It’s starting to look a lot like baseball season for the New York Mets: FanFest is officially in the books, the team has a manager again, and the start of Spring Training is only a couple weeks away. Although Brodie Van Wagenen has publicly stated he’s happy with his club as its currently assembled, the Mets continue to be linked to Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Starling Marte in trade rumors.
Based on how the roster looks at the moment, that’s one of the areas where New York has plenty of options (notwithstanding any players who’d go back to Pittsburgh in a hypothetical deal). The mere fact that Yoenis Cespedes appears to be healthy and ready to participate in baseball stuff once Spring Training gets underway could prove to be enough of a roster crunch to deal with.
Throughout most of our Mets fandom, we’ve been conditioned to not expect the best-case scenario to necessarily come to fruition. But what if it does? What if Cespedes comes into camp healthy, looks great, and is still with the organization come Opening Day (as much as New York reportedly doesn’t want that to happen)?
When looking back at what’s happened since Cespedes signed what was a four-year, $110 million deal, the chances of him being and remaining both healthy and productive is a big if — especially as a 34-year-old. Crazier things have happened, though.
The Mets have done a good of at least having a number of capable outfield options available and by no means are counting on Cespedes to simply return to form (something that would’ve been part of the plan in the not-too-distant past). However, if he’s on the roster and ready to go come March 26th against the Washington Nationals, it’s not like he’ll just be sitting on the sidelines. At the very least, Luis Rojas will find a way to get him into the lineup on some kind of rotation with the other pieces he has to play with.
We all remember what he told Eduardo Perez, too — Cespedes not only wants to hit 40-50 home runs in 2020, he also wants to play in 140-plus games. Although there are questions to come with his health and age, it’s at least a pace he’s proven to keep up in the recent past. Between 2015 and 2018, his 162-game average includes 95 runs scored, 104 RBI, and 37 home runs.
So, as I sit here and dream about baseball season starting because I’ve tired of winter for a while now, I couldn’t help but wonder the possibilities if the best-case scenario for Cespedes does come true. It’d be difficult to deal with from a personnel perspective, but if the Mets felt at all confident about him going out there and being the force that he was prior to all his injuries, it’s not like they won’t take it in a heartbeat.
I already talked about how Pete Alonso, Michael Conforto, and Jeff McNeil are projected to once again be a productive trio this season. With that already in mind, I wanted to look at things through the lens of dingers. Alonso and Conforto are projected to surpass the 30-homer plateau in 2020, which is something they each accomplished last year. It got me wondering whether the Mets have ever had multiple players with 30-plus homers in a single season on more than one occasion, and also whether they ever had three do it at once.
As it turns out, New York has watched two position players (that qualified for the batting title) each post 30-plus dingers in a single season on eight occasions: 1987 (Darryl Strawberry, Howard Johnson), 1996 (Todd Hundley, Bernard Gilkey), 1999 (Mike Piazza, Robin Ventura), 2006 (Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado), 2007 (Beltran, David Wright), 2008 (Wright, Delgado), 2016 (Cespedes, Curtis Granderson), and 2019 (Alonso, Conforto). Despite all those occurrences, it’s happened in consecutive years once (2006-08) and never by more than two in a single season.
A healthy Cespedes would give the Mets an incredibly powerful middle of the order with the potential to do something the organization has never seen during a single year. And even with the unreal barrage of homers last year, there were only seven clubs that boasted at least three teammates hitting 30-plus homers each. Five of those seven — the Houston Astros, Oakland Athletics, Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Minnesota Twins — made the playoffs (the other two were the Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies).
Having a handful of power hitters collecting bunches of homers doesn’t automatically punch a ticket to October, but it doesn’t hurt. It can be easy to forget exactly how much Cespedes carried the Mets’ offense in 2015 and 2016 when he was on the field because the organization has been through a bit since then.
When healthy, though, he was so fun to watch. I’ve been getting more and more excited with every update I see, and I’m hoping he arrives in Port St. Lucie and gives New York no choice but to hold onto him. While it may make some daily decisions harder for Rojas, this would be a great problem to have. Cespedes doesn’t seem like the kind of player that’ll ride off silently into the night, so I’m very interested to see how he looks in Spring Training.
Who knows, maybe the best-case scenario will come true and he’ll be part of a powerful trio for the Mets this summer.
