Tired Bullpen Wasn't Mets' Cause of Death

As various autopsies have been conducted on the still-twitching corpse of the Mets over the past week, several causes of death have been proposed, most of them plausible. Some say the team was poorly constructed, some say it was badly managed, some say it was unlucky, and some say it just wasn't that good. These are not mutually exclusive, and all of them are true at least in part.

One thing all can agree on is that the hitters were not the problem; among National League teams only Philadelphia's offense was better. Even during the fateful September, the Mets scored 5.6 runs per game, which would have led the league if sustained for a full season. This leaves the pitching staff to bear the blame. Because the team's relievers were so garishly bad in the season's last weeks, they've been deservedly scorned, but the starters have been abused as well. Only one among them, after all, pitched 200 innings. The bullpen may have been awful, the reasoning goes, but that was at least in part because it was burnt out. Six-inning starters killed the Mets.

This is a tidy explanation, which neatly apportions blame among the guilty parties, from the field to the front office. It's a shame it isn't true.

While the Mets' bullpen was worked hard at times — Aaron Heilman pitched in six of eight games down the stretch — it wasn't worked hard over the course of the season. The team ranked 10th in the league in bullpen innings. Other than the durable Heilman, no one pitched even 70 innings in relief. Altogether, the Mets needed 3.15 relief innings per game, a hair above the 3.08 that represents the National League average over the last five years, and the 3.12 the average NL playoff team needed this year.

The bullpen wasn't worked particularly hard because the starting pitchers gave the team a normal amount of innings. The Mets averaged 5.80 innings a start. Over the last five years the league average is 5.84 a start, and this year's playoff teams average 5.86. While all this is inconvenient for the theory that the murderer was a weak armed starter in the library with a lead pipe, it's also just plainly true that the blame lays elsewhere.

Whatever the implications of this for the ongoing assignment of blame, the more important implications involve next year. General manager Omar Minaya is going to be under tremendous pressure to acquire at least one workhorse veteran starter, two if Tom Glavine declines his player option. Workhorse veteran starters are inherently good to have around so long as they come at a reasonable price; the danger is that when a team fixates on something it supposedly has to have, it ends up paying an unreasonable one. That's doubly bad when it doesn't really need the object of its fixation at all.

Johan Santana made 33 starts this year and pitched 219 innings. Jorge Sosa's final nine starts and all those made by Chan Ho Park, Dave Williams, Phil Humber, Mike Pelfrey, Brian Lawrence, and Jason Vargas add up to 33 starts in total, during which the Mets got 170.2 innings from their starters. If Santana had replaced all those crummy starts, the Mets' innings averaged per start would have risen all the way to 6.1. That amounts to an inning every three days. The reason they would have been better off with Santana isn't that he rests the bullpen, it's that he's about eleventy-bajillion times better than Brian Lawrence.

Despite popular opinion, the Mets don't need to go out and lay hands on an iron man starter; this is good, because there likely isn't one to be had. They do need to build a better bullpen. That's fine; it's much easier to find some good relievers than land a perennial Cy Young candidate in his prime. The Mets may not even have to go too far outside their own organization. They could, for instance, just work Heilman or Humber into the rotation and back them with a bullpen bolstered by Pelfrey and Orlando Hernandez.

I'm skeptical about Heilman or Humber being strong major league starters, but they're viable candidates for a no. 5 role, and work cheap. I'm not skeptical about the odds of Hernandez and especially Pelfrey, who could easily pitch 200 innings between them, being devastatingly effective in relief. Add one 200-inning veteran and the odd live arm or crafty specialist for the pen, and the staff looks to be in good shape given Pedro Martinez's health.

It doesn't matter whether or not the Mets carry out this plan specifically; what matters is that they try to solve problems they actually have. A roster weighted down by age, bad bullpen management, and a habit of acquiring and using bad pitchers — not the lack of a seven-inning starter — are what's wrong. It would be nice if the Mets actually focused on making them right.

tmarchman@nysun.com