The Mets have found themselves being sobered up by a large dose of reality during the last week of baseball games.
They’re 2-5 since the start of their six-game road trip at Yankee Stadium. They’ve committed nine errors during that span. The pitching staff has compiled a 4.58 ERA in those seven games. The bullpen – which had been so good over the first three weeks of the season, has a 7.56 ERA over it’s last three games.
The poor defense was a known flaw and a large concern heading into the season, but the injuries to key players – David Wright, Travis d’Arnaud, and Jerry Blevins – have forced the Mets to overexpose certain position players on the field, and use relievers in roles they aren’t necessarily accustomed to being in.
That overexposure has only magnified the physical and mental mistakes.
Take Eric Campbell as one example, who has filled in admirably at third base in the absence of Wright. Over his first ten games, Campbell produced an .833 OPS and reached base 16 times while hitting .267. Since then, a span of five games, Campbell has reached base four times – he’s 2-for-19 during that span.
Campbell is a really valuable player to have, and he deserves to stay when Wright returns. He’s perhaps the most versatile player on the roster, and playing every couple of days maximizes his value.
Unfortunately, playing everyday has probably overexposed him.
As for the bullpen, up until the last three games anyway, the Mets had done a nice job piecing together their fragmented bullpen. But at the end of the day, guys like Sean Gilmartin, Carlos Torres and Buddy Carlyle have been thrusted into late inning relief roles in the absence of the injured Jerry Blevins, Bobby Parnell, Vic Black, Josh Edgin, and Jenrry Mejia. Again, they’ve filled in admirably, but they’re probably not suited for those roles in the long-term.
Injures are a part of the game. Every team deals with them in one form or another over the course of a season. The Mets have certainly dealt with an unusual number of significant injuries early in a short span of time as well, and its difficult for any team to be missing two core players on an everyday basis like they have, and have to piece meal a bullpen plan together on a daily basis.
But the game goes on anyway, and the Mets have little margin for error as a result. They know that.
“When you plug in a player, it’s not often that they take off and exceed your expectations for the replaced player,” Sandy Alderson said on Thursday, according to Ken Davidoff of the New York Post. “But our guys have done a nice job. We started the situation with David Wright and Travis [d’Arnaud] and what have you. It would be nice to have them back.”
Having said that, it just makes it that much more important for their defense to be tighter. It has not been, so bleeding has ensued…
Just Mets 