The name you’ve all been waiting for. The Mets signed outfielder Nick Plummer on Tuesday, a 25-year-old who has spent his entire career in the St. Louis Cardinals minor league system.
Plummer hit .280/.415/.479 with 20 doubles, six triples. 15 home runs, 54 RBI, 71 runs scored, 73 walks, and 13 stolen bases in 117 combined games last season in the Cardinals organization with Springfield (AA) and Memphis (AAA).
Plummer was the Cardinals first-round pick in 2015, taken with the 23rd overall selection. He was drafted out of Brother Rice High School in Michigan. Since then he has put up a line of .221/.368/.358 with 69 doubles, 17 triples, 33 homers, 152 RBI, 42 steals, 279 walks, and 239 runs scored in 460 games. The average hasn’t been there but his on-base is encouraging.
Plummer will add to one of the organization’s shallowest positions.
Plummer’s former manager described what was the cause of the performance change this season.
“He’s making more contact,” Springfield manager Jose Leger said of Plummer in June. “That’s something that he needed to correct. In the past, his swing-and-miss rate was fairly high. He’s making more contact, using the whole field. His swing, it’s a level swing that covers the strike zone and he’s also worked hard on swinging at good pitches and not going out of the zone.”
Plummer’s description lines up similarly to the type of player GM Billy Eppler spoke of during his introductory press conference last week.
“Being able to trust my swing plane, trust what I’ve built and created and being able to mix that with my eye for the zone and my ability to see spin, see pitches well and trust my swing that I’ve created in the past year and a half has been the catalyst for reducing the strikeouts and being able to use the whole field,” Plummer said.
Plummer is considered one of, if not, the top minor-league free agent on the market.
