Carlos Smells

I think I smell, yes, I smell a swing and miss.

Carlos Beltran of the Metropolitans has had more than a disappointing season so far, so I wrote down a couple things I noticed about him....

1) He takes a lot of called third strikes
2) He has had some bad luck at lining out to infielders

Neither of these things is necessarily a very important measure of how he was doing, but just for fun I wanted to see how he ranked against the rest of the league. So I asked my friends at STATS to do the work for me.

Somewhat to my surprize, Beltran's strikeout looking percentage isn't anything special, it's about normal. But Marco Scutaro, as of 5/29, 15 of his 20Ks were looking. Luis Castillo (7 of 14) and Jacoby Ellsbury (12 of 17) had similar high caught looking percentage. On the other end of the spectrum, Carlos Gomez has K'd 51 times and only been caught looking 11 times. Based on what I already know about these hitters, Scutaro, Castillo, and Ellsbury all have an idea of where the strikezone is and probably were hurt by umpire's wide strikezones, while Gomez will take a hack at anything.

Then the lineouts to infielders.... I expected to see Beltran on top of this list, since it seemed like he was lining out every game this week. However, 53 other players have lined out to infielders as many times, or more, than Beltran has in '08. Juan Pierre has been 'robbed' of basehits in this manner a league leading 8 times, Beltran only 5.

*The Mets have now won three in a row and are even starting to catch some breaks,.... like yesterday's catcher's interference that started the two-out rally against Penny.

*Gomez Update (6/2): After watching Carlos Gomez playing against the Stanks this weekend, I miss him being on the Metsies. I have to keep telling myself, "but they got Santana", "it's ok, they got Santana". There was one play where he smelled his bat, then laid down a bunt to Betemit at firstbase and beat it out before the ball was touched. I mean, he got down that line so fast it made that old Mantle legend of his 3.1 time to first look like a fucking disgrace.