New Mets hitting coach Kevin Long spoke with reporters for about 20 minutes on Saturday morning in Port St. Lucie. You can read his full comments on ESPN New York, but I wanted to cherry pick and share his views on the following three Mets players which I thought were quite compelling.
He compared Juan Lagares favorably to Robinson Cano saying both had very similar plate approaches. Long is excited about how good a player Lagares can be and is looking forward to having him tap into what he sees as significant offensive potential.
“Juan is talented. I’ve noticed that,” Long said. “And I’m excited about this player. He’s got a nice demeanor about him. He’s confident. Obviously he’s going to have to hone in on the strike zone — and take these chases and swings out of the zone — and be able to lay off some pitches and determine what’s a pitch that he can do damage to.”
“He’s got a good swing. And he’s always had the ability to get hits. He finds a way. I think he hit .285. The major league average is .250. So he’s 35 points up there. I think the point we’re looking at is: What is his on-base percentage? It’s probably .315-.320. If we can get that number up to .350-.360, you’ve gained on it quite a bit.”
Obviously, Long will be working a lot with Curtis Granderson and one of the things they decided was to go back to doing some of the things he did when he was successful with the Yankees.
“We’re going back to the blueprint of when he was with the Yankees. There are a couple of minor things that we’re working on. One is getting his hands into a consistent position and getting him to feel the consistency that he had, the shortness to the ball, obviously the compact swing that he had, the explosiveness. It’s all in there.”
“When I’ve seen Curtis, and I’ve seen him at a very high level, he’s able to get on base,” Long said. “He’s able to drive the ball. Certainly the top of the order, those guys are going to get more at-bats throughout the year. Let’s say he hit sixth. So he’d probably lose, I don’t know, 70-80 at-bats to the guy who hits leadoff. We’ll see how this plays out. Terry ultimately is going to have the final say-so on that. But Curtis has done it before. He’s capable of doing it.”
Long had lots of good things to say about Daniel Murphy who’s been the team’s best hitter over the last two seasons. What he wants him to do is hit for more power.
“Some guys have a lot of things to work on. Other guys, for instance Murphy, you look at his swing and you go, ‘Man, you know why he’s had success.’ He’s very simple. He gets himself in a good position.’
“Is there more in there? We’re going to talk about maybe doing a little more damage to the ball. If he does that, I think he’ll walk at a rate that would be average at the major league level. Right now it’s below average. It’s something we’ve talked about and we’ve addressed.”
Long also talked about his expectations for David Wright, Travis d’Arnaud, and Lucas Duda, and added that the Mets as a whole need to score more runs. Asked if the Mets are better than last year’s .239 team average, which ranked 28th in the majors, Long said:
“You are what you are. We’ll see if we can get that number to increase. At the end of the day, it’s really about scoring runs. We need to maximize our ability to score runs. There’s some intangibles that come along with that. There’s baserunning. There’s situational hitting.”
Read the entire interview with full quotes on ESPN New York.
