Free Link to Mets360: Brooks Raley v. Drew Smith, the combined misery of Brett Baty and Starling Marte, playing time and days off

By Brian Joura

We all hope that David Stearns will add another arm or two to the bullpen. But whether he does or not, one thing that we hope that Stearns and/or Carlos Mendoza will do is to utilize Brooks Raley as a true setup man, rather than the lefty specialist that it seemed Buck Showalter wanted Raley to be. He’s simply a better pitcher than Drew Smith, who some may want to see in that primary setup role, instead. Let’s take a look at what these two pitchers gave the Mets last season. The Low, Med and Hi columns will be how they did in situations with that type of leverage according to Baseball-Reference:

Player	Lo PA	OPS	Med PA	OPS	Hi PA	OPS	vs RHP	OPS	vs LHP	OPS
Raley	82	.708	73	.684	81	.554	130	.583	106	.728
Smith	112	.680	72	.911	60	.829	142	.777	102	.800

Raley was simply better last year in every category, except for low-leverage situations. And it’s not like last year was some outlier for Smith. Here are his career marks in the three leverage categories:

Lo: 408 PA, .639 OPS
Med: 173 PA, .863 OPS
Hi: 164 PA, .853 OPS

Click here to continue reading.