Conforto, Syndergaard, and the Mets’ History of Rookie Debuts

Think back on your favorite piece of the Mets’ 2015 season. Was it finally breaking through and pushing past the Cubs in the NLCS? Was it Cespedes’ three-homer outburst on August 21? Was it this?:

Yeah, those were some of my favorite moments too. But there’s another one that stands out for me: Michael Conforto’s four-hit coming-out party in his second career game, on July 25. Conforto had been a highly-touted prospect, but an untested one–he’d never played above Double-A, and it had only been a year since he’d been drafted by the Amazin’s. I had some very real worries that he’d struggle in his first taste of the big leagues.

He didn’t.

By the end of what had become his rookie season, Conforto posted a .315 True Average (TAv). If you’re  not used to the metric, True Average measures everything about a player’s hitting performance using linear weights, accounting for reaching on errors and situational hitting, and adjusted for park and league. In essence, it is your one-stop shop for overall offensive performance. Oh, and TAv is set so that .260 is league-average, so Conforto’s .315? That is a terrific number. A really great one. Chris Davis, who received an enormous contract as a free agent in the offseason, posted a .316 TAv in 2015. David Wright’s career TAv is .310.

Perhaps you’re wondering the same thing I’m wondering … how did Conforto’s 2015 rookie season stack up against the rookie seasons of Mets past? The short answer is that it was the best. Not by much, but it was the best. With an assist from Rob McQuown, here’s the top-10 Mets rookies with 150 or more plate appearances in the franchise’s history:

You have to go all the way back to 2011 to find a Mets rookie position player who hit as well as Conforto did in their opening salvo. Our friend Lucas Duda previously held the record for highest TAv by a Mets rookie, and both he and Conforto stand head and shoulders above the rest of the competition. (Duda probably also does so literally.)

Rounding out the top five position players by TAv are Daniel Murphy in 2008 (goodbye, old friend!), John Milner in 1972, and Steve Henderson in 1977. At the bottom of the list are some pretty forgettable players in Met history–including Jeff Duncan (2003, .198 TAv) and Bobby Pfeil (1969, .200 TAv)–but also some notable names of Mets past. Ed Kranepool (1962, .200 TAv) has the fourth-worst mark of all former Met rookies, while both Rey Ordonez (1996, .208 TAv) and Todd Hundley (1992, .210 TAv) fall into the bottom-10.

Now, I don’t think it can quite be overstated that Conforto’s performance deserves an asterisk or two. The first asterisk has to do with his playing time; Conforto only received 194 plate appearances during the 2015 regular season, so it’s very hard to say that his .315 TAv mark was representative of his true talent level. Offensive greatness can manifest in a number of ways, but if it crops up in less than 200 plate appearances, you better darn well open yourself to the possibility of fluke. Kevin Maas, Chris Shelton, and Mike Jacobs taught us that. (So did Russell Carleton.)

The other asterisk has to do with the postseason, where Conforto contributed a trio of memorable home runs … and not much else. Now, I’ll take three homers in 34 plate appearances–but we should also probably acknowledge that against some of the best pitchers in baseball (and the Royals’ staff), he posted a .235 OBP. Again, and even moreso, this is a small sample size, but there’s reason to believe that Conforto has some very serious power tucked away in his bat. While 2015’s performance might be a fluke in some ways, 12 major-league homers in just a few months during a rookie season is a great start no matter how you slice it.

On a rate basis, Conforto was the best-hitting rookie that the Mets have ever had–better than Strawberry and Wright and Ike Davis and Kevin Mitchell and even Benny Agbayani. That creates some massive expectations, and it might be nice to try and imagine that this sort of pace may not continue, even if Conforto still turns out to be a very nice hitter.

With all that being said … didn’t the Mets have another really talented rookie performance this past season? I remember people talking about a hard-throwing pitcher with a Marvel Comics nickname–a guy who is already culling sleeper Cy Young picks around the national media. Noah Syndergaard was pretty great last year, wasn’t he?

What you see above are the top-10 Mets rookies who threw more than 100 innings in the debut season, sorted by Deserved Run Average (DRA). As great as Thor was last year, he’s not exactly the finest rookie in Mets history. But, to be fair, some of the names on this list are absolutely filthy. I see two all-time-greats who were no-doubt Hall-of-Famers, several multi-time All-Stars, and the absolute pinnacle of rookie pitching performance: Doctor K.

Dwight Gooden’s rookie season was the stuff of legend, and this is neither the time or place to do it justice. But, suffice to say, the Mets have a history of epic rookie season pitching performances. Syndergaard was an absolute stud last year, but he ranks seventh out of just 38 in the team’s history of 100+-inning pitching performances.

(Oh, if you were wondering, Matt Harvey’s nasty 2012 debut doesn’t make the cut because he only threw 59 innings. Sorry, Matt!)

The Mets have had two wondrous first-year seasons in the last two years, thanks to deGrom’s Rookie of the Year campaign in 2014 and Syndergaard’s triumphs last year. That’s wonderful … but can we not get ahead of ourselves and hold Steven Matz to the same standards of performance that they put up? Matz is already being considered one of the team’s “Four Aces” due to his pedigree and the sharp work he put in during the regular and postseason last year.

It may have actually gotten lost in the shuffle when compared to the Cespedes and Harvey drama, the run up to a World Series and everything else that came along with the team’s extraordinary run–but the Mets had two of the absolute best rookie seasons in team history last season. One could argue that Conforto had the best offensive debut for a Mets rookie, while Syndergaard had one that may not stack up quite as nicely as Doc’s or Jon Matlack’s, but was still an extraordinary advent.

2016 should be full of wonderful surprises and a few rookie seasons as well. We’ll almost certainly see Steven Matz put up the 39th 100-inning rookie season in Mets history, and there is the possibility that a guy like Brandon Nimmo or Dilson Herrera might have a “rookie” season of their own. But let’s not expect a repeat of what happened last year–those two kids who came up in 2015 were in a very special class of Mets players.

Many thanks to Rob McQuown for research assistance.

Photo Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports