3 NY Mets players we wish Statcast was around to track

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Statcast has proven to be a viable tool for everybody associated with baseball since its inception in 2015. The New York Mets have had their fair share of elite talents that could’ve given us a quantifiable perspective of how talented these players were when they peaked as Mets.

1) Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden took the baseball world by storm in 1984 and 1985, dominating baseball as a young adult with two dominant pitches.

The Mets’ skid of seven straight losing seasons ended in 1984, the same year 19-year old righty Dwight Gooden made the team as a starting pitcher, and he made an impact from the start, winning National League Rookie of the Year in 1984 and the Cy Young the following year, and he was a must-watch every five days and he drew large crowds, earning the nickname “Doc” for leading the league in strikeouts in each of his first two seasons.

Doc utilized a plus-plus fastball and a nasty curveball to overwhelm the league those two seasons, and the advanced metrics on his pitches could have given us a greater appreciation for the hype that he received during the dawn of his career.

For example, the vertical movement on his 12-to-6 curveball caught hitters off guard, and it was unusual to see him dominate with his curveball because lefties are the ones usually associated with devastating curveballs, so a spin rate evaluation may have been useful, especially since the Mets had a pitcher with a crazy curveball spin rate recently with Seth Lugo.

Additionally, it would have been useful to see the expected average and weighed on base and slugging percentages would have given more appreciation as to how dominant and talented he was compared to the other pitchers of his league.

2) Darryl Strawberry instilled fear in opposing pitchers for eight years as a Met, but Statcast could have given us launch angles and exit velocity.

Like Gooden, Darryl Strawberry was a hyped prospect from the beginning, as he was the first overall pick in the 1980 MLB draft, and his game-changing power turned a franchise that always had been offensively challenged without much power to the best offense in the National League in the second half of the 1980s.

Our scouts and executives today put a lot of emphasis on exit velocity and launch angles, and some of the most towering home runs in Mets history were courtesy of Strawberry. So given all the media attention on the Mets during the decade, national broadcasts could have given us a measure of how hard he hit the ball.

Very few players in the league instilled opposition game planning around a particular player than Darryl Strawberry, not only for his power, but also for his speed. In each season from 1984 to 1988, Strawberry hit 25 or more home runs, and stole 25 or more bases, so how his sprint speed impacted how pitchers approached his plate appearances (albeit in a league where running was more common) while trying to neutralize his power threat would have been fascinating if Statcast was available back then.

3) Jose Reyes wreaked havoc on the basepaths in the mid-2000s, and his sprint speed compared with other great baserunners of his era could have been useful.

Jose Reyes made his major league debut the day before his 20th birthday in 2003, and he was tabbed as one of the most exciting players in baseball on one of the best teams in baseball. His speed gave opposing pitchers a distraction when it came to facing power hitters in Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, and David Wright, all of them perennial 30 home run and 100 RBI sluggers in what was one of the best lineups in baseball over a three-year period.

Reyes not only led the league in stolen bases three times, he also had enough gap-to-gap power to lead the league in triples four times as a Met and he was a good contact hitter. He became the first player in team in team history to win the league batting title, as he hit .337 in 2011.

So how exactly would Statcast have been useful in Reyes’ first stint as a Met? It would have been fascinating to see where Reyes ranked when compared to other shortstops like Jimmy Rollins in sprint speed and efficient baserunning, given the war of words between the division rivals in 2007 and 2008.

Statcast was around for Reyes' second tour of duty with the Mets from 2016 to 2018, but he was past his prime and didn't steal many bases, but the prime Reyes was the one that we wanted Statcast there to see.

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