Just Mets

The Mets are 17-10 through the first 27 games of the regular season, the third best mark in the National League and tied with the Yankees and Tigers for the fifth best mark in baseball.

Much of their early season success is due to their pitching staff, which has arguably been the best in baseball over the season’s first month.

Here’s a breakdown of their starting pitching:

• Mets starters are 14-8. The 14 wins are tied with the Tigers for the most in the major leagues.
• The starters ERA is 3.02, second lowest in the game behind the Pirates (2.78).
• They’ve thrown 169 2/3 innings, the most in the game – they’re averaging a shade under 6 1/3 innings per start.
• Their 1.64 walks per nine innings are the best in the game – they’ve thrown the third most strikes (1683) and the second fewest balls (792) in baseball. That has resulted in only 31 walks, second fewest behind the Cubs in the game (30).
• The number of strikes thrown has limited their strikeout rate to 7.21 per nine innings, 14th best in baseball.
• They have gotten the opposition to offer at 32.7 pitches outside the strike zone, 2nd best in MLB.
• They’ve thrown 2475 pitches, averaging 14.6 per inning.
• The starters have the seventh highest ground ball rate at 49.1 percent.

Here’s a breakdown of their relief pitching:

• The bullpen has thrown 66 1/3 innings, averaging just over 2 1/3 innings per game, and have thrown 1013 pitches, the fewest in baseball.
• Their 9.77 strikeouts per nine innings is the fifth best mark in the game, and they have a 65.3 percent strike rate.
• The relievers are issuing 2.71 walks per nine innings, seventh best in baseball.
• Their 2.85 ERA is the eighth best in baseball.

The starters are keeping the game short for the bullpen.

And, that’s a huge reason why the Mets make-shift bullpen has been so successful early on. By pitching into the seventh inning most nights, which is affording Terry Collins the opportunity to use each reliever to his strengths and not overexposing them and stretching them too far.

Strikes, strikes, strikes.

The Mets throw strikes 67 percent of the time, which is really remarkable considering they struggled in that area a lot last year. A lot of that is attributed to Bartolo Colon and Matt Harvey, but none the less the entire pitching staff has done a fantastic job early on of getting ahead of hitters and staying in pitchers counts, and limiting the walks in the process which has helped them limit baserunners and in turn, runs allowed (they’ve allowed 85 runs as a team, second fewest in baseball).

One area to watch is how much Mets pitching is getting the opposition to swing at pitches outside the zone, and how it affects their strike totals and favorable counts. They’re getting the opposite to swing at 32.2 percent of pitches outside the zone as a team – as the book gets out on them, it will be interesting to see if they adjust to their tendency to try and get hitters to chase.

They’re inducing ground balls.

The starting pitching is inducing their share of ground balls, which really isn’t surprising considering the power arms in Harvey and Jacob deGrom and the sinkerballers in Colon and Dillon Gee. Unfortunately, the middle infielders are making an adventure out of too many of them, which has cost the club dearly, as has been discussed. The remarkable part about it is the pitching has survived those misadventures and been able to provide length despite the extra pitches they’ve been required to throw in those instances.