NEW YORK — The Mets got off to a 13-3 start on their way to a 15-8 record in April, then struggled to a 5-7 mark in the first half of May before returning home Friday to start a three-game series with the Brewers. The cause of the slide in the season’s second month is perfectly clear: The Mets have stopped hitting.
Mets pitchers have actually lowered the staff ERA in May, posting a 2.44 mark through 12 games after compiling a 3.33 ERA in April. After scoring 4.22 runs per game in April, with a .671 team OPS, the Mets have scuffled at the plate, scoring only 2.75 runs per game with a .627 team OPS.
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The Mets will bounce back on offense. The lowest team OPS in the major leagues last year was the .634 posted by the Padres, and it was the lowest figure by 27 points. New York might have a roster tilted heavily toward pitching, but the lineup is better than averaging out to Buck Martinez, Jayson Nix or Abraham Nunez, all of whom had a .627 career OPS.
“The crazy thing about baseball is you could be 10 for your last 20 and, all of a sudden, go 0 for your next 20, or vice versa,” said Mets left fielder Michael Cuddyer, owner of a .702 OPS in April and a .561 OPS in May. “You go 0 for 20, and then, all of a sudden, you get a hit here, boom, you’re on fire. It’s a weird game, and I think offenses, as a group, do the same thing. You can go five games, scoring one run a game. All of a sudden, boom, next six games you score four-plus a game. It’s a weird thing.”
It’s the latter part of Cuddyer’s easily observed true statement that is confounding. Baseball is a series of individual confrontations between batter and pitcher, yet teamwide streaks are prevalent. Last year, the Rockies had the majors’ best OPS, at .772, with monthly totals ranging from .706 to .827 — and that was in back-to-back months, August and September. The Tigers, second in the majors at .757, ranged from a .710 OPS in August to an .801 in July.
One difference from month to month can be personnel changes, something that certainly has impacted the Mets with David Wright on the disabled list since April 15 and Travis d’Arnaud since April 21. There’s more to it than that, though, because the Mets are hardly the first team to deal with a slump running rampant through the lineup.
“The more pressure you put on yourself, the less likely you are to perform, and that’s kind of what you see,” said Mets outfielder John Mayberry Jr. “In some situations, where your team isn’t playing the way they’re capable of, I think guys try to do too much, and that can lead to the drought being prolonged.”
Mayberry was speaking in general terms, not about the Mets’ current situation, but it gets at something that can play into a scenario where key hitters are injured. When Wright and d’Arnaud get hurt, and Lucas Duda endures some predictable regression after a phenomenally hot start that saw him post a .915 OPS in April, there is more pressure applied on the rest of New York’s hitters. Facing some excellent pitchers does not help matters.
“The guy on the other side is getting paid to contradict whatever we’re trying to do,” Cuddyer said. “You look at, prior to this past series, our losses were against Gio Gonzalez, (Doug) Fister, Cole Hamels, and then in that series (the Mets’ most recent one at Wriglely Field), the first two were (Jon) Lester and (Jake) Arrieta. That’s five pretty good pitchers, and they obviously go into the equation, too. … It has a chance to snowball. You try not to let it, because you’re competing every day … but it can definitely go up and down. That’s why you see offenses rollercoaster-ride through the season. You play 162 games, it’s not always going to go bad, but it’s not always going to go good.”
If there is a snowball effect in a negative way to lead to team slumps, it stands to reason that the same would be true, positively, to lead to hot streaks. There’s just no way to know the moment that happens, because it can start so innocuously.
“You get a guy out there and you have a seven- or eight-pitch at-bat,” Mayberry said. “We win that at-bat, and it kind of carries over, and his mentality might be slightly altered for the next batter, and then you’re able to capitalize. Things go from there, and you’ve got guys on base, and they try to make a pitch. It’s too fine, they leave it out over the plate, and the next thing you know, a big inning occurs. When you talk about stressful pitches, you get situations like that, big spots, couple runners in scoring position, you have to make such a fine pitch, there’s no room for error.”
The Mets would like to get themselves into more of those situations, not only to start scoring runs and winning games again, but because there might be more to the concept of momentum than just the next day’s starting pitcher. Hitters might bring the same talent to the batter’s box in each at-bat, which plays itself out over the long haul, but there is more to hitting in an individual moment than that.
“I think the biggest part about hitting is mental,” Cuddyer said. “Physically, we’re all pretty on par, but I think mentally is where the separators are. The big part of mental is confidence. Confidence is affected by pressure, whether you put it on yourself or not. When a team’s not doing well, you put more pressure on yourself, you stress out more, and your confidence level drops a little bit. When everybody’s swinging the bat great, you put less pressure on yourself, which raises your confidence, and everything kind of flows nicely. That happens as a unit, and within the individuals.”