He doesn’t know because he can’t know, because he’s just 24 years old, because he’s played just 205 games in the major leagues, because he’s only had 695 plate appearances. Making the bigs is hard enough. Staying here is harder.
Flourishing here?
Sometimes, that takes a team effort. Michael Conforto was always going to be good enough, talented enough, to have a fighting chance because he has a left-handed swing that makes poets swoon, because he has a grinder’s mentality and work ethic that make coaches weak in the knees.
But Conforto has had the great good fortune of something else, too, something that’s fleeting and rare, especially in the carnivorous world of professional sports in New York. See, Mets fans adopted him right away. They begged for him to be called up two years ago. They suffered and bled as Conforto himself suffered and bled last year, absorbing a ruinous slump that ended with him back in Vegas, riding buses.
And here’s the thing: they never gave up on him. Not when the batting average bottomed out at .214. Not during the endless 4 ½-month stretch when he had 68 strikeouts and only 33 hits in between minor league stints, his OPS a sickly .560. Not this spring, when it seemed he’d be left behind at Triple-A despite scalding the ball.
“I take pride in the way I handled failure,” he said Tuesday night. “I kept working. I tried to use it as a positive.”
As he spoke he wore an orange and blue sash and the crown that signifies the Mets’ player of the game, an honor he cinched in this 9-3 romp over the Padres by homering twice (including his fourth leadoff blast of the season), driving in four runs, reaching base four times. That left his average at a princely .333 and his OPS at a kingly 1.138.
He has been the Mets’ best player this year, and it hasn’t been close, both sides of the ball. He shares a city with another hitting prodigy named Aaron Judge, and despite hitting leadoff most of the year (and having some 20 fewer plate appearances) he has only two fewer homers (15-13) and actually has one more run batted in (31-30), he and Judge co-starring in quite a running game of anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better.
“He went home this winter,” Mets manager Terry Collins said of Conforto, “and he came back a big league player.”
There was no guarantee that would happen, and there is no guarantee that will sustain itself, and everyone knows that. Nobody understands the fickle behaviors of baseball more than Collins, after all, and it was Collins who admitted, “We were all nervous what would happen with him,” after watching the soul-sucking swoon Conforto endured after a hot start in 2016.
Still: Collins was impressed when he heard reports of Conforto going home to Redmond, Wash., and working tirelessly on his stroke all winter, converting what had become a pull-happy swing into one that aimed for all fields. He was impressed when he told Conforto that he’d made the club out of spring, and warned that he was about to accept the hardest job in the game for a young player, getting one at-bat per game against relief pitchers throwing 99, and Conforto welcomed the challenge.
And he remains impressed as hell because … well, how can you not be?
“When the opportunity presents itself for you to get back in this lineup,” Collins told Conforto, “you need to take advantage of it.”
He did. He has. And now a Mack truck couldn’t knock him out of the batting order. All of this has been a grand reward for Mets fans who — let’s be very honest here — aren’t exactly known to have the patience of Thomas Merton very often. Sometimes, though, they will make an exception.
They made an exception with Conforto. Even at his worst last year, he wasn’t booed. Even as he was farmed out, they kept tabs on him at Vegas (where he hit .422 with a 1.209 OPS in 33 games), and kept a light on for him at Citi. Even as this season began with spotty playing time, they would echo on social media, pleading for the Mets to give him more at-bats.
It’s paid off for them. And certainly for the object of their affection.
“He’s a pretty special player,” Lucas Duda said. “I’m glad he’s on the Mets.”
In Queens, at Citi, that opinion is shared by roughly 100 percent of the baseball constituency.