Casual Diehard

The MLB-wide OPS in 2023 is .729. So far this month, there are only four Mets above that number: Tommy Pham (1.014), Mark Canha (.865), Brandon Nimmo (.764), and Starling Marte (.735). Meanwhile, there are only four Mets pitchers who have allowed a sub-.729 (sub-.800, in fact) OPS in June: John Curtiss (.286), Dominc Leone (.412), Jeff Brigham (.466), Kodai Senga (.655), and Brooks Raley (.686).

Those pitchers have accounted for 25% of the batters faced by the Mets’ staff in June. The hitters have accounted for 37% of the Mets’ plate appearances.

It’s not really a mystery why they’re 2-9 this month.

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Congratulations to the Denver Nuggets, who not only are NBA champions for the first time, but whose victory in the NBA Finals assured — since the Vegas Golden Knights and Florida Panthers are competing in the Stanley Cup Final — that this will be the fifth time ever, and second time in five seasons, we have new NBA and NHL champions.

* 2023: Denver Nuggets, Vegas Golden Knights/Florida Panthers

* 2019: Toronto Raptors, St. Louis Blues

* 1999: San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Stars

* 1991: Chicago Bulls, Pittsburgh Penguins

* 1989: Detroit Pistons, Calgary Flames

In 2019, Major League Baseball followed up the first-timers in basketball and hockey by crowning the Washington Nationals as World Series champions for the first time. That wasn’t the case in 1999 (Yankees), 1991 (Twins), or 1989 (A’s), but the 1999 NFL season did end with the St. Louis Rams winning their first and only Super Bowl (in January 2000).

The other NFL seasons ended with Kansas City, Washington, and San Francisco winning Super Bowls, so we’ve never had a year where all four major sports’ seasons ended with new champs. Could this be the year? We’re halfway there.

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Yeah, pretty much. ESPN did all the research necessary: we’ve never seen the Mets lead by three runs and lose in three straight games until now. In Atlanta, for maximum pain, amid a traumatic week in New York. I’m so tired, indeed.

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Addy’s working on a thing about the glorious F1 theme, Jesse is working on a thing about early 1980s baseball… neither of those things is ready to accompany this podcast episode, so here’s a TikTok combining them both.

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With 100 games left in the regular season, we can say this now with ease. The Mets played .623 ball last year. If they match that pace for the rest of this season, they’ll be a 92-win team.

And if they play like they have for the first 62 games of this season, well, they’ll be a team with a losing record.

There’s not a whole lot else to say at this point. The defending National League East almost champions have been decidedly mediocre for two-plus months now. If you’ve been looking the line between “slow start” and “bad,” the fellas in orange and blue are speeding toward it.

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It would be nice to be able to really make the case for Daniel Vogelbach. He seems like a nice and fun guy who likes to hit dingers, which is rad, except now he’s not hitting dingers. He’s hitting ground balls and pop flies like never before in his life, and all the hard contact in the world doesn’t mean anything if you’re pounding the ball directly into the ground.

It’s baffling that someone could be in the 91st percentile of hard hit balls, according to Statcast, yet in the 11th percentile for expected slugging percentage. Yet here we are, and the parallel story isn’t exactly encouraging.

Similarity scores are generally not something to rely on, but they are good at finding players who might be, well, similar. Ji Man Choi is, like Vogelbach, a three true outcomes-oriented cult hero first baseman-DH, had a big 2019, and then kinda fell off a cliff. And unlike the other players on Baseball Reference’s similarity list for Vogelbach, from Kevin Maas to Bob Hamelin to Marv Throneberry, Choi is an active player with Statcast data of his own.

It tells a disturbingly similar story of more balls being hit hard, but the expected stats dropping along with the actual stats. A strained Achilles has kept Choi out since April in Pittsburgh, where he essentially was meant to replace Vogelbach this season. He got to Pittsburgh in a trade in which the Pirates gave up Jack Hartman, a former fourth-round pick currently flaming out in Single-A. To get Vogelbach, the Mets gave up Colin Holderman, who is exactly whom the Mets could really use right now.

The thing with Vogelbach is that he has a very specific use case scenario: a pinch-hit appearance in a playoff game where you can use a home run, but a walk will certainly do, and all the better if it’s in the sixth inning or so and you can bump the starter’s pitch count up into get-him-outta-there territory. Also the pitcher has to be a righty. But if you’re planning a long playoff run, you can absolutely see that use case scenario.

The problem for the Mets is that they look like they’re going to struggle to make the playoffs, partly because Vogelbach has started half their games as the designated hitter, and particularly as a streaky three true outcomes guy… look, the numbers are not lying that he’s been below replacement level. He’s a slugger who hasn’t slugged, that really shouldn’t be a surprise.

The question that the Mets have to answer for themselves, and which more and more observers are leaning “no” on, is whether the potential giant positive justifies living with a lot of guaranteed negative, because even in the best-case scenario where Vogelbach gets his swing back and hits his bunches of dingers, you’re still talking about a player whose only possible defensive position is the one the team’s MVP candidate plays, can’t hit lefties at all, can’t run, and strikes out a ton. It sucks, but the thing that happens with players below replacement level is, they get replaced.

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Yesterday, we talked about the Heat changing defensive focus in light of the fact that they can’t actually stop Nikola Jokić, with Game 2 of the NBA Finals going so differently than Game 1 as Miami gave the two-time MVP more shooting options and fewer passing lanes.

Today, we visualize that… here’s a graph of Jokić’s games this season, including playoffs, with assists going up as you go left to right and points going up as you go bottom to top.

You can see, even without the axes labeled (sorry), that there’s a fairly basic principle here of “if we can keep Jokić from racking up the assists (the center line is 10), we’ve got a fighting chance.” That one game all the way on the right, Jokić’s 17-assist game, it took 39 points from Kevin Durant and 47 by Devin Booker for the Suns to beat the Nuggets in Game 3 of the second round. Miami does not have Kevin Durant and Devin Booker.

Obviously, it’s not a be-all, end-all, as the Nuggets won plenty of Jokić low-assist games. You can also see why, after getting worked so badly in Game 1, the Heat made the adjustments they did. Steve Kerr and Draymond Green chatted about it, too, and that conversation is definitely worth a listen.

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Watching Nikola Jokić dominate Game 1 of the NBA Finals the other night sparked the following thought on Twitter:

miami doesn't have any way to handle jokic, and doubling him only opens up options for him to make easy passes... i think their only hope is to make him take more shots, and then bury ton of threes at the other end. maybe that gets them a game.

Well, they got themselves a game. Changing their defensive approach, the Heat stopped trying to silence Jokić as a scorer, instead clamping down on the passing game that makes him so special. The two-time MVP scored 41 points with 11 rebounds, but only had four assists, and attempted 28 of Denver’s 75 shots. That’s six and a half fewer assists than Jokić had been averaging in the playoffs, and seven and a half more shot attempts.

And, indeed, the Heat buried 17 three-pointers, on only 35 attempts, to steal the game they so desperately needed to steal on the road, 111-108.

It might be counterintuitive, but the Nuggets are now 4-4 in the playoffs when Jokić scores 30 or more points, and 9-0 when he doesn’t. During the regular season, they were 16-5 in Jokić’s 30-point games, and 32-16 when he scored less.

For assists, the Nuggets are 8-2 in the playoffs when Jokić is in double figures, compared to 5-2 when he has fewer than 10. In the regular season? Denver was 34-4 when the best-passing big man alive had 10-plus assists, but only 17-14 when he didn’t get there.

Not to mention, Jokić had five turnovers in Game 2, marking only the third time all season that he had more turnovers than assists in the game, the other occasions being a 21-point loss to the Rockets and an 11-point loss to the Magic.

And when it comes to getting him to shoot more, Jokić’s season high was 26 attempts in a game. When he’s met or exceeded that in the playoffs, the Nuggets are now 2-3.

It’s very odd to need a team’s best player to shoot less, but that is what the Nuggets need because Jokić’s passing is what sets him, and them, apart. How Denver adjusts to Miami’s adjustments will tell the story of whether this year’s NBA Finals turn into something special, or if I was right that letting Jokić go off as a scorer would simply be the Heat’s route to avoiding a sweep.

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At least Max Strus has a whole rest of the finals to try to make a three-pointer. When John Starks went 0-for-11 from downtown in 1994, it was in Game 7, and the Knicks losing by six points, well, it’s still haunting 29 years later.

Strus and the Heat got beat by the Nuggets in Game 1 last night a lot worse than the 104-93 score suggested. Strus was 0-for-10 overall, but his 0-for-9 on threes put him right behind Starks on the all-time list for ouch games shooting from distance in the NBA Finals.

Along with Strus? Stephen Curry was 0-for-9 on three-pointers in Game 5 last year, a game that Golden State still won by 10 points because Andrew Wiggins scored 26, Klay Thompson added 21, and Curry still went 7-for-13 on two-pointers, plus a pair of free throws.

And that’s it. Starks, then Strus and Curry. Ray Allen (2010) and J.R. Smith (2015) had 0-for-8 games on three-pointers, and four more players (Sam Perkins, 1996; Scottie Pippen, 1998; Kyrie Irving, 2017; and Devin Booker, 2021) have had Finals performances of 0-for-7 three-point shooting.

All of those players, though, scored points. Strus’ 21 minutes are far from the record for most scoreless time in a Finals game — that was Byron Scott on 0-for-8 shooting in 43 minutes in Game 3 in 1991 — and also not a Heat team high, as Chris Bosh did not score in 28 minutes of a 95-88 win over the Spurs in Game 7 in 2013.

But Strus did set a record: 10 field goal attempts, zero points. The previous NBA Finals record had stood for 20 years. Malik Rose went 0-for-9 in the Spurs’ 77-76 loss to the Nets in Game 4 in 2003, a game in which San Antonio, as a team, shot 29% from the field including 4-for-18 on threes. Speedy Claxton almost bailed out a team that got a combined eight points from Tony Parker, Stephen Jackson, and… well… also Rose.

The Spurs won that series, so Rose got a ring to soothe the pain of a scoreless Finals game in which his team lost by a single point.

There’s only been one time that a player went 0-for-7 or worse and their team won, out of 10 occurrences in Finals history: in Game 4 in 1953, Lew Hitch shot 0-for-7, but the Minneapolis Lakers got 27 points and 19 boards from George Mikan, and the Knicks did not have a nice night shooting at the 69th Regiment Armory, connecting on just 29% of their shots to lose, 71-69, the third of four straight New York defeats after winning Game 1 in Minnesota.

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We had a lot to talk about in this episode that we recorded last night, a lot of negative feelings to get through about Baseball, because as much as we love the game, the institution… well, as Britt says, a big part of our podcast, in general, is about loving something that maybe doesn’t love you back. It’s been a pretty lousy week on that front.

And then Mark Canha, on the first day of Pride Month, goes out and hits a home run and wears the Willets Pen LFGM Pride shirt during his postgame interview…

It matters. We saw it in hockey this season that there were players who wriggled out of wearing so much as a team-issued warmup jersey for Pride Nights, hiding behind claims about religion that do not withstand any kind of real scrutiny. Could Brooks Raley get away with the stuff he pulled in Tampa, now that he’s in New York? The Rangers sure did over the winter. Clayton Kershaw did in Los Angeles (as we discuss on this episode, sigh). Canha putting on a shirt that some weird niche website sent to Flushing? It really does matter.

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