The Mets have a crappy bullpen. Exhibit B, as of 7/10 (click image to embiggen):
Now where have we heard that one before? Ah yes, I made this statement back on May 8th. You know, back before the Mets went on to continue featuring the worst collection of bullpen talent in all of baseball.
The subsequent prevailing sentiment (as found in the comments section):
"I'm not ready to throw in the towel entirely on this pen"
"The main thing the Mets are going to "do about the bullpen" is keep playing games"
"it´s too early to call this a lost cause"
"small sample size is small"
"This gloom and doom is based on a short sample size."
And it goes on that way.
Look, I get that by sabermetric standards early May might have been a little soon to declare this collection of mediocrity just that. (That is unless you were referring not to their month+ of performance but perhaps their career numbers and mounting negative trends.)
But at a certain point you've got to take off the SABR-colored glasses, use some common sense and call a spade a spade. I mean if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and so on and so forth.
The example I like to use lately is Justin Turner and clutch hitting. According to saber-thought clutch hitting really doesn't exist. Yet Turner continues to hit...clutchly. Is the skill repeatable? I don't know. Is he getting lucky? Not sure. What I do know is that he just keeps doing it.
So back to our central discussion, this is a bad bullpen. It was on May 8th. Hell, it was on April 1st. And most importantly, it is on July 18th.
We can continue to give these guys more innings, pointing at their modestly better FIP's and small samples, pounding the regression to the mean drum without making any significant changes to the status quo. But the bottom line is that relievers deal in small samples. That's the way it is. If we want to wait around for a truly representative sample, the season will be long over and guess what? We didn't make it.
Now this collection of ducks is probably broken beyond repair. But if this team has any aspirations of contention down the stretch the worst thing Sandy Alderson can possibly do is to let the bullpen as it's generally constituted today just "keep playing games".