Zeroing in on a bullpen formula
Edwin Díaz is unquestionably the star of the show, at least on days when Timmy Trumpet isn't at the ballpark, but Adam Ottavino's dominant second half can't be overlooked as part of the Mets' success
By Jesse Spector
Project ShaqBox Trivia: Hey, so the trivia’s been a little light lately. The newsletter was a little light this week, too, by which I mean, we didn’t have any paid content. We did, of course, have a fun Willets Pod, and we rolled out the pilot of Not A Football Podcast – both are on the same Willets Pod feed, at least for now (if you’re reading this, you know you can get the episodes here, too)… but this is the only newsletter this week, so I stopped writing this and gave all our subscribers a free week. Seems fair.
Since we’re in the business of being fair – and apparently in the business of selling fabulously fashionable, delightfully designed, okay, fine, concerningly weird stuff that I put on our website – you can get $10 off an order from our shop this month with the code SEPTEMBERCALLUP.
Oh, right, the trivia. Adam Ottavino picked up his third save of the season yesterday, all of those in the past eight days. Edwin Díaz has saved three games since the end of the home Atlanta series in which he nailed down three in five games over four days.
It’s not like there’s a closer controversy in Queens. Everyone knows who the best reliever on the planet is right now. Maybe there’s controversy over the very concept of a closer because Buck Showalter is willing to use Díaz in the eighth inning to get the biggest outs… but there’s no doubt about why Jack Harlow be damned, Timmy Trumpet and Blasterjaxx have the song of the summer. You don’t know what Ottavino’s entrance song is, and you’re not even really sure if he has one, and can’t figure out what it would be if he does. And that’s fine, he’ll just come in, fling some sliders past you, and sit back down.
It’s worth noting, too, that Showalter is the guy who perhaps most famously got burned by managing to the save, six years ago when left Zack Britton in the bullpen and Edwin Encarnación hit the second-most famous walk-off homer in Blue Jays history (remember, ex-Met José Bautista’s giant bat flip was a seventh-inning homer, it just felt like a walk-off). Now, Showalter managing Díaz like this (opponents had a .430 OPS against Britton in 2016. 40 points lower than what Díaz, pretty much in god mode all summer, has allowed) and, as a result, bringing Ottavino from never having recorded a save as a Met to being tied for 73rd on the team’s all-time list with several players, including Kyle Farnsworth, Scott Schoeneweis, Mike Scott, Dick Selma, and Paul Sewald.
The list of players who had two saves with the Mets is its own trip, including Don Aase, J.J. Putz, Nolan Ryan, and José Valverde. Ottavino can next set his sights on Jerry Blevins and Mel Rojas among others tied for 58th in Mets history with four career saves.
The point isn’t the saves, the point is how good Ottavino has been, which is phenomenal. He’s got a 1.00 ERA over his last 16 games, something you don’t even have to look all the way over to the ERA column for because you can see before that on a stat line that he’s pitched 18 innings and allowed two earned runs… with 24 strikeouts and two walks. Again, easy math, that’s 12 strikeouts per nine innings, and a 12:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. And the OPS against Ottavino in the second half is a mere .543 – not quite Díaz or Britton territory, but Max Scherzer is a pretty darn good pitcher and he’s at a .565 OPS allowed for the season. Jacob deGrom, for what it’s worth, has allowed a .388 OPS in his 36.1 innings, which naturally is the best in baseball among anyone who’s logged 30 or more frames.
We’re dealing with very small numbers, and there’s none smaller than the one Ottavino wears on his jersey: zero. Wait… is zero a number? Yes. Yes, it is. Although it wasn’t always.
And it wasn’t always a number for the Mets, even for players whose last name began with the letter O. Junior Ortiz isn’t just one of the weirder acquisitions the Mets ever made, he’s one of the great missed opportunities.
In 1983, the Mets got Ortiz from the Pirates at the trade deadline. Innocent enough for a rebuilding team to get a young backstop, except the Mets also had young Mike Fitzgerald and young Ronn Reynolds, both catchers who were good enough to stick around the 1980s and ruin your baseball card packs for the rest of the decade, much like Ortiz. Fitzgerald by that point had taken over the starting job from the finished Ron Hodges, who at the time of the trade for Ortiz was the owner of a .193 slugging percentage.
The next day, the Mets traded for Keith Hernandez and Hodges went 2-for-3. For the rest of the 1983 season, he played 65 games and batted .331/.443/.404. He still didn’t hit any homers, but that’s a .847 OPS. Pete Alonso has a .856 OPS this season. Hodges’ first two and a half months were so bad, that he ended up at exactly 1 win above replacement for the season, with a finishing line of .260/.383/.308, no homers, 12 doubles, and 21 walks.
Hodges helped cost George Bamberger his job, but Frank Howard couldn’t get him out of the lineup, even as the Mets were on their way to 94 losses and could have used the time to give some run to the young catcher they’d just traded for because they were rebuilding and the team sucked. Fitzgerald wound up coming up and becoming the starter the next year, then getting traded for Gary Carter, and it all was moot.
Except, the Mets traded for Ortiz, and then lost him back to the Pirates in the 1984 Rule 5 draft. Again, that pales in comparison to the way the Mets lost Tom Seaver, Ortiz’s teammate for a few months in Flushing, just as the trade for Ortiz is nothing like the Hernandez trade. But it also still stings because the Mets traded for a guy, hardly played him, and then gave him back to the first team for nothing, only to watch him become a useful major leaguer who wound up winning a World Series with the Twins in 1991. And to get Ortiz, the Mets gave up Marvell Wynne, himself another 1980s Topps pack staple, basically given up for nothing. To be fair, the Mets did have their outfield pretty set with Darryl Strawberry, Mookie Wilson, and a declining-but-entrenched George Foster, but they also didn’t have to trade Wynne for someone that they wouldn’t even let be the first player in team history to wear 0 as his uniform number.
That was Terry McDaniel in 1991. What number did Ortiz wear with the Mets? Hint: It’s currently worn by Deven Marrero.
Answer: 15. There was gonna be a whole newsletter here about the vibes of Tuesday night’s game, which were so good (even after having to cancel a Pod At The Park) – I saw Thumbs Down Man, Cowbellman was in the house banging his cowbell, Timmy Trumpet had everyone hyped, Ray Castoldi was playing the organ for Knicks night, Mark Canha Summer continued… and then some goobers in section 525 (where I was sitting, upper deck, about halfway up third) tried to start the wave. It didn’t catch on, because it was a 3-3 game and people were all shouting at the wave-doers to sit down and knock it off.
I’ve long been a defender of the wave as a thing that’s democratic – it only works if enough people want to do it to stand up – even if I don’t care to do it myself. But you’ve got to pick your spots. Don’t do the wave in the middle of tension in one of the biggest regular season games the home team has played in years. Just the shouting down of the wave being necessary was a total vibe-killer, and while it’s assuredly a coincidence that the Dodgers then went on to score and win, it’s also definitely not a coincidence.
