It’s not exactly splitting the atom to say that many of the Mets’ hitters are having a down year. A quick peek at the back of James McCann, Jeff McNeil, Michael Conforto and Dom Smith’s baseball cards’ show productive stats over multiple years that do not match with their current stat lines.
It’s also not uncommon for players to have down years. Even the greatest of the great typically have at least one season they’d like wiped from the record. What is uncommon, though — and what makes this flavor of Mets’ futility so bitter — is for all the struggling to hit at the same time.
McCann had never hit much until joining the White Sox for a surprise All-Star season in 2019. His offensive bump continued into 2020, but now in his first season with the Mets, the wrecking ball of regression has found him. His season-long atrophy at the plate might be the least surprising of the group, but it’s still disappointing and damaging to the Mets’ lineup.
Coming into this season, McNeil was a .319 career hitter in his three stellar years with the Mets. McNeil made contact on a staggering 82.7% of his total swings from 2018 to 2020, putting him in the upper echelon of National League hitters. His profile made him seem slump proof, immune to the long stretches of strikeouts and popups that plague so many of the swing-and-miss artists in the game today.
This year, McNeil is still running an 83.2% contact rate — 14th in the NL among hitters with 300 plate appearances — but his well of hits has dried up. The man with the knobless bat who seemed like he could roll out of bed and hit .300 is down at .247 this year, despite making contact a tick more frequently than his career average. Some basic reasons for that are found in his batted ball stats. McNeil is putting the ball on the ground more often, his 45.0% groundball rate is a career-high, and hitting fewer line drives. McNeil is hitting line drives on 19.8% of the balls he puts in play after sitting comfortably above 22% for each of the previous two seasons, according to FanGraphs.
Those slight changes to his hit profile — as well as a 10.6% infield fly percentage, producing a high rate of contact almost never goes for a hit — have been compounded by plain old dumb luck. The real outlier among McNeil’s stats comes in BABIP, or batting average on balls in play. The stat is exactly what it sounds like, a hitter’s average only on the balls they put in play, removing home runs and strikeouts from the equation to focus on the balls that opposing defenses can field. McNeil had a .343 BABIP over his first three seasons in the league, essentially meaning that he was elite at hitting balls away from the defense, however lucky that may be.
This year, McNeil’s BABIP is .275, tied for the 18th-lowest in the National League and well below the league average of .291. McNeil is essentially falling victim to the curse of hitting the ball right at people.
Same goes for Conforto, who is having an even tougher time with BABIP than McNeil. Conforto’s .219 batting average and .339 on-base percentage — both his lowest since he was a fresh faced, full-time starter at just 23 years old — are due in part to a brutal .267 BABIP. For context, last season when Conforto became a .322 hitter overnight, he had a wildly high .412 BABIP. That’s not sustainable or indicative of the type of hitter he is, just as the aberrational numbers from this season aren’t either. But when paired with McNeil, the Mets have two hitters at the top and middle of their lineup who suddenly can’t stop hitting their way into outs.
Smith’s deterioration at the plate has been aided by a decrease in BABIP as well, plus an ungodly amount of fly balls that have died in the outfield. Smith’s flyball percentage, exit velocity and launch angle are all basically right in line with his career numbers in those categories. What has changed, predictably, is the amount of fly balls that are clearing the wall. During his first four seasons, 20.0% of Smith’s total fly balls went for home runs.
During that same time frame, the league average was 14.1%. Smith was always flirting with unsustainability, and this year it’s finally played out. With a HR/FB ratio that’s finally crashed down to 9.7% (2021 league average is 13.6%), Smith has the main reason for his massive dip in slugging percentage.
Smart money is on at least one, if not all of these Mets having their fortunes reversed next season. With such stark changes in so many categories, the math points to things likely evening out in 2022, hopefully giving the Mets an offense that isn’t so nauseating as this one.
