Dear John Olerud*

I’ve been working on a massive post about a movie I recently re-watched and have a bunch of new thoughts on, but please indulge me with a post about a topic even more dear to my heart. You guessed it, that means another Mets post!

For the first time in a while I’m actually sort of feeling good about the Mets. For starters, they’re playing pretty well, and they are 5-1 in games I’ve attended this year, including Tuesday’s late-inning comeback against the Braves. (Yes, I’ve already been to six games. What of it?) Additionally, I am in the midst of reading “Faith And Fear In Flushing,” written by Greg Prince, who also writes a blog of the same name. Prince has a gift for making even the most loathsome and irritating Mets team seem somewhat loveable, and this book is highly enjoyable for any obsessive Mets fan.

When I was at the game on Friday, I was talking to my friend about a trivia question I saw on Joe Posnanski’s blog. Who has the highest career OPS as Mets (minimum 2,000 plate appearances)?

Like me, you’re first answer is probably Mike Piazza. And, like me, you’d be wrong. The answer, much to my surprise, is John Olerud. For obvious reasons, this got me doing some research on Olerud and the Mets.

For starters, the top five Mets OPS (min. 2,000 PAs) looks like this.

1. John Olerud .926
2. David Wright .921
3. Mike Piazza .915
4. Darryl Strawberry .879
5. Carlos Beltran .877

When you think about it a bit, this makes sense. Remember, John Olerud only spent three years with the Mets, and it was during what is typically the tail end of a player’s peak (age 28-30). Unlike Piazza, he was never around for his decline phase to drag down his OPS. If you take Piazza’s first three full years as a Met, which were, not coincidentally, his three best years, he had an OPS of .967.

Piazza isn’t really the point of all this. The point is that I think most Mets have forgotten just how good Olerud was for the Mets. More specifically, I think they’ve forgotten just how good Olerud was in 1998.

Most fans associate 1998 with Sosa and McGwire, the year we all fell back in love with baseball after the strike. In reality, it was the summer of Olerud. Did you remember that Olerud hit .354 that summer? I didn’t. Did you remember that he walked 96 times and struck out 73 times? I didn’t? Did you remember that his .447 OBP was second only to McGwire in all of baseball, higher than Bonds, and 70 points higher than Sosa? I definitely did not remember that.

In fact, Olerud’s adjusted OPS, which is a stat that that adjusts for home park and compares it to league average, was 163 (100 is average), and Sosa’s was 160. In the year that Sosa hit 66 homers and won NL MVP, Olerud had a higher adjusted OPS! How did I not know this?

And on top of all that, Olerud finished 12th in MVP voting! And this was for a team that was in contention until the last day of the season. I realize we have become far more savvy to the importance of OBP and park factors in the last 11 years (or at least I have), but that’s absurd. Then again, Sosa won MVP in a landslide, and I’m pretty sure I wrote a column in my college saying he should. Based on what I know now, McGwire was clearly a lot more valuable. And Olerud might have been as well.

*Prior to the season, I named my fantasy baseball team "Dear John Olerud." This was before I made my Olerud OPS revelation. Now I feel even better about my team name.