Probably not.

The Mets are not healthy. Their five best starters would combine to make one of the better starting rotations in recent history. Unfortunately, it is seeming increasingly unlikely that all five will pitch at the same time again. Steven Matz finished 2016 with a surgery to remove a bone spur in his elbow. He hasn’t pitched yet this season. Matt Harvey had season-ending surgery to alleviate thoracic outlet syndrome after a disappointing start to the season. Jacob deGrom missed the last part of 2016 for ulnar nerve surgery. Depth option Seth Lugo is out with a partial UCL tear.

Noah Syndergaard is the only one of the five to not have had Tommy John surgery. Despite pitching through a bone spur last season, he has been remarkably healthy. However, he left his opening day start this season with a blister. And now this:

Update on Noah Syndergaard. #Mets pic.twitter.com/n8JVxIBBid

— New York Mets (@Mets) May 1, 2017

As others have noted, lat strains can be fairly serious — Matz missed two months with the same injury in 2015. Syndergaard is probably out until at least the All-Star break, a big blow to the Mets. The big story here of course is that the Mets started Syndergaard even after he refused a suggested MRI. However, I believe a further, more serious injury awaits Syndergaard.

Syndergaard didn’t always throw a slider:

Indeed, he started throwing it toward the end of 2015 (his rookie season), and relied heavily on it in 2016.

There’s been a lot of work on this topic. FanGraphs’ Eno Sarris termed the pitch the Mets are throwing the “Dan Warthen Slider” in 2015. Sarris notes in his piece:

Critics might point to arm injuries on the Mets as proof that the pitch is hard on the arm, but Warthen laughs that off. “It’s easy on the arm when done correctly, it’s not one of those pitches that you try to make break,” he said. And these pitchers all throw hard, and there is a relationship between just throwing hard and arm injury. It’s impossible to split those effects apart.

Obviously there’s more contributing factors to injury than throwing this one specific slider. The Mets’ five aces throw very hard. Perhaps more importantly, they all throw breaking pitches (the Warthen slider) very hard.

This is a graph of pitchers who threw at least 250 sliders between 2015 and 2017. Perceived velocity is on the y-axis, and is correlated with release extension on the x-axis (the farther a pitcher’s arm gets from the mound, the faster the ball will appear to a hitter).

The only pitcher with a slider that has averaged above 90 MPH in effective speed that hasn’t had Tommy John surgery yet is…Noah Syndergaard. Jon Gray and Jake Arrieta are both also near the threshold.

Arrieta throws a mix of a cutter and slider. When he was traded to the Cubs from the Orioles in July 2013, his month-to-month slider usage began increasing almost immediately. In 2014, his first full season with the Cubs, he threw the pitch 29% of the time. In 2015, he threw it 29.5% of the time. However, his usage has decreased since then, and now sits at 16.1% so far this year (potentially due to his lost command of it). He threw his slider more than 20% of the time for about two years, and then decreased his usage again. It’s not too surprising that his arm has held up, especially considering his conditioning.

deGrom got Tommy John surgery at 22, Harvey 24, Wheeler 25, and Matz 19. Syndergaard is 24 now. Out of the two who had Tommy John in the majors, Harvey pitched for 1.5 years at the major-league level before needing surgery, and Wheeler had about the same amount of time as well. Syndergaard has been pitching for about half a year longer than either of them, but it’s concerning how much the timelines line up. Syndergaard is just a little past the mean age of Tommy John surgery in the last 10 years (23.28).

Jon Gray is an interesting case due to his frequent comparisons to Syndergaard. His arm seems healthy now, but he’s also only pitched for a year and a half so far. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up in the same position as Syndergaard soon, though, especially since it appears that he’s started throwing the slider even harder in limited starts this season.

Maybe Syndergaard’s injury is a blessing in disguise. There’s only one other pitcher I could find in the past seven years that’s undergone Tommy John surgery after a lat strain or tear. However, many have gotten lat strains after Tommy John (including Syndergaard’s teammate Matz). It’s certainly good that he’s not trying to pitch through it. If he does rush back or not take the injury seriously, though, it could put even more strain on his likely endangered elbow. Due to Syndergaard’s attitude about this situation so far, his desire to throw as hard as possible, and the Mets’ reliance on and mismanagement of him, I doubt he makes it through 2018 with his elbow intact.

I’ve been particularly intrigued recently by Carl Edwards Jr., a Cubs reliever who got called up last season. He had always seemed to be surprisingly good, but I wasn’t aware quite how good he was until I calculated wOBA allowed by pitchers in 2016 and found that he had the third-lowest in the league, behind only Kenley Jansen and Zach Britton, and in front of Clayton Kershaw, Aroldis Chapman, and Andrew Miller. Ranking Edwards among four of the game’s top closers and the game’s best starter seemed strange. Here are the six pitchers with the lowest wOBA against last season:

Edwards stands out negatively in several respects here. He pitched the fewest innings out of that group by far, and was almost certainly put in the least-stressful situations. His ERA is almost two points higher than the next-highest, and his FIP is nearly a point higher than Britton’s, the second-highest mark. His BABIP is also remarkably low, due in part to luck and in part to the Cubs’ historically good defense. So why is his wOBA so remarkable?

Looking through Edwards’ game log, two bad appearances stand out:

1. August 13th, where he allowed five runs on one hit and four walks while recording just two outs.
2. September 17th, where he allowed three runs on three hits (two of them home runs) in an inning’s work.

If we remove the August 13th outing, Edwards’ ERA drops to 2.55, almost an entire point. If we remove the September 17th outing as well, it drops to 1.83. Removing the first performance, his FIP drops to 2.56. Removing the other brings it down to 1.96, which is still higher than the other five pitchers, but much closer. Bad pitching performances are part of a pitcher’s year, and shouldn’t be entirely disregarded. However, it seems likely that something was off (mechanically, physically, or mentally) on August 13th.

We’ll get back to these games later.

As the Cubs consistently carried three catchers last season, I thought it would be interesting to compare Edwards’ performance across all three:

The baseballr package also allows us to look at Statcast data from Baseball Savant:

From the table, we can see that Edwards throws two main pitches — a four-seam fastball and a curveball. He pitched most often to Willson Contreras, then Miguel Montero, then David Ross (and once to Tim Federowicz). Edwards threw his fastball a notch faster to Ross than other catchers, which could be due to the small sample size. He also threw his fastball more to Ross than other catchers; despite throwing 16.67% of his curveballs to Ross, he threw 21.57% of his fastballs to him. There are several reasons this might be the case:

1. Edwards focused on his fastball earlier in the season before gaining more confidence in his curve.
2. Ross saw that Edwards’ fastball was producing better results and called it more often.
3. Contreras was more confident in his agility and therefore ability to block a curveball than Ross was.
4. Random sampling and a small sample size.

Let’s take a look at the results these pitches got. By plotting hit velocity and hit distance, we can compare results across catchers:

When Ross was catching, Edwards tended to generate softer contact that went shorter distances. We can use the Statcast data to see why that is.

This chart, plotting spin against pitch velocity, shows something interesting: Edwards’ pitches had the highest spin when throwing to Ross. Curveballs with higher spin tend to induce more ground balls[^2], which is advantageous for Edwards thanks in part to the defense behind him. High spin on his four-seamer is essential to Edwards’ style, and that was maximized when Ross was catching. Of course, this isn’t necessarily related to the catcher. It could be the case that Ross just happened to catch Edwards on his better days. For greater parity, we can look to see what happens to Contreras’ numbers if we take away the two worst games in Edwards’ season.

Already we see that removing the two bad outings brings Contreras much closer to Ross and Montero in terms of average hit speed and hit distance. Now we can look at how removing the bad outing affects velocity and spin.

There isn’t any effect on the spin of Edwards’ curveball while Contreras is catching, but the spin on his fastball gets much closer to Ross than Montero. Let’s compare Edwards’ Statcast data between the August 13th outing and his overall averages (the bolded rows are from the 13th):

If we add in the other poor outing:

Adding in the second bad outing makes the numbers more similar, lending credence to the idea that the first outing was an outlier. On August 13th the spin on his fastball, his extension, and his velocity were all down a tick.

Carl Edwards had a quietly great year out of the bullpen for the Cubs. He was among the league leaders in wOBA against, which is initially surprising based on his peripheral numbers. Upon removing an outing where the spin rate and velocity on his signature pitch took a steep downturn, Edwards’ peripheral numbers match up more closely with the type of performance you’d expect from someone in that elite group of pitchers. Carl Edwards had a bad day — here’s to more good ones.