Jerad Eickhoff was bad, but he’s not the one to blame

Whether you saw it with your own eyes or simply read the box scores after the fact, it was very clear that Jerad Eickhoff’s 2021 season with the Mets was a failure in almost every imaginable way.

All together, Eickhoff pitched 19.2 innings in the orange and blue, and in that time, he gave up 30 hits, 19 earned runs, nine home runs, 10 walks, and only 13 strikeouts. According to Baseball-Reference he was worth -1.0 WAR as a pitcher while FanGraphs gives him a 30% more generous -0.7 WAR. One bright spot is that Eickhoff’s fielding independent pitching was 9.78, so his 8.69 ERA is actually a pretty solid outcome.

In his one season and three separate tenures with the Mets, Eickhoff made five…