Major League Baseball’s GM meetings in Phoenix, Arizona has allowed us to get more of an idea behind what Brodie Van Wagenen and the New York Mets may have planned for this winter. Among the things on the club’s wish list in advance of 2020 is to find a right-handed hitting center fielder that’ll enable Brandon Nimmo and Michael Conforto to remain in the corner outfield positions.

While the option of spending at the top of the free-agent market is always there, it seems as if the Mets will be needing to get more creative in order to make things work how they’d like. With this in mind, that could mean a big-league player or two could get traded away in order to fill a weakness elsewhere on the roster.

Would Conforto be a potential casualty of that? For the moment, at least, BVW mentioned it’d be hard to send a player like Scooter packing for another city. The one part of his answer that stuck out to me, though, is Van Wagenen saying the following (via SNY):

His consistency has been remarkable. His ceiling as a player is something that I don’t think we’ve even seen yet.

As Conforto prepares to enter his age-27 campaign, there are three areas of his offensive game that helps solidify exactly what Van Wagenen said.

Consistent on a Monthly Basis in 2019

I touched on Conforto’s consistency back in August, but the focus there was more about his entire Mets career — not this past season specifically.

The outfielder’s 2018 season was marred by a slow start in the first half because he came back too soon from shoulder surgery. Since this past March/April, though, his wRC+ and ISO numbers have mostly been consistent, and they’ve mostly been above average.

When looking at Conforto’s monthly wRC+ breakdown, his performance was well above-average for the majority of 2019. He had his peaks and valleys just like any other player. However, this kind of consistency allowed him to sometimes fly under the radar a bit, especially when some other Mets hitters — you know, like Pete Alonso, Jeff McNeil, J.D. Davis, or Amed Rosario — got a little extra hot.

This is part of what makes him such a valuable asset to this offense. Every team needs a hitter in the middle of the lineup that can be consistently productive and not completely fall off the map for an extended period of time. With Conforto getting the majority of his plate appearances in the three- and four-hole in 2019, that’s precisely what he brought to the table for New York.

Improving Plate Discipline

Conforto has shown discipline at the plate for the majority of his young career, and especially since his first full season in 2016. The 26-year-old has produced at least a 13.0% walk rate in each of his last three seasons, which has ranked within the top 25 among qualified hitters in both 2018 and 2019. While he’s been keeping that up, his strikeout rate has gone from 25.7% to 24.9% to 23.0% since the start of 2017.

He’s managed to accomplish this despite opposing pitchers throwing first-pitch strikes at an increasing rate, along with throwing pitches in the strike zone with less frequency. Here’s a look at how those two numbers have changed over the past three seasons:

Even though his contact rates haven’t seen a huge change during this period of time, his aggressiveness has improved. Conforto’s chase rate has remained steady from 26-27% since the start of 2017, while his swing rate on strikes has gone up steadily from 63.7% to 72.4%.

His contact rate on balls inside and outside the strike zone actually went opposite directions when looking at his results over the last two years. The key, though, is to continue improving the quality of his contact, which he did a good job of in 2019.

Batted-Ball and Quality-of-Contact Trends

Let’s cut to the chase here — below is a table that shows how Conforto’s batted-ball events and quality-of-contact numbers have changed over the time period we’ve been referencing:

Although his hard-hit rate still hasn’t matched the number he produced in 2017, that soft-hit rate has gone down considerably. When combining that with more line drives, fewer ground balls, more fly balls, and less pop-ups, good stuff is bound to happen.

From the perspective of fWAR, Conforto has yet to surpass the 4.4 he put up in that All-Star campaign of ’17, but he’s been trending in the right direction in each of the last two years (3.0 and 3.7). His consistency has helped in building an impressive overall body of work with the counting stats to prove it. He’s also been quietly making improvements in his game that are yielding results.

Van Wagenen is right — we still haven’t seen his ceiling as a player. It’ll be awesome if he can continue to get closer to whatever that looks like in 2020 as a mainstay in the Mets’ lineup.