It was a sleepy midweek afternoon game at the end of August, and the home team was 15 games under .500 and 20 games out of first place. When they describe the baseball season as a “grind,” these are the games they are talking about. There were 25,284 fans listed on the official boxscore; there were maybe 15,000 actually occupying seats at Citi Field.
The ones who came, they came for various reason: A friend had hooked them up with good seats. It was a chance to play hooky from work one last time before the end of summer. Maybe there was a stray Diamondbacks fan in the house. By that part of the 2017 Mets season, there were few other reasons to bother.
Michael Conforto was one of the only ones.
Conforto had played in the All-Star Game. For a good chunk of 2017, he’d actually had a comparable OPS to Aaron Judge. From the moment he’d first donned a Mets uniform two years earlier — just his second year in pro ball — he’d made Mets fans swoon with one of the sweetest swings in baseball. He’d hit a home run in the NLDS, against Zack Greinke. He’d hit two in Game 4 of the World Series.
He’d scuffled as a sophomore, found himself back in Triple-A for a time, come back for the wild-card push, but now he was on the verge of putting together his first terrific full season, one of the few bright spots in a dreary season. He stepped to the plate in the bottom of the fifth inning against Robbie Ray with an OPS of .939 and a slash line of .279/.384/.555, easily within sight of 30 homers and 80 RBIs …
He was loaded up, facing a 2-0 pitch, two men on base, two outs. Ray, a lefty, delivered a delicious 94 mph fastball on the inside half, waist high, exactly the kind of pitch Conforto had feasted on all year. Conforto pounced. He swung through it. Happens a thousand times a day on a busy baseball Thursday, across the sport.
But this wasn’t just a swing and miss. Conforto grabbed for a suddenly limp left arm with his right. He crumpled to the dirt. He was in agony.
“Almost like he cracked his shoulder on that swing,” Ron Darling said in the SNY television booth. “Or dislocated it, or something. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
It is a moment you try to forget as a broadcaster, as a fan, especially as the player who’s shoulder had, in an instant, been shredded. The official term: a tear in the shoulder’s posterior capsule.
“I heard from a lot of guys in the months after that happened,” Conforto said last summer. “All of them said the same thing: ‘Dude, I’ve never seen that before.’ That wasn’t exactly reassuring, you know? You blow out your knee, it’s terrible, but a thousand guys have come back from that. You know what they did, and you do that. This was different.”
For Conforto, yes. But for the Mets, too. Conforto was drafted as a ready-made hitter out of Oregon State, and he sped through the Mets’ system and landed in Flushing in 14 months. Everyone agreed: This was a future batting champion. And he had some pop. And if he famously looked overmatched one day against Madison Bumgarner in ’16 — starting the funk that landed him back in the minors — the irony was, he could hit lefties, too.
There is little doubt that he came back too soon last year. He languished around .215 for the season’s first half, he struck out too much, he almost got shipped out again. And then rebounded with a terrific second half: an .895 OPS and 17 homers after the All-Star Game.
Now, for all the revamping that has gone on in the Mets’ lineup, for all the fear and loathing attached to Yoenis Cespedes and the uncertainty elsewhere in the batting order, it feels like Conforto is at a major intersection of his career. It feels like he could take the next step, which means residing in the same neighborhood as other legit MVP candidates, which means being the Mets’ wheelman in the lineup.
He will start the season 20 months removed from his injury, with enough good at-bats separating him from his struggles. There is a belief that for all the moves the Mets have made, it feels like they may be a bat or two shy of true contention. But if Conforto is what the Mets have always believed he could be …
Well, pitchers and catchers report to Port St. Lucie this week. We’ll know about all of that soon enough.