With Daniel Murphy likely to start the season on the DL, 24-year-old Matt Reynolds has a good chance of turning an impressive Triple-A campaign from last season into a starting spot on the Mets 2015 Opening Day lineup.
The second-round pick from Oklahoma has never been rated a top prospect, in fact Baseball America doesn’t even list him on their top ten list within the Mets organization. In his first two seasons of minor league ball, playing with similarly aged players, he never hit above .260. Essentially, before last year, Reynolds was off the team’s radar.
Then 2014 came and he started to hit! He put up an impressive .355/.430/.422 line at Binghamton, and then, gaining promotion to AAA, where he was now much younger than his competition, he continued to impress by batting .333/.385/.479.
So what happened?
Well, Mr. Reynolds started hitting a lot of line drives. And when you hit a lot of line drives, that means you are hitting the ball hard, and when you hit the ball hard, you are more likely to find base hits. His batting average on balls in play skyrocketed last season, and no, that is not just because he took a lot of swings in the hitter-friendly Las Vegas air. He hit the ball hard everywhere, and while a .400+ BABIP is surely not sustainable, we can see why it was higher, outside of park factors.
With just one year of impressive swings, it’s hard to say who the true Matt Reynolds is at the plate. We know that he has potential defensively, and if he can find a happy medium between his low-level and Triple-A performance at the dish, he can be a good bench player for this year’s Mets.
Statistics courtesy of Baseball-Reference. Follow me on Twitter @OverWhitestone.
Another original article from Metsmerized Online!
