Mets team build before and after 2023 was wildly different, and one of the most obvious ways that manifested was in the outfield. Coming into 2023, the Mets had Brandon Nimmo, Mark Canha, a hopefully healthy Starling Marte, and Tommy Pham waiting in the wings as a fourth outfielder. By the season’s end, Pham and Canha were gone, Marte had spent a majority of the season injured (and below average when on the field), and DJ Stewart and Rafael Ortega had gotten quite a bit of playing time over the course of August and September. a propensity for hitting lefties (which the Mets have been lacking in recent years).
Now, there’s no way around it–when Bader played last year, his bat was borderline unplayable. In 84 games with the Yankees, he hit .240/.278/.365 with just 7 home runs, good for a 76 wRC+ and 1.3 fWAR. In Cincinnati, in a much smaller sample size of 14 games, he hit an abysmal .161/.235/.194 with a 15(!) wRC+ and being worth -0.2 fWAR. The only reason his fWAR wasn’t fully negative is the fact that he was still an elite center fielder–when he took the field. 9 OAA in a season where he was hurt a lot of the time is genuinely mind boggling.
And he’s always been that good of a defender. Over the course of his career, Bader has been worth 66 OAA, with 59 of those being in centerfield, which is one of the premium defensive positions. For context, that makes him the tenth best in OAA in the span of the stats history (2016-present), beaten only by the likes of Francisco Lindor (who has been the best over that span), Nolan Arenado, and Kevin Kiermaier. Notably, Harrison Bader wasn’t called up until the second year of OAA tracking, and that year he only played in 32 games. And the two players just ahead of him, Jonathan Schoop and Lorenzo Cain, are unsigned and retired respectively, meaning he will probably continue to climb that list this season.
The other piece about Bader’s player profile is, while the topline numbers aren’t always the greatest, when you look at his splits, he kills lefties. In limited playing time last year, he hit .299/.361/.575, good for a 153 wRC+. Over his career those numbers drop slightly to .262/.330/.494, which totals a still great 121 wRC+. For context, the Mets as a whole last season batted .237/.310/.398 against lefties. So in that area, Bader represents a massive upgrade for the lineup as a whole.
As always, though, the biggest issue when it comes to Bader’s ability to contribute in a meaningful way is his health. Over the last three seasons, Bader has been placed on the injured list seven times. And while some of them were random injuries, like a rib fracture in 2021, more often than not they were strains of various body parts, whether it be the groin, hamstring, or oblique. So the Mets will have to attempt to load-manage Bader’s playing time to keep him healthy throughout the season.
They should have the depth to be able to do this, with Tyrone Taylor on the bench, DJ Stewart somewhere either on the bench or in the minors, and Jeff McNeil having the ability to move to a corner spot and move Nimmo to center. The Mets also have Drew Gilbert waiting in the wings, and he will probably be ready to come up somewhat early in the season. But the load-management ability becomes more difficult when Nimmo is also prone to injury, and Marte has been looking less than stellar over the course of spring training.
The Mets found a player who should be able to provide stellar centerfield defense and hit well against lefties, which should help the Mets outfield in a way they sorely needed after the string of issues they encountered last season. But if he struggles as the plate as he did last season, or runs into injury problems as he historically has, Harrison Bader could create more issues than he solves.
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