At the trade deadline, the Mets were 57-50, tied for second place in the NL wildcard race and just half a game behind top-place Atlanta.
Since then, they have lost nine of 14 games before Friday’s 7-3 win over the Marlins and slipped out of the wild-card spot.
On Friday, President of Baseball Operations David Stearns acknowledged the shaky play of the past two weeks.
“We’ve been playing very inconsistently,” Stearns said. “I believe in this squad. I think we have a squad that’s working. We know we have to play better than we did in the last stretch to get into the playoffs.”
This includes reducing walks, which was particularly damaging in Thursday’s bitter loss to Oakland, when the Mets walked 11 batters – the highest number of the season.
This is part of a years-long struggle, as the Mets allowed the most batters to walks in the National League.
Sean Manaea and Jose Butto combined for just two walks on Friday night.
“It’s a combination of a lot of things,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “With some of the guys in the rotation and on the team, I feel like sometimes we nibble way too much and we don’t attack the hitters, we don’t trust them and we don’t let the defense play.”
But pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said it’s more complicated.
He argues that the team’s high walk rate, which ranks 29th in MLB at 3.90 per nine innings—only the weaker White Sox surpass it—is a byproduct of the team’s diverse arsenals.
“We have some guys who can’t throw the ball properly, and sometimes you have to walk the batter when you do that,” Hefner said.
He noted that walks are less of a concern since the Mets rank fifth in the major leagues with a strikeout rate of 9.01 per nine innings.
And Hefner added that many of their pitchers have tended to stop batters with walks throughout their careers, so it’s not a development that only occurred this season.
“Our approach hasn’t changed at all,” Hefner said. “We’re definitely not trying to nibble or not throw on contact.”
However, he hoped that the team would perform better in certain situations.
“We say when we’re behind, throw your best strike pitch, and when you’re ahead, throw your best miss pitch,” Hefner said. “That’s the part where we didn’t get the best work done.”
But over the course of the season, they’ve given up a lot of batters on walks, which Hefner said is inevitable when you have pitchers like Jose Quintana and Paul Blackburn who don’t throw hard and can’t afford to throw the ball in the middle of the plate.
And when the team played well, Hefner said, the number of walks the team allowed was not considered a problem because it was usually able to limit the damage done by bringing in extra baserunners.
“I’m not crazy about the number of walks, but you can’t just tell the guys not to let people walk,” Hefner said.
Adam Ottavino, a veteran of many solid pitching teams, said the numbers stunned him.
“It’s definitely crap,” said the right-hander, whose walk numbers have been good this season. “But I don’t understand it. We’re not doing anything wrong by telling the guys what we’re telling them. Everyone understands that they have to be ahead in the counts.”
“Regardless of the reason, we can’t let that many people get away with it,” Stearns said. “You can’t win baseball games consistently with that many free runs.”
