Mets' Misfortune Can Only Be Explained By the Baseball Gods

As of the start of their series against the San Diego Padres, the New York Mets are tied for the league’s lowest wOBA at .291 with the very same Padres. Considering the talent on the roster, that’s simply an unacceptable level of performance, but they’re not entirely to blame. The Mets own the lowest wOBA in baseball, not because they’ve built a lineup of hapless scrubs, but because they’ve angered a vengeful god.

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to suggest that the Mets have been the unluckiest lineup in baseball. Their wOBA of .291 is objectively awful, but their xwOBA of .318 sits at much more respectable 16th. Unsurprisingly, the Mets’ wOBA-xwOBA difference of -0.027 is the largest in the league, and dwarfs the Rays’ +0.012 over-performance. 

Now, every season has to have a luckiest and unluckiest team; that’s just the way things work. But the depths of the Mets’ misfortune have them speeding toward the lower mantle. Taking every team’s xwOBA and wOBA difference, we can see just how dire the Mets' start has been. 

At -2.656 standard deviations from the mean, no team, positively or negatively, is in the same ballpark as the Mets. And just to make sure that this isn’t a somewhat common, although unfortunate, occurrence, last season, the biggest underperformers were the Pirates at -0.015, good for -1.670 standard deviations from league average. It should be noted that the Athletics posted a positive difference of +0.014, good for 2.493 standard deviations from the mean, but they played half of their games in a Triple-A park. 

The Mets should see a heaping helping of positive regression, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something intrinsic about this lineup that might cause it to underperform its expected metrics. While it’s easy to point to expected metrics as the gospel, at the end of the day, they’re just a useful tool, and they leave out one critical detail: spray angle. 

By now, the average fan has heard of launch angle and exit velocity, which are the two primary ingredients in xwOBA. Player sprint speed is thrown into the equation for certain types of batted balls, so blaming a lack of team speed isn’t an out (although that feels like every fanbase's go-to gripe with an under-performing lineup). However, one crucial, although smaller, ingredient that xwOBA leaves out is spray angle. 

Exit velocity is how hard you hit a ball. Launch angle is how high. And spray angle is where you hit it. Some players, usually by being extreme pull hitters, routinely outperform their xwOBA, and others, by crushing pitches to center and the opposite field, will consistently go under it. However, that really shouldn’t be an issue when evaluating a team. The players who really under or over-perform their expected metrics are outliers, and it’s dang near impossible to build an entire team from outliers, try as the Rays may. 

So, let’s take a look and see if the Mets have built a lineup where underperforming their xwOBA should be the expectation. 

The Mets, based on their team-wide spray chart, shouldn’t secretly be over-performing their xwOBA, but they also shouldn’t be underperforming it to the degree they have. Compared to the rest of the league, they hit their groundballs in the most productive places, and while their pull-air rate isn’t amazing, it also isn’t anywhere near the Brewers, who are 30th at 12%, and are hitting almost exactly to their xwOBA. 

If the spray angle isn’t to blame, then perhaps there is one particular type of batted ball that the Mets have been struggling with. 

(The (+) metrics are weighted so that 100 is exactly average, and each point is a percentage away from average. Example: a SLG+ of 95 is 5% below league average, while a BABIP+ of 103 is 3% above league average.)

If you hate the Mets, this should be hung in the Louvre, but I’m guessing that’s not the case if you've made it this far. The Mets are dramatically under-performing on every type of batted ball, except for pulled grounders, which are, by far, the least valuable type of batted ball to begin with. This looks like a team that made a deal with the devil to gain a marginal edge on the thinnest of margins at the cost of the whole operation. 

So, what does this all mean? Well, since the Mets are fifth in MLB at 6.3% barrels per plate appearance, own the fifth-highest EV50 in the league (100.4 MPH), and have the eighth-best exit velocity average on line drives and fly balls (93.5 MPH), they should start hitting as their xwOBA suggests. That doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily reach their xwOBA by season's end, as a lot of damage has already been done, but they should certainly start moving in the right direction.  

The Mets, miraculously, aren’t dead in the water despite this cataclysmic underperformance on their batted balls. It might be a stretch to say some god or pantheon of deities hates them, but they certainly look cursed. While the numbers say everything should begin to turn around, just to be safe, consult with your local exorcist.