Just Mets

The Mets are 35 games into their schedule, having dropped 12 of their last 19 games after starting the season with an unworldly 13-3 record.

The team hasn’t hit very much, the injuries only seem to rise every day, and lately nobody has played particularly well at all on either side of the ball.

But one common denominator in the first 16 games and their last 19 games has been Wilmer Flores and his predominantly ineffective defense. It was bad during the winning streak, it’s been bad since.

He did drive in a run yesterday on a solo home run, his team-leading fifth of the season. That does put him on pace for 25 home runs assuming he plays 150 games this year. However, he is hitting just .174 with a .240 on-base percentage and a .370 slugging percentage over his last 14 games, hardly outhitting his deficiencies on the other side of the ball.

And on Thursday, he gave that production right back and more on the field once again. He committed his eighth error of the year on a bad throw in the fifth inning on Thursday, resulting in two unearned runs to score against Jon Niese. 

“Anytime you make an error you just hope that nothing else happens,” Flores said after Thursday’s game. “It did. I just made a bad throw,” Flores explained.

He has converted only 92.2 percent of the routines plays, which is 2nd worst among shortstops with 250 innings played at the position in 2015, according to Inside Edge at FanGraphs. He has only converted 60 percent of the plays which are deemed likely to be made, which is seventh worst. His eight errors are only better than Elvis Andrus, Danny Santana, Ian Desmond, and Marcus Semien at the position among shortstops who have logged 250 innings or more.

“When you’ve got a young player like Wilmer, any of the guys, you’ve got to somehow keep their confidence up,” Terry Collins said on Thursday. “They’ve got to be a part of it. They’ve got to be a part of the process. They’ve got to be tough enough and strong enough mentally to fluff it off.”

Collins said on Thursday the club continues to discuss the problems on the middle infield on a regular basis. However, he is concerned about what changing the course with Flores would do to him mentally.

“Look, we’re not naïve,” Collins explained. “We’ve looked at this thing inside and out. But what message does that send if we tell Wilmer, ‘You’re going to play third today.’ It sends a horrible message to him. And I think it sends a bad message to what our philosophy was. This guy was going to be our SS. We’ll sit down and continue to discuss it. If people say we’ve gotta make a change then we’ll make a change.”

It’s a tough decision for the individual, but at some point, it has to be about the team. That’s not meant to be a knock on Flores – he has done all he can and works extremely hard to be as good as he can be. He has also owned up to the problem, has not hid himself from the media when faced with these kinds of days, either. He’s a good kid, having been put in the most challenging and difficult spot of anyone on the team. In many ways, it’s not fair to him, and it’s always sad to see a kid fail, and to see a kid suffer.

But the truth is it’s just not working, and the problem keeps costing the pitchers pitches, the team runs, and the team games. I’m confident they know that, too.

But, what can they do?

There are just no trades to be made right now. The markets don’t typically start to seed until after Memorial Day, which is still 11 days away. And, to get the upgrade the Mets would realistically seek wouldn’t take a day to get done, anyway.

They could run Ruben Tejada out there for now, but that risks overexposing him, as we’ve seen with Tejada when he plays everyday over the years.

They could promote Matt Reynolds. He has committed only three errors at shortstop this year, and despite hitting a 3-for-22 skid over his last five games, he’s still hitting .296 with two home runs and 26 RBI for Triple-A Las Vegas this year and hitting left-handers at a .373 clip down there. But, as impressive as he was last year and throughout spring training, I got the sense in camp the Mets wanted to see more from him to ensure last year was the beginning for him and not a fluke for their second round pick from the 2012 first-year player draft.

The question is, when will they have seen enough of what they have here?