State of the Met's Farm

After an off- season that decimated the Met's farm system the organization is looking at a crop of prospects in 2008 that is among the weakest in baseball. Outside of Fernando Martinez the Mets did not have one prospect in Baseball America's top 100, and not one on the fringe either. Instead the Met's now lack depth in the upper levels of their system at every position, but most notably in their starting pitching. Outside of Mike Pelfrey, who technically is not a prospect, their is not one other starting pitcher in the Met's system that figures to contribute at all in 2008 or in 2009. Martinez hopes to be in New York at some point in 2008, and even though he is the top left field prospect in all of baseball he should not be anywhere near Queens this year. Martinez is also the only position player above AA in the Met's system, that projects to be a major league starter down the road. Relief pitchers, however, seem to be the position of strength for the Mets right now. Eddie Kunz seems to be on the fast track to the majors, despite an inconsistent first year in which he posted a 6.75 ERA for the Brooklyn Cyclones. The Mets, as well as Baseball America who rank him as the Met's number two prospect, see him as the potential successor to Billy Wagner in the closer's role. Along with Kunz the Mets have Joe Smith, who will most likely start in AAA, and Robert Parnell, he is most likely a middle reliever at this point, who will begin in AA and probably see some time in New Orleans before the end of the season. Basically the success of the Mets organization rides on the shoulders of Mike Pelfrey and Fernando Martinez.

Mike Pelfrey was touted as the 20th best prospect last year by Baseball America, and fittingly had a dominant spring and won the fifth starter's spot in a landslide. Then it all fell apart. Pelfrey struggled immensely in two stints with the Mets last year, as he struggled to translate his spring success into victories in the regular season. Pelfrey pitched 72.2 IP last year. He faced 154 RHB and 131 LHB, so almost an equal amount, but LHB had an OPS of .906 against him while RHB posted a very modest .746 OPS against him. Even worse Pelfrey gave up 6 HR last year, but 5 of them to LHB. Part of his difficulty against LHB can certainly be attributed to the fact that four of the best hitters in the NL East are either left handed or bat left handed against RHP, Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Chipper Jones, and Jimmy Rollins. However four batters do not constitute a nearly .200 difference in OPS. Plain and simple Pelfrey was atrocious against lefties, and if he wants to have success as a major league starter he needs to fix that soon.

If Pelfrey doesn't pan out the Met's have a real problem on their hands because they have no stand- out starting pitchers after him. Jon Niese has progressed nicely through the system and will probably be in AA this year, but he projects as a back of the rotation starter at best. Recently converted reliever to starter Brant Rustich may also begin the year in AA, after he had a strong rookie year as a reliver pitching 22 IP between Kingsport and Brooklyn. Rustich is interesting, because his draft stock fell after injuries late in his college career, but before that he projected to be a first round pick. Baseball America is very high on him as well, and they think he has the stuff to be starter, but feel he is better suited as a reliever. The Mets managed to get some nice arms out of high school in last year's draft in Nathan Vineyard and Scott Moviel, but both are a while away and don't figure to contribute to the Mets for at least the next three years.

Overall the system is very thin, and while there are some strong latin prospects in the low minors, the Mets need to have a strong draft this June to replenish their system.

Run Residual

In the "Bill James Handbook 2008" Bill James projected John Maine to have a 12-11 record with a 4.05 ERA, and Oliver Perez to have a 9-12 record with a 4.69 ERA. Now after watching these two pitchers emerge into top of the rotation starters over the past two years I found it hard to believe that they would each take such a significant step backwards next year. The only explaination I could come up with for this bold prediction was that Bill James had found something that indicated that Maine and Perez over- achieved last year. I personally felt that they were both due for another step forward next year, but the god of sabermetrics disagreed with me, so I needed to statistically back up my hypothesis.

The ultimate goal of baseball is to score the most runs, and in order to score a run you need to gain four bases. So under this principle each base is worth 1/4 of a run. To confirm this number I took a SRS of 30 ML pitchers and divided their Runs Allowed by Total Bases (1b+2(2b)+3(3b)+4(HR)+BB+HBP). I found the mean ration to be .248 which is basically 1/4. I then devised a regression formula, R=TB/4. This formula gives you a predicted number of runs allowed, which allows you to find the residual value, observed(actual)- predicted Runs. A positive residual meant that the pitcher was actually a victim of bad luck and pitched better than his statistics indicated, and a negative residual meant that the player over-achieved. The r-sq. value of this regresion was .74, meaning that 74% of the data can be accounted for by this regression. I believe this value, however, would increase with a larger sample size.

While researching this stat further I found two pretty significant outliers. In 2007 Brad Penny gave up only 75 runs, but according to the regression formula he should've given up 88.25. However in 2006 and 2005 he had a +1.25 and a +4.5 run residual value meaning that his stats reflected the way he actually pitched in each of those years. The other outlier was Roy Oswalt, who had a +17.75 run residual in 2007. Unlike Penny, though, this was a trend for Oswalt who had had a +19.25 residual value in each of the prior two years. I found that in each of the three years (2007, 2006, and 2005) opposing batters had a babip of .285, .262, and .272, and an OPS of .637, .619, and .734 respectively. This indicated to me that Roy Oswalt was an unbelievably gifted pitcher when it came to stranding runners on base.

So now we finally get to the focus of this post, John Maine and Oliver Perez. Last year Maine gave up 90 runs, and in the regression formula he was predicted to have given up 90.25, a residual of -.25 meaning that Maine's statistics last year reflected his overall performance. His babip for last year was .281 which again means he was neither lucky nor unlucky. Perez also gave up 90 runs last year, but his predicted run total was only 86 giving him a residual of +4. This actually means that Ollie pitched better last year than his stats indicate, and his babip of .273 also reflects this belief.

Nothing I have found or calculated indicates that either one of these pitchers is due for a decline in performance next year. It seems more logical to believe that experience will only help these two young pitchers continue to improve as they have over the past two years. I have the utmost respect for Bill James and his sabermetric statistics, but in this case I think he is well off in his prediction, and basically I find it hard to imagine either of these two pitchers regressing next year.