The New York Mets are a team that relies heavily on the long ball, but they need to start hitting with runners in scoring position.
The New York Mets had runners at first and second and nobody out against the Chicago Cubs last night. Wilmer Flores approached the plate with a chance to put the Mets on the board.
Instead, he grounded into a double play and the Mets didn’t score in the inning. Later in the game he would hit a solo home run, which he’s done a lot of recently, but in the big spot he couldn’t come through, the story of the 2016 New York Mets.
It seems like such a common occurrence for the Mets to come up short in big spots. The Mets and their clutch hitting (or lack thereof) possess ugly numbers that speak for themselves. Of the starting eight in the lineup (Matz was not included) they were hitting a combined .155 with RISP and two outs.
The leader, is obviously Yoenis Cespedes, who has been the Mets MVP so far this year. He’s hitting .304 with RISP and two outs, but he’s the outlier. The next closest is Juan Lagares who is hitting .214 with RISP and two outs.
Somehow the Mets are eighth best in the league, leaving 3.26 RISP per game. The worst are the Pittsburgh Pirates who leave nearly four RISP per game.
Like many other aspects of the 2016 Mets, looking at these two stats make little sense. They had two guys in the lineup hitting over .200 with RISP and two outs, yet are in the top ten for least amount of runners left in scoring position per game. Riddle me that one.
Regardless, the main point is that the Mets have to find a way to start putting hits together. They can’t rely on just the long ball to win baseball games; it’s not going to work over a 162 game season.
Even though the Mets ended up losing to the Philadelphia Phillies on Saturday night they still did something that is very rare for them. Something that can be viewed as a silver lining in the loss– they drove in two runs via the sacrifice fly.
The Mets play in the National League and although the sabermetric guys will disagree with me, you have to use some amount of small ball in your game to win. Sacrifice flies, bunting, and stealing bases are all a part of winning baseball.
Look at the Kansas City Royals in the World Series last year; they ran all over the Mets and exposed Travis d’Arnaud and the Mets pitching staff.
Waiting for the home run is a boring brand of baseball. It hasn’t been working for the Mets and they are going to have to try to start manufacturing runs if they would like to be a competitive team with a chance of making the playoffs.
