11.439% of double-play opportunities resulting in one. While these numbers alone could be interpreted as troubling in their own right, what I’d sought to explore further is not just how often, but when, the Mets grounded into double-plays.

For the purposes of this article, in tracking the Mets’ lead/deficit at the time of the play, I used the score when the plate appearance began, not after (e.g., on May 9, Asdrubal Cabrera scored when Kevin Plawecki hit into a double-play; the score following the play was 1-0 Mets, but, as it began with a tied score, I wrote that one down as having occurred with the Mets at a lead/deficit of 0).

The first level of when these plays occurred centers around the scoreboard: were the Mets leading at the time? Losing? By how much? Over the first 12 games, they averaged 5.08 runs/game, while over the subsequent 66, this has lessened to 3.77. Thus, especially across this second grouping of games, the situation is important in that a missed opportunity for a run here or there could add up to be the difference between their current record and playoff contention – illustratively, the first 12 games contained a 3-0 record in one-run games, while the next 66 have shifted to 5-15 in them. Supporting that trend is the fact that the Mets led by an average of 1.18 runs when they hit into double plays up through April 13; since, they’ve trailed by an average of 0.78 runs. Also worrisome for the ability to win close games is that a full third of the latter group have taken place with the Mets either tied or down by just a run.

Those were a lot of numbers – let’s see what it looks like in practice.

June 23: Facing Clayton Kershaw, the Mets were tied at 1 with the Dodgers, men on first and second and one out. Amed Rosario batting, he softly grounds to third to spark the double-play.

June 22: Down by two in the bottom of the eighth, runners at the corners, one out. On the first pitch of the at-bat, Jose Bautista acted uncharacteristically for his time in Queens by lacking patience and swung on a pitch verging on below the zone to end the inning.

June 21: The bordering-on-the-comical video that, if you haven’t seen it yet, will serve as unsubtle foreshadowing for this article’s conclusion.

What’s comical is that, despite a different Met to begin each double play, once they made contact, the results are virtually indistinguishable. Weak contact, combined with being hit within a few inches of one another, all directly towards the third baseman or shortstop.

Though these seven double plays occurred over a three-day span, they speak to the larger trend of a lineup that need to improve on making meaningful contact on opposite-field hits. That’s not to say that the prevalence of double plays is not in itself worrying; this is evidence of situational hitting that is, for one reason or another, less “clutch” than it could be. But in focusing on that singular event for this article, the realization at how easy some of these double plays have been for the defense to turn seems equally important as something to improve upon. Challenging the defense with harder hits is a first step; challenging oneself to direct contact towards the opposite side of the field is yet another.

Photo credit: Andy Marlin – USA Today Sports

The first half of Bautista’s season – 12 games with the Braves – suggested nothing of a throwback performance in the future. Yet in the first 12 games into his Mets career, according to TAv, we’re witnessing a number in-between his 2010 and 2011 MVP-contending campaigns. Will we see those gaudy numbers throughout his tenure in Queens? It’s doubtful that this pace will be kept up, but, in examining these competing halves of the season, we’ll explore which alterations are sustainable (i.e., did he just need his own spring training?) and which…well, his BABIP in the first 12 Mets games was .429.

In 2015, then-Astros assistant general manager David Stearns spoke about the reliability of spring training for making personnel decisions, telling Baseball Prospectus, “We would love to make every decision based on 1,000 plate appearances in major league competition, or 400 innings in major league competition. We rarely have the ability to do that.” In the case of Jose Bautista, we do have this amount of data to analyze – nearly 7,000 plate appearances, in fact.

From his debut in 2004 to the end of the 2017 season, Bautista’s whiffs/swing chart looks like a pleasant gradient: light-ish blue in the middle moving in both directions towards a few shades of reddish purple. In numerical terms, his zone contact rate from 2008-2017 never dropped below 81.92%, and for out-of-the-zone contact, he moved between an okay 50.25% and an impressive 70.77%. From the pre-2018 data, it looks like he possessed a patience that could only accompany the confidence of contact being more of a given than not. This season, however, he began to exhibit an uncharacteristic tendency to swing more frequently and obtain less contact.

Examining each variation of the count between the two teams, a renewed discipline appears since he’s worn a Mets uniform. The player who has three seasons of more walks than strikeouts is near that mark again in Queens, due in part to approaching two specific pitch counts far differently than he did in Atlanta. First, when the count was 0-1, he began the season seemingly eager to limit the pressure of falling too far behind by swinging on nine of the 17 pitches he saw. Once he was traded, however, an immediate shift happened: Bautista only swung on three of 20 pitches at this count between May 22 to June 2. The pressure instead falls back on the pitcher: it’s up to them to throw a strike. Similarly, in full counts in Atlanta, Bautista eschewed the chance for a walk almost entirely, swinging 12 times on 14 pitches. Though a smaller sample size, the New York half saw him swing only four times in nine instances.

Is the quasi-spring training effect in force here? Of the 13 players aged 36 or older who participated in spring training this year, nine had fewer plate appearances there than Bautista did in Atlanta. With the thousands of plate appearances of his to analyze, the approach in the latter half of his early season more closely mirrors his career discipline, contrasting the free-swinging, low-contact former (i.e., quasi-spring training) half. Even after seeing major-league pitching for a decade-plus, there’s no substitute for getting plate appearances in and re-adjusting to stay in one’s best form.

Renewed patience is a sustainable change that can benefit Bautista and the Mets the rest of the season. However, his peak-era trademarks have not materialized: he’s lauded for his numbers versus left-handed pitchers, but he’s yet to manage a hit against one on anything other than a four-seam fastball for either team. Similarly, his home runs per at-bat ratio is following the radical upswing of last year’s 25.5 that cleared his 2010-2016 ratio by nearly 12 at-bats. When the BABIP stabilizes, how these numbers react will be the true test of if his 2018 can be seen as a tale of two teams.

Photo credit: Benny Sieu – USA Today Sports

The day before the Mets began their 2018 campaign, first base coach Ruben Amaro Jr. told Newsday of the team’s plan to improve upon a skill that eluded them during 2017: smart baserunning. “You don’t have to have great speed to be a great baserunner,” he explained, and – save for Robert Gsellman’s proclamation that he is fastest amongst the pitching staff – few players would openly lay claim to the first half of that equation. Of Baseball Prospectus’ main baserunning metrics – ground advancement runs (GAR), stolen base runs (SBR), air advancement runs (AAR), hit advancement runs (HAR), other advancement runs (OAR) and baserunning runs (BRR) – they ranked 7th, 30th, 25th, 26th, 21st and 24th, respectively. Changes needed to be made, and those that have been were on display in the eighth inning of Saturday’s game versus Atlanta.

After the bases were loaded by the first three batters and Yoenis Cespedes struck out, National League batting average leader Asdrubal Cabrera came to the plate. Atlanta’s Shane Carle threw two nearly identical changeups, Cabrera connecting on the second for a two-RBI single. The first run scored, Wilmer Flores, was unremarkable – on a clear hit into the outfield, the man on third could walk in and score. The second, however, was Jose Reyes, whose ability to score as shown in the video below speaks to one of the changes manager Mickey Callaway spoke about to Newsday: “When you’re talking about 60 feet, a step and a half makes a big difference.”

Reyes’ reaction to Cabrera’s single was only briefly shown, but what is clear is that his path home started farther off second base than normal, providing him with the head start needed to reach the plate even if a clean throw was made. On the opposite end of things, the next at-bat reflected the skill of restraint.

Unlike Cabrera’s no-doubt single, Jay Bruce’s hit to left field had the early trajectory that suggested it would be caught. When Michael Conforto, then on second, was shown in the video, he, like Reyes, was farther off second, but visibly hesitated before taking off to make sure the ball was in play. Another poor play in the outfield allowed Bruce to make it, barely, into second. This extra base taken was not an anomaly – after a season in which the Mets were tied for 26th in Baseball-Reference’s extra bases taken percentage (XBT%), they’re currently tied for fourth at 50%. This is a percentage earned by superior awareness, not just natural speed, and Bruce himself seemed to presage this moment, explaining “[Baserunning is] anticipating, it’s thinking, it’s paying attention.”

How have these improvements played out in the metrics? While we’re still in the small sample-size section of the season and teams that put up positive BRR numbers last year would be in many cases simply unable to reach them by this point, we can see who has improved out of the teams that ended last year with negative BRR. Finding the net change between 2017 and 2018, nine teams that were negative last year so far have positive BRR, the Mets among them. The two largest changes belong to Detroit and Philadelphia, who have swung 12.6 and 13.3 points respectively, though the changes in Queens have come without major differences in the lineup nor many young players who are in the stages of rapid growth. So they’re still behind Philadelphia in terms of impressiveness – the Phillies have gone from 27th to 1st in BRR over this time – but the Mets’ jump from 24th to fourth is evidence of a preseason goal being achieved.

Where they still lack is in stolen base prowess. Ranking 28th this year in SBR with a number already in the “poor” realm, 25th in stolen bases and tied for 26th in stolen base percentage, a February Call to the Pen article said it all in the title: “New York Mets still don’t seem to see the value of stealing bases.” With a division-leading start, major structural changes are probably not in the cards, and of BP’s top 10 prospects with major league ETAs of 2018 or already debuted, their quickness around the bases is not touted as a beneficial part of a call-up. Instead, the team’s best option, save for an in-contention trade at the deadline, seems to be to proceed as is, focusing on the minutia inherent in taking extra bases as a part of live plays, not the act of the steal being a play in and of itself.

Photo credit: Gregory J. Fisher – USA Today Sports

Setting: Nationals Park, April 5. It’s the bottom of the sixth inning, and the visiting New York Mets are leading 4-2 over the Washington Nationals. The Mets, owners of a 4-1 record, have earned cautious optimism, but the specter of things going just wrong enough still looms.

Cast: Jacob deGrom (New York Mets), Brian Goodwin (Washington Nationals), Anthony Rendon (Washington Nationals), Bryce Harper (Washington Nationals), Ryan Zimmerman (Washington Nationals), Howie Kendrick (Washington Nationals), Trea Turner (Washington Nationals).

Scene: Goodwin waits for a pitch in the very middle of the strike zone and knocks it into right field. Rendon and Harper, inspired by Goodwin’s patience, prefer to show off their skill at being idle as they see four pitches each, all close to the zone, but none called strikes. [Audience: Thinking that this is an inflection point, a possible microcosm for the macro interpretation of the season.] By this point, deGrom has thrown 75 pitches, and a quick turnaround is necessary to stay in the game. Zimmerman, eager to shift the game’s tides, takes a low curveball in the same direction as Goodwin’s single but is met by a glove. Kendrick waits like his successful teammates before him, but an upper-middle fastball is lined out to shortstop. Turner, possibly paying for the pitches in the zone called as balls, takes an outside third strike looking. [Audience: Breathes a sigh of relief.]

This half-inning was full of the type of drama that, even as recently as last year, proved troublesome for the Mets. Consulting Baseball Prospectus’ Expected Runs Matrix, in the young 2018 season this scenario should have netted the Nationals 2.2 runs, but they came away empty-handed. deGrom is certainly an ace more capable than most to handle a bases-loaded situation, but his run-stifling is not an outlier for the Mets’ 2018 campaign – one in which the promise of a world-conquering pitching staff can be realized not just by wins, but in the subtle ways staffs can lead their team to victory.

That sparked my interest in exploring the Mets’ ability to strand runners relative to the rest of the league, and if their early perception as being a premier staff holds up even with more niche metrics. To do this, I calculated the percentage of runners left on base relative to the number of baserunners allowed (LOB%), for the simple accumulating of left-on-base numbers belies the fact that if you’re that good, you won’t have that many runners to strand in the first place (more on that later).

The numbers concluded that this anecdote was, in fact, not out of the ordinary. At stranding 69.39% of runners, they’re good for first in the National League and second in baseball overall, behind only the similarly celebrated Astros pitchers, who have kept 72.57% of baserunners from scoring. With the league average at 58.3%, the 10 point advantage the Mets have over a league-average team will be a crucial difference if their playoff hopes rest upon a few close games in September. With their mark in 2017 at just 55.4%, the mind is free to wander in the fields of what-if?s.

The reason behind calculating this as a percentage rather than just by using left-on-base numbers is because, intuitively, good pitching (i.e., not letting men on base) should beget good pitching (i.e., stopping those at the plate from scoring whomever has been let on). I ran a correlation between team OBP numbers with the left-on-base percentage in Excel and found the correlation coefficient to be -0.47 – this means that as OBP increases, LOB% should decrease (and vice-versa).

The numbers seem to support the theory. Whether they can be kept up over the course of a full season is another story, but early on the Mets have left many an opposing fan disappointed at seeing their team standing on the bases, waiting for a reason to move. So far, these have been few and far between.

 Photo credit: Tommy Gilligan – USA Today Sports

The stars of the show were those who, based on lineup order, should be the stars. The Mets’ 1-5 hitters accounted for ten of their eleven hits and all 9 of their RBIs; this, however, doesn’t do justice to the timing of many of these hits.

Curtis Granderson got things started off score-wise with a two-run shot to shallow right for his 29th of the year. His insane HR/RBI ratio, which was covered by Eric Garcia McKinley a month ago Thursday, now stands at an astounding 29/54. For the first four innings of Seth Lugo’s campaign, it seemed like this would be enough. In the top of the fifth, however, holding a 2-1 lead entering it, Lugo’s first two pitches went off Ryan Howard and Cameron Rupp’s bats for their 23rd and 16th home runs, respectively. The bottom of the inning would show the resilience that characterized the latter half of the game.

A comedy of errors led to Ty Kelly on third and Asdrubal Cabrera on second with two outs and Yoenis Cespedes up, looking to avenge his near-heroics of last night. Though he was 14-69 in September entering the night, Cespedes delivered with an RBI single to tie the game. Two innings later, the game still knotted at 3, Cespedes improved on this performance by knocking in Jose Reyes with a double to give the Mets the lead. As with Grandy’s homer, things looked up.

It didn’t take long for the optimism to wear off, as Addison Reed allowed men on first and third with one out when Maikel Franco came up to the plate. A cutter hung on the sixth pitch of the at-bat, leading to Franco hitting a three-run shot to give the Phillies the lead once again.

In the bottom of the ninth, Reyes came up with one out and Brandon Nimmo on base. Reyes hit a game-tying two-run homer that sent the crowd into a frenzy, and it appeared as if Jeurys Familia would enter the game to keep the Phillies’ score at six. This strategy worked for the 10th inning but began to falter in the 11th –  Familia let a man score as did his replacement, Jerry Blevins, and the optics of the game suggested that the Mets were about to lose once again to a lower team in the NL East. With one out in the bottom of the 11th, the Mets’ offense ran off a three-fold series of events that quite possibly changed the entire course of their season: a Michael Conforto walk, Reyes single and Cabrera walk-off home run. For all of the criticism levied against the team in the wake of their series versus the Braves, tonight’s win proved that they want this Wild Card as much as anybody.

Photo credit: Andy Marlin – USA Today Sports

The first few innings of the game were a textbook pitcher’s duel between Jacob deGrom (as expected) and Jose Urena (maybe not). Each worked two scoreless innings, with deGrom striking out four. Danger lurked, however, as his pitch count was too high for comfort, getting behind in multiple counts, walking two in the second and working the upper part of the strike zone with limited success in getting strikes called. The bottom of the second was New York’s first chance to strike, when a Michael Conforto double and walks of James Loney and Travis d’Arnaud loaded the bases for deGrom. He hit a ball that, were the outfield playing normally, would’ve dropped in for a hit, but Yelich’s closer positioning gave him the perfect opportunity to make a diving catch.

Yelich, however, wasn’t done. After stealing a base off a walk in the second, he knocked Ichiro Suzuki home on a two-out single to score the game’s first run. In the fifth, he singled, stole second and then scored on a Jeff Francoeur double. The Marlins would add another run in the fifth, extending their lead to 3-0. In the sixth inning, Jay Bruce hit just his third home run as a Met to lessen the Marlins’ comfort. Yelich, however, had something to say about that. After an Ichiro single and Martin Prado walk, Yelich knocked Josh Smoker out of the game with a three-run shot. With the Mets’ seemingly magical run back into playoff contention, the thought that the magic simply ran out in this game would be warranted. But they weren’t to be counted out! – not without a fight.

The bottom of the eighth inning was shaping up to be just the spark the offense needed to retake the game. Starting off the inning with a Curtis Granderson double, Kelly Johnson single and Bruce RBI knock, the score was 6-2 with men on first and second and no outs. Wilmer Flores then was walked to load the bases, and Conforto came up in what had to be the cosmos aligning for his rightful redemption. Only it wasn’t to be – he hit a soft dribbler to double-up Johnson at home and himself at first. Yoenis Cespedes entering to hit seemed less important than before, and he struck out without putting up much resistance in the at-bat. Asdrubal Cabrera then hit a two-run blast with no outs in the ninth, but three quick outs once again extinguished the Mets’ rally. Some nights it’s just not meant to be.

Though the Mets have a lot to be excited about over the last two weeks, last night would’ve been a much-needed exclamation mark. Instead of finding themselves just a game back of the Cardinals, they are two back with the Marlins only two back of them. Every game matters at this point in the season, and it’ll take efforts like deGrom finding his command and not throwing 102 pitches in five innings to put them on a viable path to the playoffs.

Photo credit: Wendell Cruz – USA Today Sports

Before we get to the offensive performances, though, starting pitcher Seth Lugo notched his first big league win with a solid five innings of work. He wasn’t particularly flashy, posting a respectable five strikeouts but balancing it out with five combined walks and hits. The greatest amount of trouble he found himself in was in the third when the bases were loaded with two outs following a Yadier Molina single, Randal Grichuk double and Greg Garcia intentional walk. The intentional walk was to bring up Adam Wainwright, who had as stellar a night at the plate as he did on the mound, striking out on five pitches. Lugo left the game after warming up before the bottom of the sixth with a right calf injury, marking yet another Mets pitcher with injury troubles; the team said postgame that he’s expected to make his next start, but we’ve heard that one before. Uncharacteristically, even a subpar performance by the starter probably would’ve been enough for the Mets to get a much-needed win. This was thanks to a consistent offensive outburst.

In the top of the second, both after getting behind 0-2, James Loney singled and Curtis Granderson doubled to put men on second and third with no outs. Wilmer Flores came up and hit a sac fly to score Loney, putting the Mets up 1-0. They’d never look back. Granderson would reach again on an error in the top of the fourth, and Flores would be productive without making an out by doubling. With the same situation as the second, the Mets looked to add on runs. Alejandro De Aza would oblige, singling to score both. Even Lugo got in on the act by recording his first Major League hit, though it came without an RBI attached.

The fifth was truly where the Mets made it known that they would take this game. Yoenis Cespedes walked with one out, then a bizarre play happened. Loney blooped a single in shallow left that wasn’t handled properly by the Cardinals near the ball, providing Cespedes with the incentive to try for an extra base. He ran towards third and was met by Wainwright, whose glove came off as a result of Cespedes’ slide. He was ruled safe and Flores, next up, reached first on an error by Garcia that scored Cespedes. Men were on first and third with one out, and the game’s biggest offensive star, De Aza, was up. He homered to right, putting the Mets up 7-0.

Though the Cardinals would ultimately score six runs of their own – two in each of the sixth, eighth and ninth innings – the game never appeared as if the tide would turn. Mets fans became increasingly vocal in the crowd as Cards faithful dwindled out of the stadium, and though Brandon Moss would hit his 24th and 25th homers of the year, it simply wasn’t enough to overtake the Mets’ offensive output.

“Overtaking” was the key word of this series: the Cards entered and leave as the second National League Wild Card team, but the Mets put themselves in great position to catch them over the season’s final 35 games. Only 3.5 games back after last night, the Mets begin an eminently winnable three-game series versus the Phillies that overwhelmingly favors their pitching match-ups. If the offense performs even half as well as they did tonight, the gap between the Mets and the teams in front of them in the Wild Card standings should diminish by the end of the series.

Photo credit: Jeff Curry – USA Today Sports

The best analogue to Syndergaard’s performance on Thursday has been the season of Chris Archer: more strikeouts than innings pitched, but sandwiched around more runs given up than their teams’ offense has any hope of replicating, all adding up to a loss. He began the game with a formula that should have been repeated throughout, but it only showed up sporadically. To wit, Syndergaard began with three-straight 99-mph pitches – one fastball and two sinkers – followed up by an 84-mph curveball that Jean Segura swung on and missed. A Michael Bourn single and Paul Goldschmidt double later, and the Diamondbacks had runners on second and third with just one out. But ace Syndergaard could get himself out of such a jam, and he induced a Jake Lamb pop-up and Chris Owings strikeout to end the inning. Threat eliminated, right? We’ll get back to that.

First, the most dreadful part of this Mets’ season: the offense. Facing recent call-up Braden Shipley, the Mets’ bats were looking at a prime target to get themselves back on track. Even on the “Why He’ll Succeed” section of the BP Top 50 Honorable Mentions, he was described as “not a future star,” or, in other words, he should be hittable. Over the course of seven innings, however, he struck out a career-high seven and allowed just three hits – one in the first to extend Neil Walker’s hitting streak to nine games, and one in each of the third and fifth innings. The fifth was his biggest test of the game as the hit was given up to Rene Rivera, moving Kelly Johnson from first on a walk to second with just one out. That became the proper time to remove Syndergaard from the game, and Curtis Granderson entered with a chance to tie the game at three. He struck out swinging, and the Mets weren’t in contention for the rest of the game.

The Mets weren’t in contention because of Syndergaard’s performance, yes, but mainly because of their overall pitching and defense. Syndergaard’s fastballs were capitalized upon in the fourth when the best consecutive names a baseball lineup could have, Socrates Brito and Tuffy Gosewisch, who own -0.1 career WARP between them, hit a double and triple respectively, with a Brito stolen base in between for good measure. That was the tenth stolen base of the series for the D-Backs, and they weren’t done in that category. Later in the fourth, Shipley(!) stole a base, Goldschmidt stole two in the fifth, and a Jon Niese wild pitch would advance two runners who would then score in the six-run on only three-hit sixth.

This had to be a fun game if you’re a Diamondbacks fan, watching a young pitcher and explosive offensive threats live up to their potential. But potential has been a dangerous word for the Mets this season, a team with so much of it that for varying reasons has simply not lived up to its billing. Jeff Fisher would be unhappy with a 9-7 season, but a .562 winning percentage for the rest of the season would be exactly what the Mets need to get into the playoffs (and another Washington Nationals collapse wouldn’t hurt). They’re now .500, but after this game, just three back for the second Wild Card spot. After a game like this you’d be justified in thinking that the rest of the season is hopeless, but if they remember how close they are to securing another playoff spot, the Mets are still in contention.

Photo credit: Anthony Gruppuso – USA Today Sports

There were two relevant storylines to the outcome of the game, and both came through the same concept: runners in scoring position. The Mets’ troubles in this regard have become a meme unto themselves, and it’s been understood that just one or two hits with RISP could turn many a loss into a win. All you have to do is go to the BP Mets homepage, scroll down a bit, and see that the pitchers are more than carrying their fair share, at third in all of baseball in runs given up. It’s that they’re third from the bottom in runs scored that has been the problem, and yesterday was a prime example of the fact that they aren’t in need of excess runs to win; just enough will do.

Early on, it appeared that the Yankees would score first. In the bottom of the second inning, after a 1-2-3 first, Brian McCann started things off with a single that was promptly followed by a Starlin Castro single to left. Didi Gregorius then had a productive out that moved the runners to second and third with just one out. Colon was tested for the first time in the game and proved up to the challenge by inducing a groundout and lineout, respectively.

In the third and fourth, the offenses were quiet on both sides. An Alejandro De Aza diving catch to rob Gregorius was the lone noteworthy event, and not the only stellar defensive play he’d make all night. The fifth had barely started, TV feed still working its way back onscreen, when Kelly Johnson launched a practical line drive into the right field stands that would be a home run in scant other stadiums. This would spark the necessary offensive output that would sustain the Mets for the whole game.

Granderson, entering the game reaching base on six of his previous eleven plate appearances, doubled to continue the inning. De Aza then grounded into a fielder’s choice that the Yankees’ defense incorrectly played to allow him to reach first safely. A runner in scoring position, and no out made? This was positive progress. Speaking of, a man in great need of anything positive to ease into his new team was Jay Bruce, entering the at-bat with an 0-19 streak. He responded by crushing a homer to center, plating three runs and giving the Mets a 4-0 lead. The question was, after 90 pitches and 6.2 innings pitched, would the Mets’ bullpen hold up Colon’s lead?

Tonight, they were more than up to the task. Though Jerry Blevins let up an Aaron Hicks single that drove in Gary Sanchez, who had doubled off Colon before he was pulled, the only real threat to the game came during Jeurys Familia’s appearance in the ninth. Gregorius and Sanchez both singled to give Familia a similar threat to the one Colon had in the second: runners on first and second with one out. Anticlimactic for the home crowd (though you wouldn’t know it by the chants of “BRUUUUUUUCE” that rang out after Jay’s home run), Rob Refsnyder ground into a double play to end the game. NY (NL) moved one game back of the second Wild Card spot and begin today a very winnable series against the Detroit Tigers to assist their playoff push.

Photo credit: Brad Penner – USA Today Sports