If you had told me at the start of the season that the New York Mets would rank fourth in the National League in runs scored in early May, I'd have assumed things would be going swimmingly for them. After all, it was the Mets' 11th-ranked offense in 2016 that would occasionally bedevil the team in its playoff run, not a pitching staff that hoped to be even better this year with Matt Harvey having a full, healthy season.
Instead, the starting pitching has been disappointing, with Harvey, Robert Gsellman and Zack Wheeler all underperforming expectations to varying degrees. (And that's without even getting into Harvey's suspension.) But the big hit was the loss of Noah Syndergaard, the team's ace and one of only a handful of pitchers you could envision facing off against Clayton Kershaw on nearly equal terms. Thor's torn lat muscle, very possibly a cascade injury resulting from pitching through the biceps tendinitis that saw the thunder god refuse an MRI, now puts him on the shelf for an undetermined, but no doubt large, chunk of the season remaining.
The Mets aren't running away with the NL East -- the Washington Nationals are the team threatening to do that -- instead hovering around .500 for the first five weeks of the season, and that was with Syndergaard. Even more concerning is that this is the easy part of their schedule. In 30 games through Sunday afternoon's game against the Marlins, the Mets have played only six games against teams projected by ZiPS (and most other projections, human or computer) at the start of the season to finish above the .500 mark in 2017.
The Mets are in a hole and need every bit of ammo they have to crawl back out of it. With a healthy Syndergaard, the Mets' projected playoff chance sits at 46.8 percent, only slightly behind their preseason projection at a shade above 50 percent. (Helping the Mets is the expected development that wild-card competition such as the Cardinals and Giants have had disappointing starts, too.) But with Syndergaard projected to pitch 60 innings -- assuming roughly a three-month layoff -- instead of 150, the Mets see their playoff hopes evaporate by about a third. Projecting Syndergaard to not return at all drops their playoff odds to 20 percent, or by more than half.
So, yeah, losing Syndergaard is pretty bad news (duh). When we did a similar examination of which players were most indispensable at the start of the season, only one other pitcher measured a drop-off that severe from a full-season loss: Chris Sale at minus-27.1 percent for the Boston Red Sox.
Seeing Syndergaard out for five months in the worst-case scenario rather than a full season nearly matches that. Simply put, the Mets' situation -- with Steven Matz and Seth Lugo already out and the mediocre performances of Harvey/Gsellman/Wheeler -- has eliminated their margin for error. A contending team at only Plan B or Plan C doesn't typically have to resort to starting Rafael Montero or fishing on the waiver wire for Tommy Milone.
Syndergaard isn't the only top pitcher on the disabled list, either. If you take the top two projected starters on each of the 30 teams, as projected by ZiPS coming into the season, 17 of those 60 pitchers -- or just under a third -- have spent some time on the disabled list in 2017. Remember, we're not even halfway into May! David Price hasn't pitched a game yet, Felix Hernandez and Cole Hamels are out, Madison Bumgarner had his dirt bike adventure and so on.
To get an idea how this compares right now to other teams, I took each team in baseball and projected their playoff probability of their best-projected, rest-of-season pitcher getting 150 more innings versus getting none (including best starters who are currently injured, such as Bumgarner).
When the numbers are crunched, only a single starter -- Dylan Bundy of the Orioles -- is even close to being as crucial for the rest of his team's 2017 playoff run as Syndergaard is to the Mets. There's a similar pattern here as with the Mets, a team that could go either way playoff-wise, a top pitcher and a situation in which the replacements for that pitcher are slightly dire. In Baltimore's case, Bundy isn't the Cy Young contender that Syndergaard is, but the questions about the rest of that rotation are even deeper, and the O's alternate plans even worse.
Given the nature of Syndergaard's injury and the fact that he is now on the 60-day DL, he will not be throwing 150 more innings this season, and 120 isn't likely. Even with a miraculous recovery, he won't be pitching for the Mets until the very end of June. But the longer he's out, the harder it gets for the Mets to make the playoffs without him.
What all this means is that during the next two months the Mets are going to have to make some very difficult decisions, ones they didn't envision having to make a month ago. What, if anything, are they willing to trade to acquire a pitcher from a team that might become a seller, such as the Toronto Blue Jays or San Francisco Giants? And how do you balance the need to win in 2017 with the team's interest in protecting Syndergaard's long-term health as one the team's most valuable assets?
Sometimes the hard decision you avoid makes the next one harder. We'll never know if the Mets' shrugging their shoulders, choosing the path of least resistance by avoiding a tense issue and letting Thor pitch after he refused an MRI directly led to the injury that might shelve their ace for much or even all of the remainder of the season. But either way, the next decisions the Mets make might define how their 2017 ends.