Who Stinks?

The bullpen.

I was prepared to write something about how the Mets have been going through a tough patch since the All Star break, due to the poor performance of the bullpen. The 'pen has been terrible recently, blowing games in Milwaukee and Florida, just off the top of my head; not to mention last night's clusterfuck, or even Wednesday's almost-clusterfuck . But of course, when I looked at the actual data it turns out that wasn't it at all.



This is a graph of the OPS allowed by the Mets starters and relievers, and the OPS achieved by the Mets hitters. Basically, I'm taking OPS here to stand for the general offense, which it pretty much is. Obviously you'd want your hitters to have a higher OPS than your pitchers would allow.


Yeesh, that was an ugly stretch there in June-July, wasn't it? But the bullpen has been pretty good all year, even in August, last night's stinkfest not withstanding. It's the starters who have been letting us down, though the offense has finally started to come around. Look, the bullpen certainly did its part in blowing the game last night, but some of that blame has to go to Brian Lawrence, too. Giving up four runs in five innings to the punchless Pirates is nothing to be proud of.


You may notice that the June-July period where the Mets allowed more OPS than they earned neatly coincided with their shrinking division lead. Thank god the Braves also went into the toilet at the same time.

We couldn't really expect to have the whole rotation spot a .650 OPS for a whole season. On the other hand, they're going to have to do better than .800+ if we want to continue to hold off the Phillies and the Braves (or the Phaves . . . Brillies?). If the bullpen has to continue to pitch four innings every night, they're not going to get any better, either.

Thanks as always to the Day by Day Database, and The Hardball Times, two absolutely indispensable baseball sites.