The ups and downs of a baseball season can serve as euphoria one week, and a dose of humility the next.
But there is usually at least one constant for every team throughout the ebbs and flows. For the Mets, there are two.
One is the offense. While they’ve seen an uptick in home runs in 2015 and are middle of the pack in that category, they just don’t score enough runs – their 237 runs scored is fifth worse in the sport.
But that continues to be their second worst problem, shocking as it may be.
Before the season, I wrote the defense will be the primary concern heading into 2015, and it has pretty much lived up (or down) to that expectation for the first ten weeks of the season.
And on Saturday, that defense hit the floor head first, and spread throughout the Mets like a plague.
The Mets committed three errors on paper during Saturday afternoon’s 5-3 loss to the Braves, but that didn’t include a botched play in left field from Michael Cuddyer, a mistake on a bunt play by Eric Campbell in which he should have let the ball roll foul, Dilson Herrera diving to his left on a soft liner to snag a flyball in the 11th inning only to see it roll away from him, and then of course there was the double play Wilmer Flores was unable to start with one out in the ninth which unquestionably should have and needed to end the game.
“Any time you’re making errors, it’s something at this level you can’t do,” manager Terry Collins explained after Saturday’s brutal loss. “You’ve got to give them 27 outs. The more outs you give them, the tougher it is to beat somebody.”
Collins seemed particularly perturbed by the game ending double play which was not in the ninth inning.
“It’s a double play, we got the chance to get the game over,” Collins said. “We didn’t make the play. We still got to get an out. We just didn’t get the next out.”
No kidding.
Meanwhile, Flores seemed satisfied he was able to knock the ball down and get the out, and seemed perturbed by questions about the bobble after the game.
“It was hard-hit ball,” he said. When pressed about the play, Flores said, “Frustrating? It wasn’t frustrating. I thought I did a good job to knock it down.”
It’s hard to get on Flores these days for his defense. Up until that point, he had shown a marked improvement in his footwork, glove and throwing. He made a mistake. It happens and it will happen again.
But while this could be his way for him to not focus on an individual moment, the moment was huge and it was the worst possible moment for the next mistake to take place. That play simply must be converted at the major league level. There’s no exception or rationale to be made. That’s the game, and it cost the game.
Regardless of who is out there on the diamond, it doesn’t change. It’s a product of having Triple-A players on the field with regularity, and asking them to learn and overcome the pressure of winning a big league baseball game when they’re arguably not ready, unable to, or a combination of the two.
And that’s not only on the infield – it’s in the outfield too.
But it’s not even the errors alone. It’s the mental mistakes, the poor decisions, the lack of range and mobility, all of which are a product of having those Triple-A players out there, as well as having below average defensive players and people out of position all over the field on a daily basis.
The need for a solidified defense was clearly underestimated in the club’s evaluation of the roster, which is hard to understand in an era which is so dependent upon speed (they have none of that, either) and strong defense to win. Aside from the unprecedented number of injuries to plague this team, having neither a quality defensive team or a team with any sort of speed has unquestionably contributed to watering down their 13-3 start rather than building on it.
If this club is going to make an acquisition, perhaps the evaluation needs to include players who field their position well, and can be counted on to make the most mundane of the routine plays, which this current group simply does not.
It’s costing the Mets pitchers pitches and innings, and costing the Mets games routinely. It just has to matter, because this just won’t play in a pennant race, let alone a playoff game.
Just Mets 