Your 2026 Mets Are Statistically the Least-Clutch Team of the 21st Century

There have been countless articles chronicling the New York Mets' pitiful 2026 season. They entered the campaign as contenders, and couldn’t even keep their dreams on life support for a month. By April 30, they were 10-21, their playoff hopes were functionally dead, but they managed to “claw” back to 26-33 by the end of May. Any hopes of a miraculous turnaround were dashed when they went a meager 10-17 in June, and their season was all but over before the All-Star Break. 

There’s no mystery as to why the Mets’ season has gone awry. They can’t hit. They can’t field. They can’t pitch. And, worst of all, they can’t catch a break. The Mets’ .018 gap between their wOBA and xwOBA is the largest in the league, and it’s why, instead of having a league-average offense, their wRC+ of 92 ranks 25th. However, the Mets haven’t just been unlucky at the plate; they’ve been one of the worst teams in history when the game hangs in the balance, and it has made a bad season far, far worse. 

For those uninitiated, wRC+, or weighted runs created plus, is a context-neutral statistic. It treats all home runs the same, even though we all know a walk-off is far more valuable than a 450-foot moonshot off an eephus-hurling position player. Meanwhile, WPA, or Win Probability Added, is all about context. It rewards players for a walk-off and punishes them for a ground-ball double play in the eighth with runners on first and third in a close game. The best way to think of the two is that wRC+ is a more predictive statistic, while WPA is purely descriptive. Batting average with runners in scoring position isn’t a terribly predictive stat for the future, but it usually tells you which team scored the most runs. 

Despite their differences, team-wide wRC+ and WPA are strongly correlated. In the 21st century, the linear correlation between team wRC+ and WPA/600PA, removing the 2020 season, is 0.813. When 1.0 is perfect, a 0.813 correlation is significant, and it means we should have a very good idea of what a team’s WPA should be, just by looking at their wRC+. Spoiler: good hitters help you win more games than bad ones, and it’s by this measure where the 2026 Mets have been one of the worst teams of the 21st century. 

Using a linear forecast model, we can see what every team in the sample’s WPA/G should have been based on their wRC+. While this might sound complicated, it’s incredibly simple. The model uses a team’s wRC+ and then puts it on the red line. 

Since the 2026 Mets have a below-league-average wRC+ at 92, they should have a negative WPA, which they do, but by way more than you’d expect. In the 21st century, the Mets have underperformed their WPA/600PA, based upon their wRC+, by the sixth-largest margin.

This is not a list you want to be on. The top three teams are notoriously among the worst in history. The 2018 Orioles lost 115 games; the 2024 White Sox lost 121, and the 2003 Tigers lost 119. As a reminder, it takes a bad lineup and awful luck to lose over 110 games. The Mets probably won’t push their way into the top three. They’d have to close the season out on an epic run of futility in leverage situations to really challenge the Tigers in third, but unfortunately, they’re also the least clutch team of the 21st century. 

Clutch, unlike wRC+ and WPA, isn’t weighted to the league average. A team’s clutch score uses the team’s baseline and adds or subtracts based on how they perform. Basically, think about how people talk about Aaron Judge in the playoffs. He has a career wRC+ of 125 in the playoffs, which is really good, but since his career regular season wRC+ is 176, that’s actually not so good relative to his own performance. For a team to have a negative clutch score, they’d have to perform worse than they usually do in the clutch, which isn’t good when your wRC+ is already eight percent below league average. 

The Mets Clutch/600PA this season is a 21st century worst of -0.9507, which puts them in a class of their own. Only the 2016 Twins are below -0.9, and just four teams have eclipsed -0.8. 

As you can see, it’s much more likely for good offenses to rack up negative Clutch/600PA scores because they have a much higher baseline, but when a bad offense does, it can get out of hand. The 2016 Twins went 59-103, and the 2016 Rays were 68-94, which somehow makes the Mets’ current 68-win pace seem not so bad. 

In layman's terms, the 2026 Mets have been hit by a perfect sh*t storm. They’re underperforming their xwOBA by a massive margin, and then they’re underperforming their underperforming wRC+ based on WPA, and then they’re underperforming their underperformance in clutch moments. Fortunately, there are 60 games for them to drag themselves back from the brink of history... or sink even deeper.

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