While the 2019 MLB season will go down as a disappointment for the New York Mets since it didn’t end in a trip to October baseball, they certainly appear to have a solid nucleus of young players in place moving forward on the position player side of the house. The most obvious ones include Michael Conforto, Pete Alonso, and Jeff McNeil, along with Amed Rosario taking a huge step forward in his development throughout the last six months.

One player that mostly seemed to be an unknown at the big-league level who also added his name to this list, though? That’d be J.D. Davis. After getting acquired by New York last winter, he entered 2019 with just 181 plate appearances and -0.5 fWAR in the MLB. He boasted some minor-league success, but hadn’t put things together just yet at the next level (likely because he hadn’t gotten good enough of an opportunity to do so).

All Davis did this year as he split his time between third base and left field was post a .305/.369/.527 line with 22 home runs, 57 RBI, a 136 wRC+, and 2.4 fWAR in 453 plate appearances.

One of the more concerning parts of his game heading into his first year with the Mets was how high his ground-ball rate had been throughout parts of two seasons with the Houston Astros despite limited action (60.5% in ’17, 50.0% in ’18). It as nice to see that number continue on a downward trend in 2019 with a 47.0% mark, but it still settled in noticeably higher than the league average of 42.9%. And even though this year’s sample size is much bigger than 2018, Davis’ overall contact rate (72.3% to 74.4%) and contact rate on strikes (79.0% to 78.4%) didn’t change all that much.

So with that in mind, it was imperative for him to make the most of the contact he was making, and more specifically, the batted-ball events that didn’t result in ground balls. His season-long stat line suggests he accomplished that goal, and the peripherals check out, as well. Here’s a look at how his batted-ball profile improved in certain areas between 2018 and 2019:

There don’t appear to be many huge changes outside of looking at Davis’ quality of contact. However, a crucial piece of the puzzle to such a successful year was cutting his infield-fly rate so much, which goes hand-in-hand with the rise in hard-hit rate.

When we break the numbers down by batted-ball event, it becomes even more clear how Davis maximized the contact he made this year compared to his final go-round with the Astros. Here’s a look at his performance on fly balls between the past two seasons:

And then line drives:

And finally, ground balls:

These are all striking differences that help explain what was a breakout year for Davis. There’s really no explanation needed for the drastic rise in production on fly balls — a 20-percentage-point increase in hard contact will help that any day. Even though his hard-hit rate dropped when looking at his performance on line drives, Davis ran into a little more good fortune with a .694 BABIP (.625 in ’18).

The same can be said about what he did with ground balls in 2019, although it was added with a noticeable rise in hard contact once again. Prior to posting a .293 BABIP for this specific batted-ball event, Davis had failed to produce a ground-ball BABIP higher than .162. It’s also helpful that his pull rate on grounders has continued to fall (73.1% to 67.6% to 52.4%), coinciding with a big increase in hitting them up the middle (37.4%).

It’s not exactly fair to compare Davis’ performance over the past two years to one another because the situations and sample sizes are so different. However, this is a useful exercise to not only see how he’s grown as a hitter, but to also get a sense of how some of his peripheral stats could stabilize when given enough playing time.

Either way, what Davis has done over the past six months should officially add him to the Mets’ intriguing young core group of players moving forward. Now he’ll just need to take what he did in 2019 and build upon that heading into 2020.