Recently Larry Smith listed three areas of concern for the 2016 Mets. They were: The injury bug, big-money Yoenis Cespedes and a leaky defense. Here’s what he said about the last one:

But the Mets seem to punt defense at every opportunity. The concern here is that the up-the-middle defense may be so bad that it will cost the team enough games to drop a division winner into a wild card team. Or the D could cost the team a playoff spot altogether.

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With Juan Lagares likely relegated to backup status, there’s not one starter on the team who is a glove-first player. To which I say, “Woo-Hoo!” Having watched too many guys like Doug Flynn or Bud Harrelson or Roy Staiger, who were wizards with the glove but as helpful with a bat in their hand as Shelley Duvall in “The Shining,” give me the hitter every time.

Of course just because you’re good with the bat in your hand doesn’t mean you have to be a zero with the glove. Ryne Sandberg won nine straight Gold Glove Awards while being a feared hitter. Meanwhile, the 2015 Mets utilized poor fielders at 2B and SS, replaced them both in the offseason and it’s a question mark if they’ve improved at all defensively at the middle infield slots.

Neil Walker has slightly better defensive numbers than Daniel Murphy. But how much of that was due to the shifting and defensive positioning of the Pirates compared to the Mets? And no one thinks Wilmer Flores is an MLB SS. But they replaced him with a guy who has a track record of being awful at the position. However slim the hope, Flores might have improved. With Asdrubal Cabrera, we’re left hoping for a single-season fluke.

But here’s the thing. Even with poor infield guys up the middle in 2015, the Mets won 90 games. We’ve been told over and over again how important it is for these guys to make plays and get two outs on double play balls. According to Andy McCarron the 2015 Mets finished 25th in double plays, which is simply not good. Yet three of the four teams who finished behind them finished over .500 and the one team that didn’t, the Rays, finished 80-82.

McCarron claimed to get his numbers from Baseball-Reference but I’m not sure what he used. FanGraphs shows team defensive double plays and the numbers are different. You would expect there to be a few more overall DPs than GDPs but FG has more than twice as many than the numbers McCarron uses. Be that as it may, the Mets finished tied for 21st in DPs. Seven of the eight teams that finished below the Mets were over .500 for the year, including five teams that made the playoffs.

If you want to have a lot of DPs, it’s more important to have a pitching staff give up a lot of hits, rather than defensive wizards in the field.

The individual defensive numbers of the 2016 Mets will likely not improve over the 2015 team. But is it possible that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? However bad the Mets were individually last year, on a team basis they weren’t bad at all. Without a doubt, some of this is due to their pitching staff. But the staff should be even better in 2016, so it’s hard to see why we should dismiss or discount the pitchers contributing this way again.

Baseball Prospectus has a stat they call Defensive Efficiency (DE), which they describe as “the rate at which balls put into play are converted into outs by a team’s defense.” In 2015 the Rockies had the worst DE in the majors with a 0.682 mark and the best mark was the 0.721 mark of the Blue Jays. The Mets’ DE ranked eighth overall, with a 0.712 mark. BP also has a park adjusted DE and the Mets finished third in the majors in this ranking.

UZR, the defensive statistic we usually cite here, had the 2015 Mets ranked 14th overall with a 6.3 team rating. The White Sox brought up the rear with a (-39.5) team UZR. And before you say that was because of Lagares, recall that Lagares did not have anywhere near the defensive season last year that he did his first two years in the league. He finished with a 3.5 UZR. Meanwhile, for the sake of completion, DRS showed the Mets’ team defense to be below average.

But what about Cespedes? In his brief time with the Mets, Cespedes had a 3.8 UZR in LF and a (-3.2) in CF. Scaling that number to a full season, Cespedes had a (-14) UZR/150 in the position the Mets expect to play him the majority of the time in 2016. Surely, that’s a concern.

Actually, it’s not that big of one. FanGraphs has a positional adjustment of 10 runs between LF and CF. In a small sample in 2015, Cespedes had a much bigger difference, as he was an outstanding LF with a 22.2 UZR/150. His adjustment was 3.5X bigger. But there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, it was a small sample. In the majors, Cespedes hasn’t typically been that good in LF as he was last year. For his career, he has a 13.9 UZR/150 in LF. And the other thing to keep in mind is that Cespedes hadn’t played CF at all before joining the Mets in 2015 and had played only 35 innings at the position in 2014.

So, if there’s a 10 run differential between LF and CF and Cespedes is a true talent 13.9 UZR/150 in LF, then we would expect him to be 3.9 in CF by that metric. Last year Lagares had a 4.1 UZR/150.

Of course this is speculation using averages and career norms. As Lagares himself showed us, there is a lot of volatility in year-to-year defensive numbers. Chances are it won’t be that neat and tidy. While it’s likely that Lagares would put up better numbers in 2016 than he did in 2015, the simple fact is what he did in 2015 is not up for debate. With a less than stellar defensive season from their Gold Glove CF, the Mets were middle of the pack in both DE and team UZR last year.

Cespedes doesn’t have to match what Lagares did in 2013 or 2014. Instead, he merely needs to be within shouting range of what Lagares did last year for the Mets to repeat their defensive rankings from a year ago. The Mets won 90 games with their 2015 defensive numbers. We expect both the offense and pitching to be better than a year ago, so as long as the defense doesn’t crater from what the team received in 2015, regardless of which defensive system you prefer, it’s hard to imagine it being something that could sink the season.

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