Few high-profile additions in New York Mets history got off to a worse start than shortstop Francisco Lindor. From a spring spent hovering around the Mendoza Line to giving fans a thumbs down during a 77-win season, Lindor's 2021 was disastrous.
He's spent the last four seasons redeeming himself, winning over a city that nearly wrote him in for mayor and keeping himself in the conversation for the best shortstop in the National League. In 2024, he was a finalist for MVP and the headliner of baseball's best story.
Now, Lindor is hurtling back toward league average. He's mired in one of the biggest slumps of his New York tenure, and his underlying metrics don't offer much reprieve. Simply put, this might just be who he is.
Nothing is going right for Lindor
Now, this isn't to say that New York's next captain is never going to get hot again, or that he's incapable of posting another 5-WAR season. Lindor dealt with a toe injury earlier in the year, might be mechanically compensating for that, and he isn't getting great batted ball luck, either.
But Lindor's slump is more than bad luck. His striking out 10% more than he had in the first half, and an under-the-hood look at his numbers reveals a player that could very well be declining in his age-31 season.
In a league where hitting the ball hard is king, Lindor's 90th-percentile exit velocity (104.3 mph) is a tick down from last year's mark (105 mph). From a percentile basis, he declined from 70th percentile to 47th -- the lowest ranking of his Mets career.
The same can be said for maximum exit velocity (60th percentile), pulled fly ball percentage (59th), and damager per batted ball event (55th) -- all via Robert Orr's app. This is a full-fledged power outage compared to the past two seasons. Lindor has never been an elite contact bat, nor has he ever posted fantastic walk rates. He's good, but not great, at both skills. But if his bat isn't dynamic and he isn't optimizing his contact, the path to being a superstar is much harder to find.
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Elsewhere, his defense is slowly declining, too. This isn't some cataclysmic collapse, but if it seems like Lindor isn't quite as sharp or covering as much ground as year's past, Outs Above Average would agree with you. He ranked second among shortstops with 16 OAA in 2024, with a 3% success rate added. This season, he ranks ninth at the position with 4 OAA and a 1% success rate added. His value is partly derived from being incredible at a difficult position. That calculus changes when he's playing a good, but not great, shortstop.
Lindor has never taken offensive struggles to the infield or vice versa. If he can't help it, by way of slight physical decline, there's reason to believe his woes are connected and harder to shake.
New York needs Lindor to be better if its going to be competitive come October. It's no surprise his swoon has come while the Mets lose ground in the NL East. And while there's still room for Lindor to regress back to his mean -- a star atop the order -- it is becoming increasingly clear that 2024 isn't coming back.
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