Francisco Lindor could not be having a worse start to his New York Mets career, which is all a way of saying he is having a very New York Mets way of starting his time with the team.
Aside from his struggles at the plate, Lindor is now embroiled in a war with the fans, which at this point seems like a rite of passage for Mets players. Over the past month, Lindor and other players like Javier Baez and Kevin Pillar have been giving each other thumbs-down gestures after getting on base, as a slight to the fans who have been booing them during the team's recent skid that took them out of first place in the NL East.
But last weekend, people really started to notice the gestures and things, predictably, blew up. It was a harmless thing the players were doing, blowing off a little steam at a fickle fan base – nothing that warrants the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching that has come from the media as part of the fallout. But this is baseball, and that is what happens every single time.
And then you add the New York market and fans to the mix and, well, that's a powder keg just waiting to explode – which certainly has at this point.
Players should be able to express themselves as much as the fans, and honestly, the players should be able to give it back to the fans just as much. But that's just not the way a lot of people are going to see it. The players, unfortunately, are in a lose-lose situation here.
But this is just the icing on the cake for an inaugural Mets season Francisco Lindor would most certainly like to forget. On the year, he's hitting a dismal .224/.316/.370 with 11 home runs, 12 doubles, 38 RBIs and a 92 wRC+. He's walking at the best clip of his career (10.6%), but he's also striking out more than ever (17%), and he currently has the lowest wOBA of his career at .301, along with his lowest WAR to this point (1.7).
Defensively, he's the same Francisco Lindor he's always been, with a 16 Outs Above Average that puts him second among all major-league shortstops.
But these aren't the metrics the Mets were expecting when they signed Lindor to a ten-year, $341 million extension this season. The team – and the fans – are looking more for the 2016-2019 version of Lindor, when he was a four-time All-Star, averaging .284/.346/.495, 30 home runs and 39 doubles a year in that span.
But as Cleveland fans know all too well, Francisco Lindor was a bit of a conundrum the past few years. It's hard to be too upset with 40 doubles and 30 home runs to go along with elite defense, but Lindor would occasionally get himself into homer-happy cold spells and was dreadful with runners in scoring position in 2019 and 2020. He's been better in that department in 2021, but he's still only hitting .254.
To top it all off, Lindor has missed significant time this season with an oblique injury that sidelined him for more than five weeks. Obviously there's nothing he or anybody else could have done about that, but in the midst of an incredibly frustrating year, he has also been saddled with an incredibly frustrating injury.
Chances are, though, Lindor is going to be just fine. The sample size is so small it's ridiculous to make any broad assumptions about him or how his time in New York will go, but it's doubtful this is how anyone drew up his start. Lucky for him, he's on a team that will have no trouble spending the money to put a good team around him.
He's still going to have to make some changes at the plate, though. This is the era of the launch angle and, yes, Francisco Lindor can hit it out of the park as well as anyone, but that often comes with some situational sacrifices. His plate discipline is better than ever, and if he can make some adjustments to the rest of his approach, he should be just fine. Despite a prolonged slump that dates back a few seasons now, he is still one of the best hitters in all of baseball.
And he should be able to do all of that under the constant scrutiny, overanalyzing and, yes, excessive booing that happens in New York. Just not this year.
Only ten more to go.
Follow Us
Subscribe