Wanted to update this post with some quotes from Lucas Duda and Michael Cuddyer who spoke to Fred Kerber of the New York Post about the recent uptick in Mets offense and how Cuddyer is fueling that.
“I felt my swing was getting better even — without the results,” Cuddyer said. “But nobody wants to hear about the process, they just want to see the results. But as a player, when you’re going through it, you have to worry about the process. You trust in that and the work you put in.”
Duda said he believes when Cuddyer is going good, the Mets go good.
“We tend to feed off him. Hitting is a contagious type of thing and Cuddy, the way he goes about his business on a daily basis, you can feed off that,” Duda said. “If he gets hot, we can ride him for a week and a half. He sets the tone.”
“When you go through a hot streak enough, everybody seems to be hitting the ball well and vice versa when things aren’t going well. It has a snowball effect,” Cuddyer added.
“That’s where the old adage of hitting is contagious comes into play. Whether it is contagious, I don’t know but mentality-wise I think you can feed off each other.”
May 28
For the first five weeks of the season, it looked like the Mets’ biggest acquisition from this past offseason was going to be a total bust. However, over the last two or three weeks, Michael Cuddyer has finally begun to turn it around at the plate.
Going into the Milwaukee series, Cuddyer was slashing just .233/.298/.358, showing very little power, and was probably one of the least productive cleanup hitters in baseball. He went 4-for-12 with a double in the Milwaukee series and has picked up the pace since then. He has two home runs in his last three games and has walked three times in that span as well.
Overall, since May 15, Cuddyer is batting .341/.420/.500 with two home runs and a double. It’s a pretty small sample size from him (50 PAs) and you would like to see a little more power from him than that, but it’s great to finally see some life out of Cuddyer.
Up until recently, Cuddyer had looked lost at the plate. His strikeout rate — 23.2 percent — is the highest in his 15-year career. Plate discipline numbers show Cuddyer is swinging at more balls out of the strike zone than he used to and has seen a huge drop in contact percentage on those pitches.
Last year, he made contact on 73 percent of balls outside the zone that he swung at. This year, that’s down to 59 percent. He’s been swinging at balls he has absolutely no shot at and is constantly being fooled by pitchers, especially with two strikes.
Cuddyer’s recent stretch looks promising, but he has to keep this up for much longer to be worth the $21 million over two years Sandy Alderson forked over to acquire him. He will have to reverse the tendencies he’s defaulted to in order to do that.
