The World's Worst Sports Blog

Not just offense – consistent offense. April 9, 2015

Jacob deGrom pitched a quality start last night and got almost no run support.

Now, that’s not unusual. Last year, 2546 teams had their starter pitch 5 or more innings and allow two earned runs or fewer; 781 of those teams lost, for a winning percentage of around 69%. It’s not unusual for the Mets, either; they had 84 such games last year, including 16 from Bartolo Colon (14-1 in those games), 15 from Jon Niese (4-4), 19 from Zack Wheeler (11-2), and 13 from deGrom (9-1). The Mets were right in the middle for all of this – the median across MLB was 85 games and 61 wins in those games. Washington had the most games (101) and the most wins (79), along with the highest percentage of wins coming in 5-inning starts with 2 earned runs or fewer from the starter (82.2%).

Take note, though, of how disproportionate the wins were. Colon won all but 2 of his solid starts, with the Mets averaging 6.4 runs of support; Jon Niese only got 8 decisions, four of them losses, despite having almost as many games as Colon. Behind Niese, the Mets scored only 2.6 runs per game. deGrom had about 4.2 runs per game behind him and won 9 games; Wheeler had six more games with the same 4.2 run support average, but only got two more wins than deGrom in those games.

deGrom maintained last year’s high standards in this year’s first start, and the Mets provided very little run support; even deGrom didn’t support himself very well, shaving almost 40 batting-average points to hit only .178 in these starts compared with .217 in other starts.

Given, the Nationals are coming off a fantastic year as the best team in the National League’s regular season, so we can handle a 2-1 loss early in the season, but the offense needs to be more consistent if we’re going to take a rotation full of talent and turn it into a 90-win season.