Mets Announce Opening Day Lineup

Mickey Callaway and the Mets held their first manager and player Q&A’s of the season today and the new skipper revealed his lineup for Opening Day.

The lineup goes as follows:

Okay, so there is actually a decent amount of information to absorb here as well as some interesting quirks to this arrangement.

For starters, Nimmo is leading off. While that is not unexpected, it confirms what we already knew, in that Nimmo is probably going to end up getting the majority of the playing time in center field with Conforto out and that he would likely bat leadoff when he’s in the lineup.

Then, it goes into Yoenis Cespedes, with Callaway sticking to his plan of having Cespedes hit second, sticking to his his philosophy that the team’s best hitter should be in the two-hole.

Jay Bruce follows him, which is not surprising in the least.

It gets really interesting from there, though, starting with Asdrubal Cabrera. Most people have pegged him to either leadoff, bat second, or hit sixth this season. But writing him into the cleanup spot is putting him in a prime power hitting position. Cabrera has more power than the average second baseman, but he does not have the typical profile of a number four hitter. Cabrera has only topped 20 home runs twice in his career (2011 and 2016).

Todd Frazier, who most thought would hit directly behind Bruce, moves to the fifth spot in the lineup. He is then followed by Adrian Gonzalez, who much to the dismay of many, is the starting first baseman.

For the seventh spot, the Mets went with Kevin Plawecki as the Opening Day catcher, which is interesting because many thought that it would be a 50-50 split, but d’Arnaud would still have priority coming into this season. However, Callaway had hinted recently that Plawecki was being viewed as invaluable to the pitching staff, and might get a larger share of the time behind the plate. He might have just confirmed that with this decision.

Lastly, he decided to allow the pitcher, Noah Syndergaard, to hit eighth, while having Amed Rosario hit ninth. This tactic has largely become famous by Joe Maddon, but this is an intriguing decision made by Callaway. The idea behind a strategy like this is to have a “double-leadoff” situation where two faster players (Nimmo and Rosario) hit back-to-back to give RBI hitters (Cespedes and Bruce) more opportunities to drive in runs. Another factor to consider is that Syndergaard happens to be a good hitting pitcher, so that makes a decision like this much easier.

While I don’t want to make this seem like its an extremely big deal, it is worth noting and paying attention to early in the season in order to gauge Callaway’s strategy and how it differs from that of former manager Terry Collins.

If you are struggling to believe that this is the lineup he chose to use tomorrow, take a listen from the new Mets skipper here: