PHILADELPHIA — Here is a truth — perhaps a half-truth — that Mets fans will not want to read:
In clutch situations, Mets batters have been unlucky.
As of Saturday, the Mets have posted the lowest batting average on balls in play (BABIP) with runners on second and/or third at .236, ranking last in the league. The team trailing just ahead was the White Sox, sitting at .254.
Their struggles aren’t due to a lack of hard hits; in fact, the Mets have an impressive average exit velocity of 90 mph in these scenarios, placing them third across the league.
During Friday’s disappointing opener against the Phillies, the Mets had the bases loaded with one out in the first inning when Jeff McNeil hit a ball at 98.5 mph right off his bat, straight to second baseman Bryson Stott, who turned a double play.
Compare that .215 batting average with RISP with the .254 expected batting average; their .299 on-base percentage with RISP with their .338 expected on-base percentage; their .386 slugging percentage with RISP with their .445 expected slugging percentage.
Can the Mets chalk up a problem that has persisted all season — a lack of timely hits and a general lack of clutchness — to the kind of unsustainably poor fortune that will naturally change as the season wears on?
“Yes and no,” co-hitting coach Jeremy Barnes said before the Mets went 2-for-7 with runners in scoring position in an 11-4, slump-busting victory over the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park. “It’s hard to control your BABIP. … Once it leaves the bat, there’s only so much you can do about it. So in that aspect, all we can control in those situations is our process and what we’re swinging at and all those kinds of things.
“We need to be better. I think we’re still giving away a lot of things. But yeah, there’s a level of it just isn’t falling for us.”
The Mets have identified that their struggle to find hits at the right time is, indeed, a problem — they too often have chased outside the strike zone with runners in scoring position.
Mets coaches have felt the more pressurized at-bats have looked different, perhaps a reflection of hitters trying to do too much.
“We have some guys that are being overly aggressive in certain situations,” Barnes said. “We have other guys that are maybe not being as [aggressive] … they’re maybe a little bit too passive. But it’s something that we’re paying attention to and we’re addressing.”
Entering play, the biggest offender with runners in scoring position was Juan Soto, who was batting .133 — with a .247 expected batting average.
Soto, who has performed in the World Series and put together his best season in his walk year, is not known for wilting under pressure. And he did not Saturday, when he went 4-for-5 with two homers and came through with a bases-loaded, two-run single in the eighth.
Before Jesse Winker went down, he was hitting .222 in such situations with an expected batting average of .322. Brandon Nimmo’s actual average in those spots (.234) similarly fell far short of his expected (.290).
Francisco Lindor also has been a victim of poor luck, though he sent a clutch, two-run double off the right-field wall to pad the Mets’ lead in the sixth.
“It’s kind of a mixed bag — it’s a tricky one right now,” Barnes said. “We definitely want to be better. We need to find a way to score more runs.
“But we got to do that without really changing our identity and overhauling everything and having a negative trade-off.”
