Trevor May, Mark Canha, Billy Eppler lead Mets breakout candidates
NEW YORK — One of many problems for the Mets last year was the inability of several key players to match the production of their breakout seasons.
James McCann went from an .808 OPS in two years with the White Sox to a .643 in his first tour with the Mets, well below the league average. Taijuan Walker broke out in the first half but was shelled for a 7.13 ERA in the second half, and Jeff McNeil was unrecognizable from his 2019 All-Star self.
Getting those guys back to form will carry major importance in the Mets’ overall outlook, but some breakthroughs from other parts of the organization — including upstairs — could make the club’s 60th anniversary season a happy one.
MARK CANHA
Canha’s true breakout came in 2019, but now he’ll have a chance for a National League version of that.
The most anonymous of the Mets’ free-agent signings has all the tools for a pleasant introduction to the 7 Line Army. He’s capable of clocking 25 homers (a threshold he crossed in 2019), bringing some modest but much-needed baserunning (his 12 stolen bases in 2021 would have ranked
second on the Mets), and he’s one of the league’s most prudent hitters.
While power numbers are prone to fluctuation, one skill that rarely deteriorates is plate discipline. A disciple of Billy Beane’s regime in Oakland, the 32-year-old Canha fully understands the value of patience. His watchful eye has bred an elite understanding of the strike zone.
Canha does not swing at many pitches off the plate. In fact, among 132 qualified hitters last year, Canha had the 12th-lowest chase rate in Major League Baseball. That restraint spawned his third consecutive season with a walk rate above 12%, something that should find a comfortable home in the Mets’ aggressive lineup.
His career year in 2019 was also the first year that Canha started crushing fastballs. Despite hitting .328 with a .677 slugging percentage on fastballs that year, catchers have kept putting one finger down when Canha is at the plate. Last season, 57.9% of the pitches he got were fastballs. While he didn’t inflict the same kind of destruction he did in 2019, if pitchers keep feeding him fastballs, Canha is going to keep eating.
TREVOR MAY
If anyone is liable to have an Aaron Loup-type season out of the Mets bullpen, it’s Trevor May.
No one should expect another veteran in his thirties to pop off quite like Loup did in 2021, but there’s certainly a possibility of May ascending to another level. For starters, May has a fastball that averages 96.5 miles per hour in his back pocket. No matter how hairy things might get, or who’s at the plate, a baseball moving that fast is very hard to hit.
May’s fastball velocity puts him in the upper echelon of the league — the 90th percentile, according to Baseball-Savant — and his other two pitches are no walk in the park either. In addition to the blazing fastball that gets a swing and miss 33.2% of the time, May’s slider and changeup also had a whiff rate above 30% last season.
Sharing a bullpen with Loup and Edwin Diaz meant that May went overlooked. But the former fourth-round pick from Kelso, Wash., was one of just nine NL relievers to throw at least 60 innings and strike out 30% of their foes. Among those nine, May had the fourth-lowest walk rate.
Perhaps the most encouraging thing — and something that Buck Showalter will become aware of as he starts sponging up Mets-related data — is May’s expected numbers. May put up a 3.59 ERA and .227 opponents’ batting average. But by expected ERA (xERA) and expected batting average (xBA), he again ranked in the 90th percentile. These are Statcast numbers that attempt to quantify what a pitcher’s numbers would look like based on the quality of contact they allow.
Essentially, if you removed defense, ballpark dimensions and other factors to examine just the exit velocity and launch angle of the batted balls allowed, how would a pitcher’s numbers turn out? For May, the answer last season was a 2.92 xERA and .192 xBA, both significantly lower than the numbers he put up. This means that with a few more balls getting stopped in the infield or dying at the warning track, May is primed to be even better than he was during a very underrated 2021.
BILLY EPPLER
Yes, a breakout season from their general manager should be on the Mets’ wish list.
Billy Eppler never made the postseason while running the Angels. His track record includes signing or trading for a slew of stunners (Shohei Ohtani, Anthony Rendon and Justin Upton), but never actually accomplishing the goal that those players were brought in to do.
Eppler is following a startlingly similar path in his first months with the Mets. The big-name acquisitions are already in place, but if they fail to get the Mets into the playoffs, the chorus of criticism will begin, and it will be much louder in Flushing than it was in apathetic Orange County.
Depending how the season plays out, a franchisealtering move could be necessary to get the Mets over the hump.