Just Mets

A lot has been made about the competence of the Mets middle infield defense over the last ten days for the Mets. It’s arguably cost them five of their last seven losses, and unless something drastically changes and fast, that could very well continue.

The reason for that is the offense is giving the pitching and the defense next to no margin for error as of late. Here’s a breakdown of their offense during the same stretch of ten games in which it is believed the defense has cost the Mets games:

• 26 runs (2.6 per game)
• 72 hits (7.2 per game)
• 13-for-59 with runners in scoring position (.220 avg)
• 23 extra-base hits
• Three runs or fewer in seven of their last ten games
• Six hits or fewer in four of their last ten games

“The [past week] we just didn’t get the big hits. It’s as simple as that,” Michael Cuddyer explained on Sunday.

Yes, but they hardly got any hits at times, and haven’t scored a single run since Daniel Murphy drove in three with his eighth inning double on Friday night, a span of 18 consecutive innings.

“This isn’t just one or two guys. We got to put some better swings on the ball through the lineup,” Terry Collins said after their second consecutive shutout loss to the Nationals. “You’re seeing guys swinging at balls out of the zone pretty consistently through the lineup. We’re swinging at a lot of balls in the dirt with two strikes.”

That’s true to an extent.

Over the last seven games, the club has swung at about 30 percent of the pitches they’ve seen outside the strike zone which, while it isn’t great, is 16th best in the game over that span. Of course, in that same stretch of games, they’ve only made contact with 61 percent of the pitches outside the zone, which is helping to speed up their plate appearances and not see too many pitches – they’ve only averaged 3.74 pitches per plate appearance since the start of their series in Miami last week.

The Mets were certainly bound to regress after their 11-game winning streak, in which it seemed nothing could go wrong for them. They’ve been hit hard by injuries all over the place, and in fairness to the offense, they’re missing two guys who were hitting really well before they got injured in David Wright and Travis d’Arnaud. As admirably as Eric Campbell and Kevin Plawecki have performed, the offense has begun to feel the effects of missing those bats over the last week, which really isn’t unexpected. Hopefully, the Mets can get Wright back within the next seven days, and d’Arnaud follows a week or so after that.

Still, that’s still a lot of baseball time.

Collins is remaining optimistic, choosing to take the longer view of the the club’s early season’s success rather than hone in on their most recent struggles.

“We’ve got a 3 1/2 game lead. if you’d have said to us, ‘Hey, May 3rd, you’re going to have a 3 1/2 game lead, you’re going to be seven games over .500, six games or whatever it is, would you take it?’ Well the answer is of course,” Collins explained. “As we said when we won 11 in a row, ‘Hey, we’re going to have a down time.’ We didn’t think it was going to be right away, but we were going to have one, and we’re just going to play through it.”

Fair, but that doesn’t make their recent play acceptable, both offensively and defensively. And complacency and satisfaction in May is certainly not part of a winning culture.