Conclusions Are Hard
Everyone trying to draw conclusions about the Mets should know the difference between "The Mets played badly" and "The Mets are bad."
Welcome back! I know, I’ve been gone for a while. I’m back, hopefully as regularly as possible (no promises!). Today, we explore a key concept in baseball: that it’s incredibly difficult to draw grand conclusions from short stretches of action. That there’s a huge difference between “J.D. Davis played badly” and “J.D. Davis is bad.” That a team having a bad stretch isn’t necessarily a bad team. Riveting stuff. Enjoy! Subscribe!
Here’s who this column is for.
If you’re one of the people who thought to yourself “that’s it, the season is over, they suck” after the Mets blew a 9-0 lead yesterday, this column is for you.
If you saw the Mets lose four games in a row last week, never scoring more than two runs, and thought to yourself “the offense is broken, time to tear it all down and rebuild,” this column is for you.
If you’ve watched Tylor Megill pitch to a 7.98 E.R.A. over his last three starts, and thought, “here comes the regression, Tylor Megill was never a Major League pitcher and now the Mets are going to fall apart,” this column is for you.
Here’s the thing about drawing conclusions: it’s difficult. Well, not exactly. It’s easy to draw a conclusion if you’re not particularly concerned about whether it’s accurate. “I conclude that leeks are a good source of protein.” Are they? I don’t know. I just drew a conclusion. Accurate? Who knows?
But drawing accurate conclusions is difficult, especially in baseball, a sport that plays itself out over 162 separate games, whose fandom is governed as much by emotion as by reason. And because human brains are imperfect, it’s easy to mistake emotional responses for logical conclusions. Which is when things stop making sense.
Like yesterday. The Mets blew a 9-0 lead against the Nationals. That’s very bad. Yesterday, for a few innings, the Mets played badly. But if you want to say things that make sense, you have to see the difference between “the Mets played badly” and “the Mets are bad.”
Did the Mets play badly for a few innings in yesterday’s doubleheader? Absolutely. Are they a bad team? I don’t think so. But even if you do think so, you should at least recognize that those are two different questions.
A few weeks ago, J.D. Davis struck out on consecutive days to end innings with the bases loaded. In those spots, he was bad. Does that mean he’s a bad hitter? Of course not.
In 2019, the Mets blew a six-run lead to the Nationals in the ninth inning. The Mets were bad that day. The 2019 Mets also won 86 games. If the 2021 Mets win 86 games, they’ll probably win the N.L. East.
Good teams can have bad days, and bad teams can have good days. That’s all I’m saying. The 1986 Mets started the season 2-3. At this point, that’s become a cliché — any time the Mets go through a bad stretch, hundreds of people pre-emptively attack optimists by asking “anyone want to say that the 1986 Mets were 2-3?” — but it’s still true.
Tylor Megill looks like a pretty good pitcher. He might keep pitching well. He might hit a snag and turn worse. We don’t know. All we can say for now is that he still looks okay. Maybe he’ll pitch to a 1.37 E.R.A. down the stretch and catapult the Mets into a playoff spot and all the way to the World Series, then go 4-11 with a 5.09 E.R.A. in 2022 (does that remind you of anyone, maybe someone whose name rhymes with Peth Pugo or Mobert Msellman?). But whatever happens, whether or not he’s a good MLB starter will not hinge on a single three-start stretch. There’s a difference — a huge one — between “he pitched badly” and “he’s a bad pitcher.”
I remember being struck, when I first read “Moneyball,” by Michael Lewis’ description of Billy Beane. The way Lewis described it, Beane barely cared about individual game results. All he could do was put together a good roster, then see what happened. At the time, I disagreed. Wins and losses, I reasoned, are what actually matter at the end of the season. But now I see where he’s coming from.
Outcomes of individual games matter a lot — emotionally. But they have nothing to do with whether a team is good. If Billy Beane builds a roster he thinks is stacked, then his team loses three games in a row because first a reliever had a terrible outing then his team got shut down by a rookie opposing starter then his shortstop made a costly error in the bottom of the ninth, should he lose faith in the idea that his roster is stacked? No. It’s baseball. These are things that happen in baseball, even to good teams. Good teams have bad stretches. It happens.
My advice? Just be happy. No one has any idea how the season will end, so keep believing until the standings say otherwise. There’s still plenty of hope; no sense bathing in a cocktail of doom and self-pity with a month left in the season. You might as well be eating leeks for the protein.