Conforto return couldn’t have gone much better than this
WASHINGTON — The hardest part was keeping the bat out of his hands across all the mind-numbing weeks of rest and rehab.
Michael Conforto has wanted to be a major league hitter his whole life — and that has always meant just as many swings in January as in July, just as many hours logged in a batting cage, fine-tuning the swing, refining it, shaping it.
“All those hours,” he said, grinning, “and I had to find other things to do to occupy the time. That was the tough part. I played video games. I spent more time with friends. That was nice. But I missed hitting. I missed that a lot.”
That was, of course, the profound irony of what happened to Conforto on Aug. 24, when he took one of his textbook-perfect, sweet-as-a-strawberry swings at a Robbie Ray fastball and quickly contorted in agony. He’d torn the posterior capsule in his shoulder doing something that came as natural to him as blinking, or breathing.
“Suddenly,” he said, “you realize just how much you love what you do. When you can’t do it … it’s awful.”
This was just one of the things swirling in Conforto’s mind as he made a pass at a 97 mph Stephen Strasburg fastball with two outs in the top of the f ifth inning Thursday, the Mets and Nationals tied at 2-2, Kevin Plawecki taking a lead off second base. In truth, his heart was a jumble of emotions, too.
It had been 224 days since Conforto had swung his bat in a big-league game, and at first it hadn’t gone well: Strasburg struck him out on three pitches leading off the game, overwhelming Conforto, and had induced a double-play grounder his second time up. Now, Strasburg was ahead 1-and-2. He tried to put Conforto away.
Conforto swung, and made solid contact, and knew. He wasn’t quite sure where it would land — it turns out nobody knew
for sure for a while — but he knew he’d gotten enough to vault the ball over Adam Eaton’s head in left, knew he had given the Mets their first lead of the afternoon.
“Pretty fired up,” he admitted. “I saw someone in scoring position and I was excited to be in position to help the team. And I put a good swing on it.”
He was also given a little extra time to gather his thoughts, standing on second base while the umpires consulted with New York about whether the ball had carried over the top of the fence before bouncing back into play. It had. The last part of the journey was a 180-foot dream ride. Welcome back, kid. “What he did, that’s extremely difficult,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway would say later, when this 8-2 Mets win was complete. “It shows what kind of talent he is. It’s fun to watch.”
What’s more fun for the skipper is realizing what Conforto’s return to the batting order could mean over the long haul. He wasn’t the only power source on the afternoon. Yoenis Cespedes tied the game at 2 with a 2-iron blast off Strasburg in the fourth; Jay Bruce salted the game away with a grand slam off Brandon Kintzler in the seventh.
“What I think he does is add a whole other level of anxiety for the other team,” Callaway said. “As a guy who was a pitching coach, when you’re preparing for a team you have to pay attention to a guy like him. And you back him up with the other guys we have …”
As much hope as Conforto’s return rep-
resents for the 2018 Mets, he was as much a symbol for all that went wrong in 2017 as anyone. He was one of the few reasons to watch the Mets by Aug. 24 after making his first All-Star Game, after assembling a slash line of .279/.384/.555, smacking 27 homers in 373 at-bats. For the longest time, May 1 was his targeted return date, and the way things go around the Mets, you wondered if that was a little on the ambitious side.
Yet there he was, batting leadoff on April 5.
And there he was, getting the biggest hit of the day as the Mets landed the season’s first uppercut in their 19-chapter serial with the Nationals.
“A lot of long hours,” he said, shaking his head. “A lot of hard work, a lot of patience.” He smiled. “Worth it,” he said. The Mets couldn’t possibly agree more.