The 2023 New York Mets: A potential disaster scenario

It’s been a fun winter for New York Mets fans … the kind of fun you have on a no-budget weekend jaunt to Vegas.

But, by summer’s end, the letdown could also resemble the aftermath of a Vegas weekend.

Using Steve Cohen’s functionally unlimited financial resources, New York Mets management signed Justin Verlander at $43.3 million. He joins Max Scherzer as the staff ace.

Jose Quintana, who revitalized his career in Pittsburgh and St. Louis in 2022, signed on as the team’s projected No. 3 starter.

They also resigned center fielder Brandon Nimmo and closer Edwin Diaz, and, of course, made their dramatically fated run at free agent Carlos Correa, who they intended to convert to third base.

The team’s payroll is expected to rise to about $340 million in 2023, a $75 million hike in just one season. To put that into perspective, the Cleveland Guardians last season won the AL Central on a $68 million player payroll.

All those moves further ratcheted up expectations in Queens, where the obvious goal is a World Series victory. That means they also set up the Mets to be the biggest disappointment of 2023.

The roster of ways the New York Mets’ 2023 could go south is extensive enough that falling short of expectations is virtually a given.

But the biggest potential trouble spot has to be the rotation, which Cohen, team president Sandy Alderson and GM Billy Eppler almost completely reworked.

Verlander, Quintana and Japanese free agent Kodai Senga are expected to replace the departed Jacob deGrom, Chris Bassitt and Taijuan Walker at the top of the rotation.

If Mets’ plans blow up, the first reason is almost certain to be regression. Scherzer will be 38 this summer and Verlander will be 40. Both are well past the age when nobody can be surprised by performance declines.

That certainly wasn’t the case for either pitcher in 2022. Verlander won the Cy Young Award on an 18-4, 1.75 ERA, 28-start season for the Houston Astros. Scherzer was 11-5 with a 2.29 ERA in 23 starts for the Mets.

Projecting performance is always a chancy proposition, but eventually Father Time is undefeated. Baseball-Reference offers two methods for projecting what a player will do: similarity scores and Tom Tango’s Marcel Projection System. For purposes of forecasting what a player will do, Tango’s projections are far more useful.

Start with Scherzer. Tango projects him with an 11-6 record and 2.86 ERA in 151 innings in 2023. The record is virtually identical, but the ERA increase exceeds his 2022 performance by a half-point.

Tango projects Verlander to finish 12-5 with a 2.55 ERA in 148 innings in 2023. But that’s a comedown of six victories in 27 fewer innings and a 46 percent increase from his 1.75 ERA.

The other troubling aspect is reliability. Tango puts the reliability of his projections at just 63 percent for Verlander and 74 percent for Scherzer. In both cases, that leaves a lot of room for regression to the mean, which at their respective ages is not good.

In other words, there’s a decent probability that both of the team’s aces underperform expectations.

Quintana’s projections are similarly problematic. His 6-7 record of 2022 does not look good, but his 2.93 ERA in 32 starts does. His 166 innings marked a personal workload high since 2019.

For 2023, he projects to deliver only 140 innings with a 3.73 ERA. That’s a rise of about three-quarters of an earned run per start on about 25 fewer innings. Again, the 69 percent reliability factor of that projection makes it somewhat of a “guess,” and leaves open the possibility of him doing better.

If you add up the projections for those top three starters, they work out to 148 earned runs allowed in 439 innings of effort, a collective 3.03 ERA. The ERA would be an improvement over the 3.61 ERA the Mets’ three most-used pitchers — Bassitt, Walker and Carlos Carrasco — delivered in 2022.

The problem is the workload. That projection only allocates 439 innings of work to that top three, just a 30 percent share of the season-long innings required to get though the season. The top three last year delivered 491 innings, more than 50 more innings.

That’s the least surprising outgrowth of building your staff around even Hall-worthy pitchers if they are pushing age 40.

Senga, the projected fourth starter, has only pitched in Japan, so there are no published comps for what he will do as a rookie here.

The projected fifth starter is Carrasco, who was 15-7 with a 3.97 ERA in 29 starts last year. Tango projects his ERA to rise to 4.12 in 2023 over 10 fewer innings than the 152 he worked in 2022. So that projects to put another strain on the team’s overall workload.

The Mets play in the NL East, a division that has produced the last two National League champions. Competition will be stiff. If the rotation fails to perform up to expectations, Mets fans could be in for a big letdown this season.