New York Mets 2012: Lucas Duda Necessary to Provide Spark in Starting Roster

Lucas Duda has been the single most important player on the New York Mets this season not named David Wright.

Baseball is a game that rewards patience. Perhaps that’s a downfall to its own popularity: modern generations of consumers want action, and they do not want to wait for their gratification.

So when fans saw Lucas Duda, 26, come out of the gates sluggishly to begin the MLB season in 2012, disappointment spread like a wildfire. His fantasy owners and fans of the New York Mets alike were upset to see his inconsistency, despite recognizing his potential as a sleeper coming into the season. His power is too strong to ignore, and everyone who knew this waited on every at-bat for the flying ball to soar through the air and land in the stands.

Alas, nothing in the sport is more gratifying than the glory of watching the slugger take his slow trot around the base path following his home run. Luckily for Duda, that’s something that he is extraordinary at.

With as many home runs as 2011 NL MVP Ryan Braun, his bomb on April 28^th marked four for the season, giving him one more than teammate David Wright. So maybe there is something substantial with this Lucas Duda kid after all. We want him to be the slugger in the middle of the Mets line-up. We want him to provide support for David Wright in the absence of Jose Reyes. We want him to capitalize on the moved-in fences at Citi Field. And most of all, we want him to provide offensive cushions so that we can see R.A. Dickey become the first knuckle-ball pitcher to ever win Cy Young award honors.

Duda was having trouble seeing the ball to begin this season, and many considered the fact that the infamous sophomore slump had reared its ugly head on the young slugger. By the time that Duda had finished the first two series of the season, his on-base percentage was a measly .179 and of his three hits, two of them came from homeruns that were product of an extraordinarily powerful bat. Besides big hits, he simply wasn’t getting on base.

But baseball is a game about patience. That’s what a 162-game season will do to a professional athlete. If you’re going to give up in April, perhaps you might want to find a different sport more enduring to your sanity.

At the lowest point of his season to date, he came out of his slump against the Phillies and hit 2-for-4 against Vance Worley on April 14^th. Including a home run and a double, drove in two runs and scored once.

Doubters confirm their beliefs: he is inconsistent, and he needs to provide more offense to make up for his abysmal defense. FanGraphs.com shows that his Ultimate Zone Rating was an -11.8 on the field last season, and this season he has recorded a -7.2 According to BaseballThinkingFactory.org, the UZR is “designed to measure and quantify only that skill which enables a fielder to turn batted balls into outs.”

So if he’s a liability on the field, what can he do?

With more help from FanGraphs.com, we can look at some of his advanced hitting metrics to help analyze his success this season. The statistic that is most telling of this for Lucas Duda is Weighted Runs Created Plus (WRC+), which measures how a player’s weighted runs created compares with league average. League average, in this statistic, is always measured at 100. Each point above 100 is a percentage point above the league average.

This season, Duda has a WRC+ of 123. That means that his run production is 23% better than the rest of the league, which is considered to be “excellent” by the standards of FanGraphs.com.

At 123 WRC+, Duda is performing at a level exactly consistent with Prince Fielder (who signed a 9-year, $214 million contract this off-season), Alex Rodriguez (who is making a 10-year, $275 million contract with the New York Yankees) and Adrian Gonzalez (7-year, $175 million) despite the fact that his annual salary, $497K, is only a small fraction of what they are making.

Why does Lucas Duda create runs at such an exceptional level?

While much of this can be attributed to his unique power ability, he can also thank his teammate, David Wright. This season, Wright has been an absolute machine when it has come to getting on base.

Wright, whose weighted on-base average (wOBA) is .424, has one of the best averages in the MLB, and is top five in the National League. wOBA, which combines all of the different aspects of hitting into one metric, weighing each of them in proportion to their “run value” or likelihood of scoring. Any average above .400 is considered to be excellent.

Duda benefits from the strength that Wright adds to the line-up, because if no one is there to drive him in, than Wright’s efforts are fruitless.

Wright is an elite player for the New York Mets, but Lucas Duda provides a necessary secondary punch to the roster. Fortunately, Duda has been heating up since April 21^st. He has recorded a hit and a run in six of his last eight games, and has raised his on-base percentage from .255 to .337 in the last week on the heels of four multi-hit games.

Yesterday, Duda hit his first homerun since April 14^th and drove in four runs in a winning effort against the Colorado Rockies.

Fans that are relying on Duda’s power will also be pleased to learn that the shorter fences at Citi Field have been benefiting him thus far, as he has improved his homerun to fly ball ratio from his career average of 11.3% to a much more impressive 18.2% this season. That means that almost twice as many of the fly balls that he has hit this season have turned into home runs, and if he can keep that rate up, he will continue to see much professional success.

“The balls are falling," Duda told Mets.com. "Luck's kind of going my way right now."

With Jason Bay on the DL, Duda has taken much of the responsibility on the offensive side of the ball in Queens. He continues to get on base, continues to drive in runs and continues to keep this team relevant while the rest of the team either slumps (Ike Davis), has yet to seen much real-time experience (Kirk Nieuwenhuis) or is injured (Jason Bay).

Duda, a player built for the advanced mind of Billy Beane circa the years of Moneyball, must channel his inner-Bill James and continue to provide the New York Mets with the success that they have seen so far. With their winning record (13-9), the Mets are one game out of first place in the NL East and look to take their April success and continue it for the remainder of the 2012 MLB season.

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