Good eyes, quality discipline, and 1 of the worst team batting averages

Now 10 games into the 2023 season, the New York Mets are a .500 ball club. It doesn’t seem that way. At times, they’ve felt much better. On other days, they’ve seemed much worse. Maybe this is what playing even baseball is like. We got spoiled with how consistently they won in 2022.

The Mets enter Monday carrying a .216 team batting average. We know this is bad for any point in the season. Even after a week and a half of games, it’s terribly low. In fact, the Miami Marlins are the team above them at .230. That’s a lot of distance. Unfortunately, the Mets have settled in at number 27 in Major League Baseball and are currently last in the National League.

The three teams hitting worse than them are the Detroit Tigers at .205, Oakland Athletics at .192, and Kansas City Royals at .184.

The Mets aren’t hitting and are wasting a decent OBP

It doesn’t seem like the Mets have been this atrocious at the plate. It’s because they haven’t been. They’re still getting on base. Their .325 OBP is decent; it ranks 18th in MLB. They’re just behind the New York Yankees and San Diego Padres at .327. They’re ahead of the struggling Houston Astros at .319.

We observed last year how talented this lineup was at finding ways to get on base. It’s more than Brandon Nimmo. Daniel Vogelbach is a master at walking. He owns a .412 OBP behind Nimmo’s team-leading .421. This is still a ball club that gets doinked. Tim Locastro has already taken three pitches for the team. He has yet to pick up a hit in any of his other chances.

Against a bad Marlins squad, this can win games. Versus tougher opponents like the Milwaukee Brewers where the pitches throw strikes, it’s an imperfect strategy. Not everyone in your lineup needs to be Rudy Stein.

Numerous hitters have gotten off to slow starts with Pete Alonso providing the bulk of early offense. He has gone deep 5 times and has more than twice as many RBI as anyone else. He’s also leading the team in runs.

There is no alarm to sound or panic button to aggressively punch but it is a cue for the Mets to swing the bat a little more. Their OBP numbers aren’t great right now because they’re relying way too much on free passes and sliders that move a little too far inward.

The early OBP output has been promising and yet much of it has gone to waste. Two shutouts and a game where they scored one run places them 22nd in MLB with 39 runs scored. It’s less than teams who have played fewer games than they have.

Amazingly, the three teams tied for 27 runs scored at the bottom of the league are the Marlins, Athletics, Royals, and Tigers who are all grouped together with the Mets with the worst batting averages in baseball. Patience has paid off in this regard. They are scoring runs. It just hasn’t been easy.