Mandatory Credit: Wendell Cruz-USA TODAY Sports

New York Mets outfielder Michael Conforto entered 2021 with a ton of personal momentum. Unfortunately, it’s now safe to assume that his next contract is going to be for a much smaller dollar amount than he and agent Scott Boras were expecting just a few short months ago.

Sure, the 2020 campaign was a truncated 60-game sprint, but Scooter broke through with the kind of offensive performance we had been waiting for since he was called up in 2015. His .193 ISO was a little down from previous years, but it was easy to deal with since he posted a .322/.412/.515 line with 2.0 fWAR and a career-high 157 wRC+ through 233 plate appearances. This year? Well, I don’t really want to write these numbers out, but I kind of have to. Through 277 plate appearances, Conforto has struggled to a .199/.329/.329 line with just six home runs, 24 RBI, and a 91 wRC+, which has led to a 0.1 fWAR.

Disappointing? Oh, yea — you bet. That’s the perfect word to use since it appeared he was snapping out of his season-long funk in the middle of July as New York faced the Pirates and Reds. Outside of a two-hit game on Wednesday night, things have been bad since then. Like, among the worst-in-the-league level of bad. Entering Wednesday’s game in Miami, I noticed these unfortunate truths about Conforto’s recent performance:

About a month ago, I tried figuring out where the 28-year-old’s power had gone. However, his struggles obviously run much deeper than simply looking at his performance in the power department. What’s even more confusing is when looking at some of his peripheral stats and comparing them to the last couple of years, there hasn’t been an overly dramatic shift.

His walk and strikeout rates are within the same ballpark, as are his average exit velocity, launch angle, and barrel rate. There was a spike in line-drive rate and a soon-to-be three-year decline in fly-ball rate, but his batted-ball profile and quality-of-contact numbers are reasonably close to one another. And outside of his contact rate on balls outside the strike zone (57.8% in ’20, 71.7% in ’21) and inside the strike zone (86.8% in ’20, 80.3% in ’21) over the past two years, his plate-discipline numbers aren’t terribly different.

So, what gives? There could be an argument for some misfortune, especially when viewing his current .242 BABIP and how different it is from last year’s .412 mark (and his career mark of .298). But then I started noticing a difference in how opposing hurlers were attempting to get him out.

As I mentioned in my article about Conforto last month, he’s struggled against most pitches when it comes to generating power. Using wRC+ as the barometer, he’s been an above-average performer against four-seam fastballs (116) and sliders (144). The one pitch he’s far-and-away struggled with the most in 2021 is curveballs. Conforto is slashing an anemic .042/.148/.042 with an astronomical 48.1% strikeout rate against that offering, which has yielded a -30 wRC+.

This is a pitch Scooter has historically struggled against (44.3% strikeout rate, 52 wRC+), and while he posted a 42.3% strikeout rate against it in 2020, he still managed to produce a 112 wRC+. If we look at the season-long pitch mix usage from opposing hurlers against Conforto this year, the 11.8% curveball usage won’t look much different than the rest of his career (13.8% in ’20, 11.9% for his career).

There’s been a steady climb in its usage as his lack of performance against this pitch has dragged on throughout this season, though.

This rise in curveball usage is consistent, but not nearly as profound as one would anticipate after seeing just how badly he’s been against it. However, things change a little bit when looking at it during a different time frame. Here’s a look at how curveball usage against Conforto has shifted over the last seven days, 14 days, and 30 days, along with his overall wRC+ during those time periods.

It’s likely an oversimplification to say they’re directly related. Looking at this progression and not thinking they’re not at all related is really hard for me, though. Looking ahead at New York’s schedule for the coming weeks makes me believe that analytically-minded clubs — especially thinking of the Giants and Dodgers — will try to exploit this weakness as much as possible. But before New York has to deal with that gauntlet, they need to take care of business in Philadelphia after squandering a series in Miami and watching their NL East lead shrink to just a half-game.

This series has similar vibes to the three-game set in August of 2015 where the Mets ended up sweeping the Washington Nationals to create a tie for first place before leaving everyone else in their dust. The only problem now is that New York is in the Nats’ spot in this scenario. To avoid the same fate as Washington, things need to start firing on all cylinders. The Mets have at least performed well on offense at Citizens Bank Park over the years, and Conforto has been a part of that — through 212 plate appearances in Philly, he’s slashing .280/.354/.566 with 14 homers and 41 RBI.

If there’s ever been a time for the outfielder to bust out of his slump in a big way, now would be that time. In order to do that, it seems as if he’ll need to find a way to either hit the curveball or at least find a way to hit a different pitch and do some long-awaited damage at the plate.