I’m not ready to jump off a ledge yet. Yes, we haven’t gotten many hits with runners in scoring position, but it is a small sample, and it is April. We’ve gotten a lot of guys on base.(Our on base percentage with runners on is a little better.) Sometimes we stage two out rallies where a guy or two gets a hit, and often guys like that get stranded. I’m not as worried about the number of guys left on, because you do get things like that when a team gets a lot of hits and never gives up even with two outs. Creating opportunities to score is the first part to having big games.
Still, this team doesn’t feel right. Supposedly Manuel is preaching aggression, but I don’t see it. Other than trying to make Castillo swing at more pitches, I’d say this team is timid. Also, wasn’t the big plus with Dan Warthen and Oliver Perez is that he let Ollie be Ollie? Why is this not okay with Castillo? I worry that trying to make him into a hitter that he isn’t, could hurt. He’s been a successful player in his career, why mess with that? The Mets have way too little stolen base attempts for a team that is supposedly aggressive.
The Mets are on pace for 122 stolen base attempts, compared with 174 last year. Before that is was 246, 181, and 193 in 2005. This team is a team that’s always used it’s running game to it’s advantage. When was the last time you saw Reyes dancing off third trying to entice a balk? Putting the runners in motion, like yesterday with Omir Santos up, is not what I’d call aggression. It’s almost defeatist. Manuel seems to manage like he expects failure. He doesn’t think Santos, even though he’s two for three, or Reed as a pinch hitter are going to come through, so he tries to manufacture something. The same way he does when he goes matchup happy and starts pinch hitting for Church or Castro/Santos. Church has shown some ability to hit lefties, but if you keep taking him out against lefties, he’s going to have less practice at it, and you’ll start putting ideas in his head about failure. I brought up a similar thing about Feliciano. If you never let him pitch to righties, how is he supposed to figure out how to get them out? It’s not like he wasn’t a big pitcher for us in years past, so what happened? Actually, the data doesn’t look that horrible for Feliciano’s splits, and it also looks like that he pitches against as many righties and lefties. So if he’s really supposed to be a lefty specialist, he’s being used wrong.
Then again, the Mets won two of three. They dropped the ball on the third game, but you can’t actually win them all. (I’m assuming they can win 156 however) Beat the Cardinals, Beat the Nationals and maybe we can start putting this small sample size problems behind us.
