WASHINGTON – “As is usual when the season starts, [we are] focused on the performance of the players, ”Scott Boras wrote in a text message to The Post on Sunday in response to a question about Michael Conforto, adding to the unlikely event that his client will sign an extension with the Mets before he gets a free agency reached. .
If I were to run the Mets, there are fewer players I would like to lock up for the foreseeable future than Conforto, the homegrown All-Star who has never represented the organization in any way other than exemplary.
Even if I ran the Mets? There are fewer players whose uncertain future would worry me less about the present. While an unresolved Francisco Lindor situation like the sword of Damocles could have hung over this club, Conforto silently thinks he’s fighting on.
“Right now I’m focusing on the Mets,” Conforto said on Sunday after the team completed training at Nationals Park. “I wish you would ask me about a situation I couldn’t get through in a game we won and won. I wish we were talking about baseball. “
Baseball will finally greet the Mets Monday night, four days later than planned, when they plan to open their 2021 season against the 3-0 Phillies at Citizens Bank Park. They spent the weekend in the nation’s capital and stayed loose after the Nationals, their first planned opponent, experienced a COVID outbreak.
Lindor, 27, is making his Mets debut with a $ 341 million 10-year deal starting next season. His fate is determined after some serious drama. Conforto starts his seventh year in a Mets uniform, his eighth in the organization, with his fate in the air. For better or worse, Steve Cohen clearly tabbed Lindor, after the team took him over from the Indians in January, as his “I’m not the Wilpons” flag to plant on Planet Mets.
Conforto, 28, only expressed his luck for his new teammate, saying, “I think he got what he deserved. I think it’s good for the game. “
He added: ‘Obviously everyone knows that Steve Cohen is a rich man. He is a rich Mets fan. But I think he was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to throw money around carelessly. He would have faith in the boys he hired to make the baseball decisions. “
Luckily for Conforto, you’d think, Sandy Alderson oversees baseball decisions as team president; as general manager, Alderson approved the selection of Conforto 10th overall in the 2014 amateur design. No, that didn’t lead to many similarities at this point, although Boras is more comfortable than most of his brothers taking his players to the open market.
“I think I could see the team look very different in the coming years and I’ve been thinking about that,” said Conforto, although the position playing corps could be fairly intact if Conforto stays.
He has proven quite consistently over the past four years, his OPS + hovering between 122 (in 2018) and 153 (last year), and his games played 90 percent and more than any of the previous three seasons. The natural, albeit imperfect equation, based on the current market, would be George Springer, who received $ 150 million from the Blue Jays in six years as a better hitter in a more important defensive position. However, Conforto is three and a half years younger than Springer, has no record of the Astros sign-stealing scandal and has proven his Big Apple and Mets bona fide.
“He is one of our natural leaders here,” said Luis Rojas of Conforto. ‘He’s a man who bleeds blue and orange. He cares so much about the team. “
Conforto dropped some news about his Zoom audience when he revealed that he contracted the coronavirus shortly before spring training. He statistically registered a blah spring training and you hope that no effects of the disease linger.
Except if you’re the Mets? Enjoy this latest installment of this show knowing that if it’s clocking in a typical Conforto year, you can afford to outbid someone for his services. And if he clocks in a typical Conforto year? You probably should.