FanPost

Can Our Defense Hold Up at an Elite Level?

A recent slew of unfortunate injuries to David Wright, Jerry Blevins, and Travis d'Arnaud during the Mets opening homestand have left many fans worried about the ability of the team to sustain a blistering hot start that has made the Amazins the National League’s best team this young season. The fear has been that losing the two of the team's top three hitters and best lefty reliever is too costly a blow to a roster already depleted by pitching injuries. But despite the unfortunate wave of injuries that threatens to undermine our offensive production and pitching depth other data raises a larger issue for the 2015 Mets.

According to a Granland article written by Johan Keri the Amazins currently rank as the 5th best defensive team in MLB in terms of Defensive Runs Saved (DRS). According to the metric our defense has saved us 16 runs so far in this young 13 game season. That's better than a run per game. According to Keri, every 10 runs saved equals an extra win. So our defense has earned us one more win in our 10-3 record.

Looking at the team coming into this season there were multiple question marks on defense from Cuddyer in LF, to Flores in SS, to D'Arnaud behind the plate. So, needless to say, I was rather surprised to see us rank at as an elite level defensive team so early into the 2015 MLB season. This improvement in defensive performance is a positive development and bodes well for the future success of this year's Mets squad as the correlation between DRS and win percentage has been has been well documented by Bill James. According to James a high DRS is more predictive of success (.59) than either OPS (.51) or batting average (.47).

If guys like Campbell and Recker/Plawlecki can respectively continue to fill in a competent third base and catcher, then our defensive performance can keep us in games to effectively compete in games. But therein lies the rub. Last season Travis had a DRS of -15 and though there was a great improvement of his work at backstop. His improvement in that domain this year probably won’t be matched by his replacement in Kevin Plawecki. whose own defensive woes have been well documented by scouts as subpar. And then there is the trickier issue of David Wright. whose 13 runs saved last season makes him a very tough act for Campbell to follow.

So what do you guys think? Should we be even more worried about the dip in DRS threatening our pitching than the loss of offensive production to follow the loss of Wright and d'Arnaud for 6 weeks?

This FanPost was contributed by a member of the community and was not subject to any vetting or approval process.