On this week’s Public Display of GRIT, we check out this post that some poor guy at Crabapple made about the failings of the 2009 Mets. Considering the Mets’ season, it’s a bit shocking that the post is so short. But Pseubermetrics was born out of an abusive relationship with the Cubs, so we can empathize with the writer’s plight. Your club fields the best group of players that $140 million can buy (or something close to it, hopefully). Then you, Joe Average Fan, invest in that group of millionaires.

You invest your hopes. You invest your dreams. You invest your $5 hot dog habit.

And then, what do those good-for-nothings do in return? They piss it all away. Lose two of three to a bunch of bums from some third world country that make a fraction of what your guys make. It’s an unhealthy relationship dynamic, but what are you going to do? These are the Mets. You can’t outsource the Mets!

We digress from that digression.

Each week we send out the Pseubermetrics web crawler. He’s a cute little guy that looks for “grit.” Well, we sent him out earlier this week and he comes waddling up to the door with this Crabapple post in his mouth. He dropped it on our doorstep like a present. Sometimes he thinks he’s people. It’s adorable. What got his attention?

Hitters…ugh. They need a new 1st baseman, a new catcher, a new left fielder, and maybe even trade Carlos Beltran. The Mets have always worked best with grit. Beltran has no grit. Reyes has grit. Can’t wait for that guy to return to form next season.

Well, the writer is technically correct in that the Mets have very little grit this year. As of August 21st, the Mets had a team GRIT3 total of 0.82. However, 0.82 is actually a pretty sizable amount as far as team GRIT3 totals go. So sizable, in fact, that the Mets are actually third at present.

Regarding Reyes and Beltran, Crabapple has the basic ontology correct, but they forget that GRIT3 can also be negative. Consequently, Beltran doesn’t have “no grit.” He has negative grit. Per the Ongoing Player Totals table, Beltran is the most non-gritty player on the team this year with a GRIT3 of -7.83. A cursory glance at the same table shows that Reyes only “has grit” when compared relative to Beltran’s negative grit. Since going down with injury in May, Reyes has hovered right around 0 for a good part of this season, finding himself with a GRIT3 of -0.44 as of our latest calculation.

So, who does have grit?

For starters, the loss of Reyes provided the Mets with a 2009 NL All-Gritter at shortstop in Alex Cora. He’s sporting a very solid 6.16 as of August 21st. On the flipside of the keystone, Luis Castillo (5.17) has enjoyed a very gritty season in his own right and his pairing with Cora gives the Mets one of the grittier double-play duos in all of baseball.

When you throw in Fernando Tatis (2.96), Daniel Murphy (.85), and Brian Schneider (.59) the Mets — as they did as recently as August 11 — can field an infield entirely of plus-gritty players.

As for the assertion that the Mets “always worked best with grit,” well we checked that out as well. If “worked best” is meant to be interpreted as “won a lot of baseball games”, then the evidence isn’t there to support the conclusion. The Mets haven’t always worked best with grit. In fact, they’ve worked pretty damn awfully when they’ve had grit. Data?

Here’s a table of every Mets season since 1962

As you can see, the more successful years have almost exclusively occurred when the Mets have been non-gritty. This table of summary statistics best illustrates the point.

During “gritty” seasons, the Mets would have averaged a record of 64-98 over 162 games. Even during seasons when their grittiness ran from moderately gritty to moderately non-gritty, the Mets didn’t fare much better, averaging a record of 70-92. However, in the years when the Mets showed signs of serious non-grittiness, they flashed an average record of 84-78. If you were to drill down and divide the seasons into quartiles, you’d find an even more discernible pattern as the least gritty seasons intersect with some of the most successful. And before you go and argue that the 1969 Miracle Mets won a World Series in spite of their grittiness, keep in mind that that team wasn’t winning games thanks to its high-powered offense. A bigger portion of that team’s success was due to its lights-out pitching staff.

The lesson here? Grittiness doesn’t pay. At least not in terms of baseball success. For that, you’d be better served getting some honest to goodness talent. Or pitching.