This weekend my brother, who I haven’t seen in nearly two years, was in town visiting. We were watching the Mets game Saturday night and he made some comments about Jon Niese that caught my ear. Essentially, he said that he keeps waiting for Niese to take the next step but that with all of the pitching the Mets have in the pipeline, he’s okay if he doesn’t get any better, as he’ll be the best fifth starter in the league.

Meanwhile, last night Niese hurled a Quality Start for the seventh time in his last eight games. It’s not so much that Niese needs to get better but rather that we need to have a better appreciation for what he’s actually delivered. While the second part of my brother’s statement above is/would be true, let’s take a look at Niese to see what he’s actually delivered in the 2014 season.

He’s ranked 29th in the NL in innings with 182.1 – making him a low-end SP#2. He ranks 34th in ERA with his 3.50 mark – making Niese a high-end SP#3. Finally, he checks in 44th in fWAR with a 1.4 mark, making him a low-end SP#3. Outside of 2011, Niese has never had a great FIP, the main pitching input for fWAR.

In that 2011 season, Niese had his best strikeout year ever, posting a 7.89 K/9. He averaged 90.6 with his fastball velocity that season. Flash forward to 2014 and Niese has a 6.61 K/9 and an 88.5 average fastball velocity. A two mile-per-hour drop in velocity is a big deal and likely the main reason he no longer racks up big strikeout totals on a regular basis.

But for the most part, Niese has adapted well to this velocity loss. He has less room for error now and location is even more important than ever. Shortly after the All-Star break, Niese was catching too much plate with his pitches and batters were teeing off on him. In a four-start stretch beginning July 21st, Niese was 0-4 with a 5.76 ERA, as batters notched a .361 BABIP and an .873 OPS against him.

Recall that was right after he came back from a DL stint with inflammation of the A/C joint. Prior to the trip to the disabled list, Niese had a 2.96 ERA and batters had a .673 OPS against him and after that rough stretch, Niese has pitched to a 3.50 ERA and a .772 OPS. The numbers for the current stretch are being distorted by his bad outing in Miami four starts ago. In his last three games, Niese has a 2.14 ERA and a .676 OPS against – which almost perfectly matches what he was doing the first half of the season.

We all love the guys who give us the Cholula readings on the radar gun and the ones who have the hitters doing the walk of shame back to the dugout after failing to put the bat on the ball. And Niese simply isn’t going to be able to compete with the Jacob deGroms and Zack Wheelers of the world in this department.

Yet it’s hard not to notice that Niese and Wheeler are neck-and-neck when it comes to ERA, with Wheeler holding a 0.01 edge in the category. Most of us are excited about Wheler because he’s young, he throws hard and he’s displayed great improvement after his first nine starts of the year. But after 180+ innings for both guys, their output as judged by ERA is virtually identical.

The stretch right after the All-Star break was discouraging. But Niese has rebounded from that to once again become the pitcher we’ve been accustomed to seeing the last several years. He doesn’t have to take a step forward – we just have to properly value what we have right now. It’s possible Niese gets dealt in the offseason and if he does, well, you generally have to give up something good to get something good in return.

And if Niese is back in the 2015 rotation for the Mets, let’s hope he pitches just as well as he did this year and just as well as he has since 2010. In his career, Niese has had just one “big” year in terms of decisions, when he went 13-9 in 2012. If you look at his IP and ERA that year and 2014, you’ll notice they’re very similar. How different the perception of Niese would be if he was 11-9 right now instead of 9-11. Let’s not put too much weight on his 2014 record when evaluating Niese and perhaps we can all appreciate him a little more.

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