GRANDERSON MAY BE MOST VALUABLE MET
As bonus, stroke vs. lefty pitching returns in playoffs
Terry Collins’ news conferences have been a highlight of the 2015 postseason, the New York Mets manager presiding over a realm that so often in the club’s past has been little more than strategically explaining futility.
But even within this new world, Collins visibly brightens when Curtis Granderson’s name comes up. It happens infrequently, and Collins appreciates the chance to sing the virtues of a steady performer often overshadowed by powerful Yoenis Cespedes or folk hero Wilmer Flores or all those Mets pitchers with their flying fastballs.
“Curtis Granderson, he’s just one of those quiet guys that goes about his job,” Collins said Sunday before Game 2 of the National League Championship Series against the Chicago Cubs. “I tell all the young players that come up here: ‘If you handle the game like Curtis Granderson does because you’re talented, you’re going to be successful, because he never has a bad day.’
“This guy’s got a smile on his face every day — if he’s playing, if he’s not playing. You wouldn’t know if he’s 0-for-40 or if he’s 30for-40, same guy every day. That persona on a star, and young players see it, it helps a lot.”
But Granderson isn’t some managerial talisman of limited on-field value but elevated because of his outsized influence in the clubhouse. The numbers are equally kind to Granderson, who can stake a claim as the most valuable Met in this breakthrough 2015 season.
Via Baseball-Reference.com’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistic, it is Granderson, with 5.1, who led the Mets this season. Not the two months of Cespedes, or the powerful season from Lu- cas Duda or even the dominant frontline pitching duo of Jacob deGrom and Matt Harvey.
The extent to which these 2015 Mets mirror the 1969 “Miracle Mets” echoes through Granderson’s performance, calling to mind a latter-day Tommie Agee. Like Agee, Granderson struggled through much of his first season with the Mets in 2014. And like Agee, Granderson hit 26 home runs out of the leadoff spot for a division winner this year.
But there has been a hole in Granderson’s game all season, one that has periodically plagued him in stops with the Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees as well: He simply wasn’t hitting left-handed pitching.
For his career, Granderson has a .861 on-base-plus-slugging percentage vs. righties, a .696 mark vs. lefties. But that implies some vaguely competent potency against lefties. Instead, Granderson’s ability to hit lefties seems to vary by year like a faraway radio station on a night drive.
But the Curtis Granderson the Mets have been treated to in the playoffs has actually saved his best moments for at-bats against left-handed pitching. He cited the frequency with which the Mets have been seeing lefties as helpful in his breakthrough against his occasional pitching kryptonite.