Mets' misfiring staff stuck in reverse, with nobody taking wheel
Mets starting pitcher Kodai Senga walks back to the mound as Atlanta's Ozzie Albies rounds the bases on his solo home run during the fourth inning at Citi Field on Thursday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The problem with not prioritizing the acquisition of a bona fide, ace-caliber starting pitcher?
There’s never one around when you need him.
And the Mets were desperately craving that legitimate No. 1 stopper — a crippling blind spot for Steve Cohen’s $333 million roster — heading into Thursday night’s series finale against Atlanta — a 4-3 loss at Citi Field. Handing the baseball to Kodai Senga raised the possibility they could get that type of performance, but it felt more like a prayer than a prediction, as the Mets just wrapped an entire turn through the rotation without a starter completing as many as five innings.
David Peterson had pitched like the rotation’s rock for most of this season. But watching him crumble at an astonishing clip (six runs, five walks, 3 1/3 innings) in Wednesday’s 11-6 loss was further destabilizing for the Mets, who suffered their 12th loss in 14 games. If Peterson wasn’t up to the task, that left manager Carlos Mendoza pretty much adrift going forward as his Mets barely clung to a one-game lead over the Reds for the final NL wild-card spot.
“It’s hard,” Mendoza said before Thursday’s game. “They’re all kind of struggling, but we got to be able to move on. We got to continue to support those guys and continue to come up with solutions. At the end of the day, that’s our job, right?”
Now that the trade deadline has long passed, solutions are more difficult to come by and this is not a recent problem. The rotation has been in free-fall for two months. President of baseball operations David Stearns used one of his Triple-A bullets in calling up Nolan McLean for Saturday’s start against the Mariners, but hoping on a Syracuse star can’t instantly reverse a long-term spiral.
The Mets need the current starters to snap out of it. Since June 13, the rotation had pitched the fewest innings (227) in the majors, averaging 4.45 per start over that 51-game span, with a 5.35 ERA that was the fourth-worst overall.
“We’re not holding up our end,” Peterson said.
Compare that malaise with the first 2 1/2 months of the season, when the Mets boasted MLB’s best-performing rotation, and the depth of the collapse becomes even more shocking. Through those 67 games — without Sean Manaea, the winter’s big spend ($75M) — the Mets averaged more than a full inning better (5.48) for each start and sported a 2.79 ERA, tops in the majors (the next-closest NL team was the Brewers, at 3.36).
Frankly, we didn’t think the situation would get quite this bleak. Before the post-6/13 meltdown, Stearns was looked upon as a sort of pitching whisperer, exploiting arms-race inefficiencies while others spent big (with mixed results) on Max Fried ($218M), Corbin Burnes ($210M) and Blake Snell ($182M). Stearns’ bargain-hunting worked like a charm last season when the starters pitched to their ceilings — staying mostly healthy the whole way through — so there was reason to believe he could do it again with this group, especially after bringing Manaea back with a functioning Senga.
The reality, however, has been very different. Stearns’ strategy of going with quantity over quality has backfired, eroded by injuries and regression. What we initially believed would be another balanced rotation that could deliver a solid start each time out has devolved into a dice roll, with Mendoza never knowing what he’s going to get — or a performance much worse than he feared.
Take Senga, for instance. He had a 1.47 ERA through his first 13 starts, averaging 5.67 innings. Since that June 13 date, his ERA balloons to 5.31 while his per-start average shrinks to four innings. But Senga has plenty of company in that underachieving department. Manaea (4.36 ERA) was viewed as No. 1 potential when he came off the IL right before the All-Star break, but that hasn’t materialized, and no one else has stepped up to fill that void, either. To the point where maybe it’s getting in the heads of his flailing rotation-mates.
“We only get one chance every five days to do this kind of thing,” Manaea said before Thursday’s game. “And you want to be that guy to put the stop to things. You know, turn the tide. It’s a good thought. But at the same time, it can get you out of what you know how to do, your normal things, and that can be a battle.”
At least Senga and Manaea have experience in these roles. The Mets also continue to rely on Clay Holmes, but he was the Yankees’ closer last year and hadn’t been a starter since 2018 with the Pirates. Holmes already has doubled his workload from last season, jumping from 63 innings to 126, so how realistic is it to think that he’ll suddenly be able to push past the fifth on any given night? Never mind rise above the rest of the rotation to suddenly deliver a stopper-quality performance. But that’s what all the starters are wrestling with at the moment.
“I think everybody wants to be the stopper,” Holmes said Thursday afternoon. “But it’s not easy as saying, hey, I’m going to force something great tonight. Some people respond well to adversity and are able to give a big performance when it’s needed. But at the same time, if you try to force it, it can backfire.”
The Mets are definitely getting that backfire vibe from their rotation lately. And this disturbing trend won’t go away on its own. Ultimately, someone has to stop it.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
