N.B. Lindberg

Image courtesy of © Brad Mills-Imagn Images The New York Mets' playoff hopes are by no means back in business, but they’ve done enough to forestall foreclosure. Entering May, the Mets owned a 10-21 record, built on the tidal cesspool 3-17 stretch from April 8 to April 30, but their 11-6 start to May has them at 21-27 and gives them an outside chance to make a real postseason push. While everything that can go wrong has and did go wrong, Carson Benge’s May surge, one horrific defensive play aside, has been central to the Mets’ turnaround. To put it mildly, Benge’s April was as bad as the Mets' was. Over his first 97 career plate appearances, he hit two home runs, two doubles, and struck out 23.7% of the time to produce a 52 wRC+. To put that offensive ineptitude in perspective, that’s the career wRC+ of Sad Sam Jones (who I swear is a real person), a pitcher from 1914 to 1935. Needless to say, you probably want to outhit a mediocre pre-war pitcher if you plan to stick around in the bigs. Fortunately, the calendar turned to May, and we might as well call him Carson Binge. In 66 May plate appearances, Benge has been on fire. He has cut his strikeout rate to 14.1% and posted a wRC+ of 165. While that has only been thanks to one home run and five doubles, Benge has started to get far more out of his contact, even if it's been in a subtle way. The funny thing about hitting is that averages can be misleading, and I’m not talking about batting averages. Benge is hitting for more power in May than in April, but you’d never guess based on his average batted ball metrics. I mean, how is he hitting for more power doing this? Your eyes do not deceive you. Benge is hitting fewer fly balls, more ground balls, is pulling it less, and hitting it hard less often in May (the month where he has basically hit like Juan Soto) than in April, when he hit like Sad (Sack) Sam Jones. So, what the heck is going on? Well, like I said, averages are deceiving. While hitting the ball hard, in the air, and to the pull side is a great way to post elite batting lines, you’ve got to do all three at the same time for it to matter. You can hit a ball 120 MPH to the pull side, but if it goes straight into the ground, you’re probably running past first base, straight down the right field line, and into the showers, because you just grounded out to end the game. So, while Benge, on average, isn’t hitting the ball hard and in the air more frequently, when he is hitting the ball hard, he’s getting it off the ground more often, which is actually what matters. Using 100 MPH batted balls as our proxy for smoking the ball, we can see how Benge’s slow stretch to start the season was largely due to hitting his best struck balls straight into the ground. *Stats in graph charted as of May 18 When you factor in his improved contact figures, it’s not hard to figure out why Benge started binging, and his rolling 100+ MPH launch angle average just so happens to look eerily similar to his rolling wOBA. Instead of focusing on averages, which can be obscured a bit by one freak batted ball, it’s even easier to see why Benge’s batting line has taken off. Using April 15 as the date of demarcation, Benge has done a much better job of getting his best contact off the ground. In the early going, 40% of Benge’s best batted balls were grounders, while only 40% were line drives or fly balls. Now, 60% of his premium contact has been a line drive or fly ball, and only 20% is headed for the dirt. Hard ground balls can become hits, possibly even a double, but the chances are low, and the upside is minimal. When you clobber the ball, you want it to have a chance to find a seat, not have it play around in the dirt. It should be noted that some of Benge’s turnaround is down to better luck. He posted a BABIP of .231 in April and is at .426 in May. Hitting them where they ain’t is still an undefeated strategy, but BABIP isn’t just about luck. Benge, despite lifting more of his best contact, is still a lower launch angle hitter. That means when he does lift the ball, he’s far less likely to hit it in the can-o-corn range, where even elite exit velocities go to die. As long as he continues to limit his worm burners, he should maintain an above-league-average BABIP. We might track and analyze hitting largely through averages, but at its core, it’s all about events. Having an average exit velocity of 75 MPH would be dreadful, but if you hit one ball 100 MPH and another 50 MPH, you’re probably going to have a hit to your name. Carson Benge has turned his season around by getting the most out of his batted ball events. He won’t continue to post a BABIP above .400, but he doesn’t need to in order to help the Mets achieve liftoff. View full article

Image courtesy of © Brad Penner-Imagn Images The 2024 New York Mets feel like a distant memory. While it hasn’t even been 24 months since Grimace’s first pitch turned the Mets into a juggernaut, it might as well have been the pivotal moment in the Revolutionary War. A late-season collapse in 2025, followed by the fast-moving ecological disaster to start 2026, has all but erased what felt like, for a fleeting moment, the beginning of something special. And no player has embodied the rollercoaster quite like Sean Manaea. Manaea was a revelation for the 2024 Mets. He made 32 starts, totaling 181.2 innings, and posted a 3.47 ERA. A season after being moved to the bullpen in San Francisco, Manaea earned the right to start four playoff games for the Mets, and it was in large part thanks to him lowering his arm slot. The truth about hitting is that it is fundamentally subconscious. There just isn’t enough time to see, think, and react to a pitch moving 90-plus MPH. What this means for pitchers is that being generic is the worst thing possible. The more generic a pitch is, the more times a hitter has seen it, and the easier it is for them to square it up or spit on it. Manaea always had a weird profile. His sinker and four-seam fastball might be the same pitch. The former has more horizontal movement and vertical drop than average, but is usually thrown at the top of the strike zone. The general rule is that sinking fastballs play best at the bottom of the zone, while high-spin ones dominate at the top. Despite all this, Manaea limited fly balls, threw enough strikes, and got hitters to chase his sweeper or changeup on his way to being a mostly league-average pitcher. It was an effective plan, but it was mostly generic, until all of a sudden, he wasn’t. With the Mets in 2024, Manaea made the bold decision to lower his arm angle and completely transformed his fastball into an unstoppable weapon. While pitch characteristics are important, they aren’t the only factor in determining how a pitch will play. A lower arm angle provides pitches with a flatter approach angle, which generally makes them play better at the top of the zone. The combination of a sinking-tailing fastball from a shallow approach angle at the top of the zone made Manaea’s fastball far more unique, and helped him and the Mets to a second-half surge. So, what has gone so wrong for Manaea since 2024 and, in particular, 2026? Well, it’s complicated. First, his 2025 wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. His xERA was 4.00, his FIP was 4.39, and his xFIP was 3.30. In fact, he posted the best K% (28.5%) and K%-BB% (24%) of his career, but was undone by a career-worst home-run-to-fly-ball ratio of 19.4%, which is how he posted a 5.64 ERA, despite some solid indicators. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of his 2026. There is no way around it: Manaea has legitimately been awful to start the season. His xERA is 5.52, his FIP is 4.48, and his xFIP is 4.58, despite throwing exclusively out of the bullpen. So, while he has been unlucky to have a 6.85 ERA, it’s not like he’s making a case to re-enter the Mets' rotation. The biggest concern facing Manaea has been his fastball. Usually, pitchers experience some form of velocity bump when throwing out of the bullpen, but Manaea’s average fastball velocity has dropped to 90.2 MPH, down from 91.7 in 2025 and 92.2 in 2024. No matter the secondary characteristics or the location, at a certain speed, any fastball is vulnerable. And to make matters worse, he’s locating it far worse. Manaea’s fastball has played relatively well at the top of the zone, and has characteristics where it could play near the bottom, but what you cannot do is throw a 90 MPH fastball down the middle, and that’s exactly what he has been doing this season. Sean Manaea 2026 Four Seam Heat Map Unsurprisingly, the pitch has surrendered an xSLG of .537 and has seen its whiff rate drop from 23.2% to 18.2%. The reality is that Manaea’s fastball velocity might never return. He’s 34, and his velocity has been trending down over the past few seasons, despite throwing more innings out of the bullpen. However, that doesn’t mean his fastball can’t play far better if he can manage to locate it more consistently at the top of the zone and out of the heart of the plate, and despite the awful results, there are still a few things under the hood that the southpaw is doing well. His infield fly ball percentage of 17.2%, which, when paired with a 41.4% fly-ball rate, means that 7% of all the batted balls he has allowed are infield fly balls. Infield fly balls are historically converted as outs at nearly the same rate as strikeouts. When added to his current 22% K%, he's still getting nearly automatic outs in 27.08% of plate appearances. That's not elite, but it's something to build upon. Manaea's first pitch strike percentage is also down to a career-low 59.3%, but in his excellent 2024, it was 59.8%. In all likelihood, his first pitch strike percentage should regress towards his career average of 63.1%, which will help cut into his career-high 9.3% BB%, and probably lead to slightly better strikeout figures and batted ball metrics. With the loss of velocity, Manaea’s days as anything but a spot starter might be over, but there’s a road map for him to be a viable member of a bullpen. All he needs to do is locate his fastball a bit better, and he should start to look like the league-average pitcher he has been for most of his career. That's not particularly exciting, but the Mets, and Manaea for that matter, need boring competence more than anything. View full article

Image courtesy of © Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images The New York Mets are turning back to David Peterson in their starting rotation, and just like their season, success hinges on razor-thin margins. When everything is clicking for Peterson, he throws enough strikes to limit walks, get ahead in the count, and generate ground balls to keep the game within reach. It isn’t an overwhelming or dominant game plan, but it will get guys out, keep the bullpen from being overtaxed, and get you a start closer to the guys you really trust. For the first four months of the 2025 season, Mets fans were treated to the best possible outcome of this profile. Over 21 starts, through August 1, Peterson posted a 2.83 ERA, with the Mets going 12-9 in his starts. Unfortunately, his final nine starts saw his ERA balloon to 8.42, during which the Mets went 3-6 and fell out of the playoff race. But here’s the thing: Peterson didn’t actually pitch all that much worse. His FIP was 3.36 over his first 21 starts, and 3.88 over his final nine. The reality is that Peterson’s effectiveness is somewhat left to chance. He doesn’t possess overwhelming stuff, and, paradoxically, he isn’t particularly adept at generating soft contact. What he does do is direct contact towards the ground, which limits damage and allows him to weather a lineup multiple times. Adding more variance into the equation is that Peterson is one of the most difficult players to project. This is anecdotal analysis, but few players have a larger divergence between their ERA estimators. For his career, he has a FIP of 3.91, an xERA of 4.65, and a SIERA of 4.14, against a career ERA of 4.16. While that makes SIERA look like the golden goose, when you look at all of this data season over season, the relationship cracks. What does this all mean? In effect, prognosticating Peterson’s future performance based on generally reliable ERA estimators isn’t quite so simple. SIERA has done a good job mirroring his career ERA, but xERA, which has the largest difference between his career ERA, has the smallest season-to-season standard deviation. This dynamic is interesting in its own right, but it makes talking about Peterson’s future performance a bit murky. However, we can talk about how Peterson, and his admittedly limited profile, can prosper. One of my personal sports analysis idioms is, “the main thing has to be the main thing.” The basic conceit is that every professional athlete has some singular core skill that is the foundation of their game. Remember Matt Harvey? His main thing was that he could throw four-seam fastballs down Main Street and prosper. When he stopped being able to do that, he was out of the league in short order. For David Peterson, the main thing is that he’ll throw his sinker and then hope for the best. The bread and butter of Peterson’s approach is that he can coax favorable launch angles. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how hard you hit the ball if you hit it on the ground. For a pitcher who doesn’t rack up strikeouts, limit hard contact, or own a microscopic walk rate, it’s basically the only way you can survive in the majors. The problem that Peterson has run into this season is that his sinker has gone from a worm burner to a low-flying hazard. Last season, batters tagged Peterson’s sinker for an average exit velocity of 90.4 MPH and an average launch angle of -2 degrees. It led to a wOBA of .350, an xwOBA of .351, and a slugging percentage of .391. All told, the pitch was worth six runs of value or 0.7 runs per 100 pitches. Peterson’s sinker was by no means an elite pitch, but it was a solid enough base to get disadvantaged hitters to chase his off-speed pitches off the plate. This season, Peterson’s sinker has become an indescribable liability. Batters are hitting it for an average exit velocity of 95.7 MPH and at an average launch angle of 7 degrees. Unsurprisingly, that’s led to a wOBA of .487, an xwOBA of .517, and a slugging percentage of .594. That may not be the worst individual pitch in the majors, but it’s certainly in the running. So, what exactly caused his sinker to sink into the abyss? The first noticeable change is that Peterson is getting far less horizontal movement on the pitch. Last season, he generated 14.6 inches of arm-side movement, but that has decreased to 12.1 inches in 2026. For a sinker that averages 91.3 MPH, that loss of movement might have completely nuked the pitch's viability. On top of the loss of movement, Peterson hasn’t been locating it in nearly as advantageous locations. The first image shows Peterson’s sinker locations in 2025, while the second shows 2026. What stands out? The volume of pitches he has left in the middle-outer third of the plate has exploded, and hitters are absolutely teeing off on it, posting an .846 slugging on balls in play. It’s likely that with the sinker’s slightly diminished movement profile, it’s catching more of the plate and running away from fewer barrels than before. In many respects, it’s the worst of both worlds. So, what’s the best path forward for Peterson? I’d suggest throwing fewer sinkers for one. He has always had a junkerballer profile, but has consistently thrown his mediocre-at-best fastballs over 50% of the time. His slider has been a highly effective pitch this season and could keep hitters off his sinker a bit. However, I think the most likely outcome is that either he starts throwing his sinker more effectively by hitting better spots and/or generating more movement, or he finds himself out of the rotation again. The margins are razor-thin, and it’s sink or sinker for David Peterson. View full article

Image courtesy of © Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images Juan Soto has achieved just about everything you can as an individual. He has six Silver Sluggers, is a four-time All-Star, has a batting title, a World Series ring, and a 15-year, $765 million contract. For someone who won’t turn 30 until October of 2028, Soto has already lived a full baseball life, but he still has one major milestone left to collect on his way to Cooperstown—an MVP trophy. The New York Mets’ season might already be over. Following a 7-4 start, they embarked on an epic 12-game losing streak, which sank them to the bottom of the standings. Teams can overcome a 7-16 start, but it leaves them zero margin for error, and the 2026 Mets feel like they’re perpetually carrying a pot of chili into the office. The good news is that they employ Juan Soto. Calling consistency a superpower is boring, but for Juan Soto, it’s why he’s one of the best players in baseball and also probably why he doesn’t have an MVP. The simplest way to explain Soto is that he plays all the time, gets on base all the time, and hits for both contact and power. It’s why he has a career wRC+ of 160, the 19th-highest figure ever, just below some guy named Ty Cobb. Teams covet consistency—it’s why Soto is paid like a king–because it limits downside, but it also limits upside, and that’s tough in the era of Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. While six to seven wins above replacement per season for a decade is worth three-quarters of a billion dollars, it’s not enough to win MVPs when you’re up against 10-WAR Kaijus. However, Soto might not need to have a truly transcendent season at the plate to forge an attractive MVP narrative. The Mets are truly in trouble, but none of it falls directly at Soto’s feet. During the Mets' 12 days of despair, Soto was out with a calf injury. He left the Mets 4-4, came back to find them 7-16, and as soon as he re-entered the lineup—poof, the losing streak ended. Baseball isn’t as simple as one player returns and everything is solved, but stories are. Should the Mets turn their season around, Soto will have a story worthy of an MVP. He’ll be the hero who saved the season. The man who guided a helpless, lost cause out of the depths of despair into the warm glow of the blustery, frozen hellscape that is October baseball in New York. Even as analytics have come to dominate baseball awards voting, I still think there is some romanticism left in the world. Part of the reason Ohtani has walked away with MVP after MVP is his story as a two-way player is like a tall tale. He’s The Natural, just living and breathing, and while the WAR helps, the story is just as intoxicating. If Soto produces his usual .300/.400/.500 triple-slash line, while dragging the Mets out of the cellar, that is a story that will transcend baseball media. It’s the oldest sports story of them all for a reason; people love it. And on top of that, he’ll have the underdog winds at his back. No matter where the Mets finish this season, they’ll be underdogs. That’s their franchise heritage, and it’s the exact predicament they find themselves in. But Soto is also an MVP underdog. He has four top-five finishes, three top-three finishes, and came runner-up in 2021, despite leading Bryce Harper in WAR. He has been oh-so close to winning the award, but the stars just haven’t aligned for him (even though those in the media decide what the stars say). Before it’s all said and done, Juan Soto will very likely win an MVP award. He’s just too good, too young, and too consistent. But there’s a chance he’s this generation's Hank Aaron. Aaron, who finished his career with more home runs than anyone, never once hit 50 in a season, and only won one MVP. In fact, he never finished higher than third outside of his lone win. Aaron, like Soto, was a metronome of consistency, but only once did he lead his league in WAR. Perhaps Soto will consistently, excellently trudge through his career without that single transcendent season to capture voters’ imagination. Or perhaps, he’ll lead the Mets back from the brink, into the playoffs, and secure the one award that has eluded him. This is Soto’s best chance to win MVP, and all it’ll require is one of the great turnarounds in history. That’s no small feat, but that’s why it’s an MVP story. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images To put it mildly, the New York Mets' offense has been a dumpster fire on top of a tribal burial ground. They don’t get on base, they can’t hit for average, and when they do connect, they barely put a charge in the ball. As with any early-season slump, a lot of things have to go unexpectedly wrong all at once for a team this talented to sport a wRC+ of 80 over 22 games. First, Juan Soto went down with a calf injury, and then everyone this side of Francisco Alvarez and Luis Robert Jr. decided that letting go of the slack would be a great idea. The Mets’ bats will turn it around in some capacity. Soto is a metronome of consistency, and Francisco Lindor, Bo Bichette, Marcus Semien, and Jorge Polanco have track records I trust far more than their current production. However, that probably won’t be enough for the Mets to get where they want to go. They’ll need more, which means they need Mark Vientos to break out… again. Only 18 months ago, Vientos was viewed as a future building block for the Mets. Hot on the heels of his explosive 2024 season, where he belted 27 home runs in 111 games, good for a wRC+ of 132, Vientos and his plus-raw power were poised to solidify their spot in the middle of the Mets lineup. Unfortunately, nearly everything has gone south since. Vientos’ 2025 was as underwhelming as the entire team's season. He slumped to 17 home runs in 127 games and posted a wRC+ of 97. That’d be fine for a catcher, but not for a corner infielder who isn’t an elite third-base defender; that’s replacement level. However, the whiplash between his 2024 and 2025 was more extreme than his underlying performance. In 2024, Vientos was one of the luckier hitters in baseball. His wOBA of .356 far outstripped his xwOBA of .333, and the 32 home runs he hit between the regular season and playoffs exceeded his expected total of 25.8. Now, for a 24-year-old, it was fair to dream he could continue to improve, but instead, he mostly stayed the same and got far less favorable results. His xwOBA in 2025 was .320, but his actual wOBA came in at .303. So, while Vientos, under the hood, only shed .013 points of wOBA between seasons, in reality, his wOBA dropped by a gargantuan .053. The Mets, realistically, don’t need the 2024 version of Vientos to be real challengers, but they desperately do need something approaching the 2025 version, just with a bit more batted ball luck. Unfortunately, the 2026 version of Vientos has looked absolutely lost at the plate, but there are a few promising developments that could portend a second breakout. Normally, you don’t highlight a player with a wRC+ of 71 and an xwOBA of .271. Those are dreadful figures, and as the expected data suggests, Vientos has earned those numbers. However, just because your batted balls have been lackluster doesn’t mean the foundation of the operation is totally kaput. The basis of Vientos’ operation is power. In 2024, he struck out in 29.7% of his plate appearances and walked in 7.3%. Both of those figures were below the league average, but it didn’t matter because he slugged .516 against the league average of .399. In the seasons since, Vientos has dramatically improved his K%, but at the cost of his walk rate and power. On the surface, the answer seems pretty simple for a player who has seen his K% drop from 29.7% to 23.4% and isolated power drop from .249 to .114. But Vientos isn’t really trading contact for power, even if that’s what the results have been. The best underlying metric for power-intention is swing speed. While a bunch of factors go into how hard you hit a ball, the most fundamental one is how fast you swing the bat. According to physics, the faster you swing a bat, the faster the ball should come off it, and Vientos has never swung harder than this season. In 2024, the season Vientos slugged his way into the heart of the Mets’ order, he averaged a swing speed of 71.8 MPH, with a fast swing rate (the percentage of swings above 75 MPH) of 20.6%. He followed that up in 2025 by cutting his swing speed to 71.2 MPH with a fast swing rate of 14.8%. The result, unsurprisingly, was less power but also fewer strikeouts, as he cut his K% from 29.7% to 24.8%. Now, in the early going of 2026, his average swing speed is a career best 73.7 MPH with a fast swing rate of 28.7%. Vientos, based on his swing speed, is going up to the plate looking to slug, but his hard-hit rate (the percentage of batted balls hit 95 MPH or harder) has plummeted to a career low 41%, compared to 50.5% in 2025 and 46.6% in 2024. So, what exactly is going on here? Well, swing speed is necessary for high-end exit velocities, but it isn’t the only factor. To really put a charge in the ball, you need to square up the ball while also swinging fast, and it’s here where Vientos has fallen off. In 2024, Vientos' blast rate (a fast swing that also results in squared-up contact) was 19.3% on contact and 13% on all swings. In 2025, he saw that decline to 16.9% on contact and 11.7% on all swings, and in 2026, those figures have eroded further to 16.4% and 10.6%, respectively. While the results for Vientos in 2026 have been more or less atrocious, he may be on the cusp of turning it around. His contact and swing decision metrics are almost identical to 2024, and he’s striking out at a career-low rate, while also swinging harder than ever. The only issue has been converting all of those hard swings into well-struck balls. This could simply be a timing issue, which all hitters go through at some point during a long season, but I also think Vientos could benefit from getting his stance back to where it was in 2024. Over the past two seasons, Vientos has slowly crept closer to the plate. In 2024, he stood 29.7 inches off the plate, but in 2026, he measures in at 27 inches off the plate. Now, 2.7 inches is not much in the real world, but in the high-stakes reality of Major League Baseball hitters, it might as well be a mile. The benefit of getting closer to the plate is that it increases your plate coverage, but a drawback is that it can make impacting pitches on the inner and middle third more difficult, and if your timing is off, it can make turning on fastballs all but impossible. Based on the change in Vientos slugging percentage on fastballs between 2024 and 2026, it's clear something is off. In 2024, Vientos absolutely crushed middle-in fastballs to the tune of a .500 slugging. In 2026, that figure has halved to .250. Needless to say, that’s not a good development. Obviously, we're in small-sample-size territory, but it's pretty easy to see the through line between the decline in production and an inability to crush inside pitches. There’s a chance that Mark Vientos has completely lost it at the plate. That, in his quest to cut down on strikeouts, he muted his one carrying trait. However, I think the fact that he is swinging as hard as ever suggests he’s just a small adjustment away from getting back to his best. Whether it’s backing off the plate an inch, getting his timing down, or simply just starting to see the ball a bit better, Vientos is still swinging as hard as ever and putting the ball in play as often as ever. Those two things should be a potent combination. The Mets just need to survive long enough for the results to match the data. View full article