In his heart, Michael Conforto believed he’d swung the bat well already. This was certainly a matter of personal interpretation. Twice, he’d grounded into inning-ending 4-6-3 double plays, one that merited preservation in the scorecard behind yellow highlight ink. Once he’d struck out, overpowered by a James Paxton fastball.
“He dotted the corner on me all night and made a lot of good pitches,” Conforto would say later. “But that’s why we play nine innings. I knew I’d get another shot at the end.”
This was the chance. This was the bottom of the eighth inning, a full house at Citi Field, maybe one of the last full houses at Citi Field this year, and most of the 42,150 in the park were actually Mets fans, too. The Mets already had tied the game at 2, thanks to a J.D. Davis homer in the sixth and his RBI double four batters earlier.
The bases were loaded. The Yankees went to their chief setup man, lefty Zack Britton, a southpaw who can be water torture on left-handed hitters. Robinson Cano was standing on second base but wandered over briefly to counsel Conforto as Britton took his warm-ups.
“Look out over the plate and up in the zone,” he said, before jogging back to second.
Conforto didn’t have to be swayed. He knew Britton might try to get ahead in the count so he could follow with one nasty breaker after another, the kind that breaks your bat, best-case, and your heart, worst-case. Britton’s first pitch was exactly as Cano predicted: over the plate, up in the zone.
And Conforto put that swing on it, the one that makes Mets fans swoon spring after spring as they anticipate the year when he will turn the Mets’ record books into his own personal journal. That hasn’t quite happened yet, and that’s a source of frustration for a lot of the people who come to Citi wearing their No. 30 jerseys.
But THIS swing reminded you why. It soared over Brett Gardner’s head in left, took a hard hop against the wall. Two runs scored. Citi exploded. For a night, the folks who filled the joint could adopt a case of selective amnesia. The Yankees would be beaten 4-2, their long streak of 31 straight games with a home run halted. The Mets would taste what this summer was supposed to be about all along: strong starting pitching, flawless relief, clutch hitting.
And Michael Conforto banging line drives off the fence.
“We know that guy can hit,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said. “When he’s going good he can really carry us.”
But when he’s going bad it feels like a virus attacks the Mets’ lineup, and lately he’d been in a 1-for-24 funk that shoved his average under .250, a shocking reality for someone who still makes veteran scouts tremble when they study that swing. Callaway acknowledged the “lulls” that Conforto is prone to, still, even in his fifth year as a big-leaguer, and admitted they puzzle him every bit as much as they do the folks in the mezzanine.
“If we had that figured out,” Callaway said, “he’d be the best player on the planet.”
If Conforto could figure it out he’d start stacking the piles of .300/30/100 seasons that seemed destined for him from the moment the Mets took him in the 2014 draft and he hit his way to the bigs just over a year later. He was one of the stars of the 2015 postseason, clobbered two home runs in Game 4 of the World Series, seemed destined to rake his way into Mets lore.
Sometimes, he’s been just that.
Sometimes he’s been the 1-for-24 enigma that saw his batting average tumble almost 20 points in a week. Not often given to public displays of displeasure he was visibly frustrated when he bounced into a double play to end the sixth.
“I take pride in being the guy that beats out a double play ball,” he said. “I’m a guy who gets it in the air so we can stay out of a double play, and don’t kill a rally. And to do it twice in one game, yeah, that’s frustrating.”
If it feels like much of Conforto’s career has been shadowed by that frustration, it was right to see his postgame ritual of unwrapping a massive boulder of ice from his shoulder, the one that nearly sabotaged his career two years ago. It hasn’t been an easy tour of New York, and Michael Conforto has been mighty confounding on so many nights.
But then he swings that swing and bangs a ball into the night and you remember what he can be in between the lulls. That keeps him coming back. And you.