SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
Conforto may not be solution as Mets’ No. 3 hitter, but his swing will make you watch him
We can’t now just assume that the kid, Michael Conforto, even with that sweet swing of his, stays in the No. 3 hole in the Mets’ batting order for as long as Keith Hernandez did. The Mets hadn’t been hitting across the first two weeks of the season, and there were no tradedeadline reinforcements about to change that fact of things in April, and so Terry Collins batted Conforto third in Cleveland on Friday night and Yoenis Cespedes behind him and the Mets hit and won.
Before that all happened, Collins talked about how the kid has been getting on base, and how if the World Series wasn’t too big a moment for him, batting third against the Indians on a Friday night in Cleveland wasn’t going to be too big, either.
“I saw what he did in the World Series,” is the way Collins put it.
He saw. We all did. Conforto hit two home runs in Game 4 against the Royals, first against Chris Young and then against Danny Duffy. So he’d done what Gary Carter had done in 1986 – the official “Kid” for the Mets, the late, great Hall of Fame Kid – and hit two home runs in a World Series game. Conforto, at 22, had also become the youngest player to hit a home run in a Series game since Miguel Cabrera against the Yankees in 2003, and the first rookie to hit two home runs in a Series game since Andruw Jones had done THAT against the Yankees back in 1996. There was some thought, one year ago, that he might not be ready. But he was, just because there is no official timetable for these things, whether you hit or whether you pitch. Now the best thing about Michael Conforto is he is the first hot kid in the Mets’ batting order since David Wright came along. And if the swing holds up, and he’s as good as he looks before he’s even played 100 games in the big leagues, he becomes one of faces of what the Mets want to be, for a long time, just without a 98 mph fastball. So far, so good. The moment doesn’t turn out to be too big for him the way the New York stage doesn’t seem too big. So far, there is nothing not to like about the way he goes about his business. And when you look back across just the past 20 years in baseball in New York, you see how rare it is to even have a chance for one of our teams to develop a hitter who might last, and might stay. Derek Jeter stayed. Wright stayed. Robinson Cano didn’t, he just comes back for visits, like the one this weekend. Greg Bird is hurt. This season the Yankees import a young guy like Starlin Castro, and we continue to hear about young kids of theirs who are still a year, or two, away. With the Yankees, the young, home-grown star position player is still as unusual as a young, home-grown starting pitcher, something Yankee fans hope Luis Severino can change, also for a long time.
For the Mets, there has been nobody as promising as Conforto since Wright. It has happened fast. He has come from the first round of the 2014 draft to here, with a stop in the postseason of 2015, when he made everybody pay attention to him with those two shots against Young and Duffy, in between. Again: There are never any timetables. There is just the first chance, and then you make it happen or you don’t.
On Friday night, batting third, he came up in the first inning and hit one over 400 feet to center field. There would be three more home runs for the Mets after that, from Cespedes and Neil Walker and Alejandro De Aza. There would be a terrific at-bat for Conforto later, one that finally ended with him pushing a ball towards third against the shift.
“That’s what got us where we (went) last year, the power,” Collins would tell the media when the game was over. “The power is something we have to have. If we hit homers we have a chance to win games.”
There really is no telling of how long this lasts. Even if it doesn’t last with Conforto at No. 3, Mets fans don’t care where the kid hits, as long as he hits. Even if it has only been a handful of games when they haven’t hit in April, when that happens all Mets fans can remember is what it was like before the reinforcements arrived last summer, and there were all those games when you felt as if the New York Rangers scored a lot more than the New York Mets did.
There really is no way of knowing what Conforto, out of Washington state and Oregon State, really is going to be a star, or if he will ever put numbers close to Wright’s in the books for the Mets. For now, you just watch the swing and imagine where it might take him. He was the one hitting behind Wright this weekend, and ahead of Cespedes. He turned 23 in March. It doesn’t happen like this all the time in baseball New York. This is a good thing, maybe great.