Right before everything shut down, we all got word that Michael Conforto tweaked his right oblique, throwing is Opening Day start into jeopardy.
That feels like a lifetime ago, right?
Almost lost in Pete Alonso’s amazing rookie year, Jacob deGrom’s back to back Cy Youngs and Jeff McNeil’s arrival as one of the better hitters in baseball was Michael Conforto. Conforto, very quietly, had a good year on offense hitting over 30 homers, getting on base over a .360 clip and slugging nearly .500.
According to Baseball Prospectus he was 22% better than the average hitter last year, which is very, very good. (A couple of years ago Nimmo had the best ranking in that stat on the whole team).
2019 Stats: 648 PA, 549 AB, 33 HR, .257/.363/.494, 3.5 WAR, 122 DRC+
It looks like computer projections have Conforto putting up practically the same season, especially where it counts in OBP and SLG. A consistent Conforto is the backbone of this team and at some point the Mets are going to need to lock him up on a long term deal. As we have discussed with each article in this series so far, we can’t look at the raw homer numbers, we have no idea how many games will be played in 2020 (but a 30-34 homer season if Conforto was given the chance to play would just be *chef’s kiss*).
The only question is will the rest of the league recognize Conforto for what he is. He’s only been named to one All-Star game, 2017, but if he puts up the numbers he did last year again like the consensus of projections show, then he should be in the All-Star game every single year.
(Citations: BP projections come from the Baseball Prospectus Annual, a must read for all baseball fans and can be purchased here. ESPN comes from their fantasy baseball projections and can be found here. Both ZiPS and Steamer are found on FanGraphs. ZiPS can be found here, Steamer can be found here. BR comes from the Baseball Reference for this specific player and is linked earlier in the article)
