The Mets Have a SERIOUS Problem...

The New York Mets have a serious problem. Finally, finally, Carlos Mendoza showed some emotion en route to a 7th inning ejection in last night's snoozefest against the Reds. But fans are still unhappy. Why? Because the manager refuses to confront his players about key issues, and it shows with a disastrous offense. I'm Mike Dutto, your host today, here to detail all of it only on Mets Digest, but first I want to thank each and every single one of the over 7 and a quarter thousand subscribers that we have around the channel. Thanks so much for taking time out of your day to hit that free subscribe button, and if you're part of the 66% of viewers who has not yet done so, please consider, it's free, we're on the road to 8,000 subscribers, and it's worth your while, we've got videos coming out each and every single day, between myself and Josh Byrne, sometimes two, three, and even four videos in a given day, so thank you so much. And here it is, the ejection to kick things off, of course this was said in the middle of a Mets rant, because what else is there to say? And then, there's Carlos Mendoza, who finally showed some of the emotion that fans are feeling while watching these games, and being forced to listen to him repeat the same tropes after each and every single loss. He was ejected, twice actually, arguing balls and strikes, and as cathartic as it was to finally see some fire, as positive as it was, the reason he had to do so, exposes one of the quieter weaknesses, and this is why fans are so upset with Mendoza right now, dragging this team down. They are flat out bad at managing the ABS challenge system. You can see the rankings from the Mets Fitch Tracker below, we'll take a look at that in just a second, because yes, this ends up being on Mendoza, when there is a problem with the ABS system. I understand, right now you can point to Marcus Simeon, who had a bad challenge last night, you can even point to Francisco Alvarez, who didn't have the best challenge, and ended up not going his way, and also was really early in the game, in fact, by the bottom of the second, the Mets had zero challenges remaining. So yes, you could point to the players, but when this becomes a consistent theme, there's something that needs to happen behind closed doors, someone needs to say something, and that ends up being the manager's job. That isn't David Stern's job, David Stern's, the President of Baseball Operations, has to make sure that this team is put together correctly. Now, he's not doing his job either, but neither is Carlos Mendoza, by not addressing a key issue that is in the dugout right now. So it's Tacoma time, let's turn it over to the MLB and Mets Insider, who wrote an article last night titled, With No ABS Challenges Left, Mendoza Gets Ejected Twice the Old Fashioned Way. So, what happened Anthony, you got the floor, he said, about as animated as he gets on a baseball field, Carlos Mendoza stood in front of umpire Carlos Torres, and wagged his finger. He yelled while Torres stood and listened, before informing Mendoza, for a second time, that he was no longer welcome on the field of play. So, Mendoza showed some emotion, right? Why the backlash? Why are fans upset? Well, I just talked about it, and Tacoma will go into a little bit more detail. Mendoza's ejection in the 7th inning Tuesday punctuated the Mets' latest loss, a 5-3 defeat to the Reds at Great American Ballpark. It also highlighted a season-long troubled area for the team. After J.J. Bledee walked on a low 3-2 pitch in the 7th, someone in the Mets dugout, not Mendoza, began chirping at Torres. The Mets were still upset that Corson Bench had been called out on strikes on three borderline pitches in the 6th inning, all of them seemingly out of the zone. But the problem was, the Mets had already lost both their ABS challenges early in the game. In fact, by the 6th inning, they were already four innings removed from their last ABS unsuccessful challenge. Meaning, they had to play seven consecutive innings of ABS-less baseball, and that is not good in the modern-day MLB. That simply cannot happen because it left Bench with none on some very borderline pitches. We'll dive into all that. I'll show you all of the graphs in just a second. Because then came the ejection itself. Tacoma, you've still got the floor here. When Bladet subsequently walked on a relatively close pitch, Tempers and the Mets dugout flared. Torres ejected Mendoza once for the comments that came from the bench that were still unidentified, and then for a second time after he came out to the field to argue, probably not even realizing that he had already been ejected. My assumption is Torres, the home plate umpire, thought that those comments came from Mendoza, said you're gone based on those. And then Mendoza's like, oh, I didn't say anything, I'm going to go out and protect my guys. I'm going to go out and protect my fellow staff. And that's when he got ejected for a second time. So pretty fun that he got ejected twice. But here comes the main talk, the Mets with their ABS. Still, things might have been different had the Mets retained even one of their challenges. Teams get two per game plus additional challenges if their initial ones are correct. Instead, the Mets lost their first challenge when Francisco Alvarez questioned a 2-1 ball call to Bladet in the first. Then the other one, Marcus Simeon, tapped his helmet on a call third strike with the Alvarez said he thought his challenge was important to get pitcher Kodai Senga back in court with a man on base in a scoreless game, but both challenges occurred in very relatively low leverage situations very early in the game, which has now been a theme for the Amazons. Though the team came into Tuesday's play ranked 11th in the MLB in net calls over turn, they were 18th in net runs for slash against using ABS. That suggests that while the Mets have won their share of challenges, they haven't regularly done so in important spots. And part of that is because they can't challenge in important spots like last night when they blew it way too early. So what did the skip have to say on this front? Well, we turned it back to Carlos Mendoza. He says, obviously, I wasn't pleased with the strike zone, especially with that bench at bat there. I went back and looked at some of the pitches and I wasn't happy about it. We were super aggressive today, especially when you lose that first one right there early, a little too much there. We've got to do a better job. And that's something we will continue to talk to the guys about. I don't believe it, though. And same with Twitter world. They don't believe him either. Oh, this is such a problem. Carlos Mendoza is definitely bound to go talk to his dugout. Nobody believes him. No Met fan that listens to his press conference every single night, watches every single game. They don't believe him because it's the same problems night in and night out. And it's been this way for over a year under Mendoza when the Mets are simply not winning baseball games and it's, oh, I'm going to do something. He simply does not do it. It is absolutely a problem. Look at the graph that we talked about earlier. The New York Mets have challenged 156 calls this year. They've won 79 and lost 77. They're just about 50 percent. That's not great. After last night's game, they're down to 20th overall. As for batters, out of 76, they get 36 right, 40 wrong. That's less than 50 percent at 47.4. That ranks just around the middle of the MLB. And their catchers have been really, really bad with just 43 correct out of 80. That's 54 percent and ranks 22nd in all of Major League Baseball. We'll turn it back to Tacoma, who confirms all of these problems, saying the Mets continued issues with the ABS challenges indirectly led to Carlos Mendoza getting ejected last night and arguably indirectly led to that loss or directly led to that loss. However you want to interpret that. Also, Gary Cohen from the broadcast booth, he confirmed it as well on the Mets. Terrible use of the ABS from the broadcast last night. He said the Mets night after night or wasting challenges at low leverage situations. At some point, the manager has to address this. I couldn't agree more. So let's go ahead and dive into each and every single one of the challenges. First came with Francisco Alvarez. Now, Cohen said directly after this challenge, this is a big problem, keeps on happening. Nothing nothing game. Bottom of the first runner on first. Nobody out. J.J. Bladet eventually walks in this at bat to make it runners on first and second. Now, on the leverage index scale from Fangraphs, that basically says, is this a low leverage situation, average or high? This was a 1.74, which is average. After this, the Reds winning percentage bumped up to 63.6. That was an increase of 5.3 percent. And as you can tell, it was a ball and it wasn't even that close. This was clearly low of the strike zone. As you could tell, they have nine boxes, anything below that bottom third of boxes, anything to the right of it, to the left or up. That is a ball. That is not a strike. It's not based off that gray highlighted area. It's based off the boxes and pitch number four. The one that it says upheld next to the one that was challenged was clearly a ball. Now I get it. Alvarez wanted to get his pitcher back into it. He walked the first guy, was in danger of walking the second. He ended up doing so. But still, it's early and it was inaccurate. I know it's a little bit of a Monday morning quarterback to say now, hey, you probably shouldn't have challenged that. But it's more of a situation thing, especially with this clearly being a ball. But I think this one is worse. The Marcus Simeon call, 4-0 Reds, top of the second, nobody on, two out. He ended up striking out in the at bat, looking, challenged that fourth pitch. The last one that clipped the outside part of the zone. You can see number four has that black. It's got the outside. But this was a 0.63, 0.36, excuse me. That's even worse on the ally. Clearly low, a very low leverage situation. But Simeon is wasting the ABS challenges. The Mets win probability was 12.2, but only went down 0.7 because it was a low leverage situation. Now let's turn it over to this Corson Benj at bat. Look at that. Remember what I said? Anything outside the black, not the gray highlighted area is a ball. Well, all four of these, all three of these are balls. Pitch one, two, and four are clearly outside of the black. There is zero bit of anything touching the black. So they are balls. But remember, this was the sixth inning. Corson Benj could not challenge. And this was a much bigger leverage situation. Granted, it's 0.55 on the ally scale. But based on the eye test, this was a lot more of a high leverage situation. 5-3 Reds, top six, runner on first, two outs. Mets were trying to get a comeback going, but instead Benj strikes out on three bad calls because there was no ABS challenge left. And of course, the last one that led the skip to get ejected, JJ Bladet, he ended up blocking this at bat. Still 5-3 Reds, bottom of the seventh base is empty, one out. And as you could tell, yeah, he was wrong. But still, there was no ABS challenge left for Carlos Mendoza. That's why he had to go old school. That's why he had to start arguing with the umpire like everyone did before the ABS challenge. Now this is clearly a problem. I know some of you might say it's not, but it absolutely is. Before we wrap up, let's dive into another problem because the Mets have so many of them. They are 3-for-23 this series with runners in scoring position and have left 23 runners on base in the first two games of this set against the Reds. And keep in mind, they have only scored a total of three runs. So go down there in the comment section, let me know what you think. Are these problems? How can these problems be addressed? I think it's pretty simple. Yes, it's a problem. And Carlos Mendoza needs to do something. Tell his players, hey, you can't be wasting this in the first three innings. You can't be wasting these in low leverage situations. You want to waste one, whatever. You can't waste both before the bottom of the second inning even starts. This is a huge problem, in my opinion. Don't worry, I'm going over more later because the Mets have a ton of problems. Hopefully, by the time you're watching this, they end up winning this baseball game. We'll see. Game three against the Reds coming to you in a matter of minutes. But unfortunately, that's all the time I have for you in today's video. Thank you so much, as always, for watching. And let's go Mets!