With the win last night, the Mets have officially completed one-third of the 2005 season. It feels to me like they were still in Spring Training just the other day, and yet here we are, 54 games already in the bag, and the Mets are right about where many predicted they would be. They're two games over .500, but somewhat surprisingly only 1.5 games out of first place in the division.
Since we're at a nice even point in the season, it's a good time to look at everyone's stats so far and see how they project over the next 108 games. We'll look at the pitching staff first.
PROJECTED 2005 PITCHING NUMBERS
IP W L SO BB HR H ERA WHIP
Pedro Martinez 237.0 18 3 276 36 18 132 2.62 0.71
Tom Glavine 187.0 9 15 93 87 15 234 5.05 1.72
Kris Benson 169.2 14 9 145 51 28 163 4.21 1.27
Victor Zambrano 172.0 9 15 126 111 12 171 4.24 1.64
Kaz Ishii 166.1 5 14 89 98 14 117 4.79 1.29
Pedro's projected numbers are certainly Cy Young worthy. His 276 strikeouts would be 13 shy of Tom Seaver's Met record of 289, though it would have taken him almost 50 more innings to do so. Martinez' K/9 rate is 10.48, which is ridiculous for a starting pitcher, and his K/BB of 7.67 is equally absurd. Though it has seemed like he's been giving up a lot of homeruns, he is on pace to allow 18 of them for the season, which isn't bad at all.Tom Glavine stinks big time, but aside from the inflated walk totals, he has been giving up an inordinate number of hits. Whether this is a result of having to throw more pitches over the meat of the plate because he's not getting the corner calls he has grown accustomed to or just a result of bad luck in the early goings, we'll have to wait and find out. Over the course of his career he's allowed only 3661 hits in 3803 innings, so he certainly has a history of limiting the base hits.
The two numbers that jump out at me for Kris Benson are his strikeouts (7.68 K/9 would be the best of his career) and the humongous homerun count. He has only given up more than 18 homeruns in a season once, and that was 24 back in 2000. It was also in 217.2 innings pitched. This year he is on pace to allow 28 homeruns in just 169.2 innings, which is a gaudy rate of 1.48 per nine innings.
Ishii and Zambrano have both been pretty lousy. The one thing that strikes me about Ishii is that he has only allowed 25 hits in 35.2 innings, which is incredibly low. I thought it was a fluke, but then I checked and saw that he has a history of allowing a relatively low number of hits per inning over his career, despite not being a terribly successful pitcher. His career H/9 is 7.89, which is really quite good. Sadly, his BB/9 rate is 5.77, which is really quite abysmal.
I'll be back later in the day to post the hitter projections.
Amazin' Avenue Daily Web Links
- MetsGeek.com: Upcoming Series: San Francisco Giants Pitchers (Andrew Hintz)
- MetsGeek.com: Draft Primer, Part II (Michael Oliver)
- Newsday.com: Pedro proves life of the party (Jon Heyman)
- MetsDaily.com: Game Highlights (6.2.2005) (.wmv format)