Zito or Not, Expect Mets Rotation To Improve Next Year

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Here is a quick question: How many Mets starters pitched at least 100 innings with a park-adjusted ERA that was average or better?

The answer, when you think about it at all, is pretty shocking: Two — Tom Glavine and Orlando Hernandez.

When a team wins 97 games, there’s a temptation to say that they were good in every phase of the game. The Mets weren’t, and they weren’t even close — the starting pitching just wasn’t good. Good pitchers like Pedro Martinez and John Maine were hurt; bad pitchers like Steve Trachsel pitched a lot, and a bizarre assortment of castoffs, prospects, and nonames soaked up an awful lot of innings. Jose Lima, Victor Zambrano, Alay Soler, Brian Bannister, Oliver Perez, Dave Williams, Geremi Gonzalez, and Mike Pelfrey combined to throw 182.2 innings with a 6.56 ERA. Between them and Trachsel (whose 4.97 ERA actually overstated his effectiveness), the Mets essentially got worse performance than you’d expect to get from a random quadruple-A journeyman from two different rotation spots.

The Mets won because of a truly great offense and a truly great bullpen, which wasn’t merely effective, but very durable. The pen ranked third in the National League in innings pitched, which is especially impressive considering that for obvious reasons there’s usually an inverse proportion between how often a team uses its relievers and how good it is.

Next year, the offense will again be excellent — probably not quite as good, but more than good enough to win 95 games. The bullpen, too, should again be excellent — Willie Randolph and Rick Peterson have showed real talent for putting unexceptional pitchers in position to take advantage of whatever it is they do will, and so filling in the blanks around Billy Wagner, Aaron Heilman, and Duaner Sanchez shouldn’t prove too difficult.

What all this means is that the Mets aren’t really forced to improve the rotation dramatically, and it will probably improve if they don’t make a big move over the winter. It wouldn’t hurt to bring on a free agent star like Barry Zito or Jason Schmidt, but it’s just not neccessary, even to win in the postseason — the Mets missed out on the pennant because the offense shut down, not because they lacked starting pitching.

Think of it this way. Say Oliver Perez pitches 182.2 innings with a 4.90 ERA. That will represent an improvement of about 40 runs — four full wins — over what the Mets got from the random assortment of chump no. 5 starters they sent out to the mound this year. That’s over twice the difference between Zito and Glavine this year. The biggest gains the Mets can make aren’t in the area of high-grade ace starting pitching, but just in avoiding sending people like Jose Lima to the mound.

Keeping this in mind, the Mets’ goal should be clear — to meet or exceed the performance of this year’s rotation (918.2 innings with a 4.67 ERA) — and so should be their priorities. The first should be to lock Perez and John Maine into rotation spots. Count on Perez to pitch 182.2 innings with a 4.90 ERA, and on Maine to pitch 180 innings with a 4.25 ERA — not overwhelming goals. What, then, do you need to get from the rest of the rotation? 556 innings and a 4.72 ERA.

Looked at this way, it’s easy to see why it’s so very important to bring Tom Glavine back for another year. Yes, he’s old, but he’s a fairly certain bet to pitch 200 innings with an ERA of, at worst, around 4.00 — his first year with the Mets excepted, he’s been doing that since the Berlin Wall was standing. Bring him back, pencil him in for the usual, and now the Mets just have to find two pitches who between them can pitch 356 innings worth of baseball with a 5.23 ERA. At this point you start to see that the Mets have a whole lot of options, and need to sign an expensive veteran about as much as they need to sign a new first baseman. A rookie like Mike Pelfrey would probably good for 150 innings at a 5.23 ERA, so you can use him and then dig up someone who can pitch 210 innings at Steve Trachsel levels and the rotation would be as good as last year’s — all of which assumes that Pedro Martinez will be an utter non-factor coming off his shoulder surgery next year, which isn’t a sure thing, and also that Perez and Maine aren’t better than this exercise gives them credit for.

It’s of course better to have good pitchers than bad ones, and Zito in particular is intriguing. When you get into the guts of his numbers — his line drive percentage, strikeout ratios, and so on — they don’t look so great, but his ERA has been better than his underlying numbers for many years, and he’s an incredible durable pitcher, routinely throwing 220 innings.

As a bulwark to next year’s staff and a long-term replacement for Glavine, he’d be a great fit. Past him, the quantities are more unknown and all have various issues. What’s important to realize, though, is that the Mets don’t need them. They need to re-sign Glavine for a year (or bring in an equally reliable replacement), they need to commit to a couple of their young, unproven starters, and they need to make sure that next year’s role players are as good as this year’s, so they don’t start leaking offense at spots like second base and right field. Past that, they’re fine. The Mets could use a lot of different guys, and as long as they’re better than Victor Zambrano, all will be well.


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