Wilmer Flores Is Already Approaching Several Hitting Records for Mets Shortstops

Wilmer Flores is improving with the glove, but he's really picking it up at the plate.  (Photo by Ed Leyro/Studious Metsimus)

Throughout the off-season and during the first month of the 2015 regular season, many Mets fans clamored for general manager Sandy Alderson to acquire a good-hitting, good-fielding shortstop.  The incumbent at the position, Wilmer Flores, was expected to hit well in the major leagues, but was considered a liability on defense.  In his first 30 games of 2015, Flores committed nine errors in 129 chances and wasn't contributing much with the bat, as he was hitting just .229 with three homers and eight RBI through May 8.

But since then, Flores has taken great strides in improving his defense, making just one error in his last 104 chances (.990 fielding percentage) and participating in 20 double plays.  He has also elevated his game at the plate, batting .263 with seven homers and 20 RBI over his last 31 games.  In fact, he has as many homers in that span as he does strikeouts - a rarity for a player who hits with power.

For the season, Flores has been hovering around the .250 mark, but his ten homers are tied for the most by a shortstop in the major leagues.  (The Cardinals' Jhonny Peralta also has ten.)  In addition, Flores ranks in the top five at the shortstop position in RBI (28) and slugging percentage (.433).  Among players on his own team, however, Flores ranks first in home runs, second in RBI (just one behind the injured Daniel Murphy), second in slugging percentage and third in runs scored.  Flores is in the top three in each of those categories despite having the sixth-most plate appearances on the team this season behind Juan Lagares, Curtis Granderson, Michael Cuddyer, Lucas Duda and Daniel Murphy.  And among all National League players, regardless of position, Flores is the ninth-toughest to strike out, as he has whiffed just 25 times in 201 at-bats.

On Friday night, Flores hit his tenth home run of the season, making him just the third Mets shortstop to reach double digits in homers over an entire season, joining Kevin Elster (1989) and Jose Reyes (2006, 2007, 2008, 2010).  [Note: Eddie Bressoud hit ten homers as the Mets' primary shortstop in 1966, but only eight of those homers came while Bressoud was playing shortstop.  He hit one as a first baseman and one as a second baseman.]  However, Elster didn't hit his tenth homer in 1989 until the final week of the season, while the earliest Reyes reached double figures in long balls was in 2008, when he launched his tenth rocket on July 12 during the team's 94th game of the year.  Flores turned the trick a full calendar month before the date Reyes did in 2008, doing so in the Mets' 62nd contest, leaving exactly 100 games for him to add to his total in 2015.

For his career, Flores has produced 25 doubles, 17 homers and 70 RBI in just 555 at-bats.  By comparison, Elster had 21 doubles, nine homers and 47 RBI in his first 555 at-bats, while Reyes had 32 doubles, ten homers and 52 RBI in the same number of at-bats.  Doubles-wise, Flores ranks in between Elster and Reyes, but Flores is already superior to both Elster and Reyes in home run and RBI production.

With the season still three weeks away from being halfway done, Flores is approaching 30 RBI, putting him on pace to easily surpass 60 RBI for the entire season.  Only two Mets shortstops have ever driven in at least 60 runs in a single season - Reyes, who owns the franchise mark at the position with 81 RBI in 2006 (he also produced 68 RBI in 2008) and the normally light-hitting Rey Ordoñez, who became the first shortstop to drive in 60 runs for the team when he reached that exact figure in 1999.

No Mets shortstop has ever led the team in home runs or RBI.  In fact, the closest any shortstop has ever come to leading the team in either category was in 1966, when Eddie Bressoud (10 HR, 49 RBI) finished six homers behind team leader Ed Kranepool and 12 RBI behind Ken Boyer for the club lead.  However, as mentioned before, Bressoud accumulated some of his offensive totals at other defensive positions.  The only true shortstops to finish within 20 RBI of the team leader were Roy McMillan, whose 42 RBI in 1965 left him twenty short of team leader Charley Smith, and Jose Vizcaino, who finished 20 RBI behind team leader Rico Brogna in 1995.  Vizcaino's 56 RBI during the strike-shortened 1995 campaign set the franchise record for runs batted in by a shortstop in a single season, a mark that was surpassed by Ordoñez four years later and Reyes seven years after that.

There haven't been too many offensive-minded shortstops in Mets history.  But there have been some standout seasons at the plate for some players who manned the position.  And if Wilmer Flores continues his recent power production, he might become the first to lead the team - or even come close to leading the team - in either of those categories over a full season.

With his offensive struggles and defensive shortcomings no longer as obvious as they were during the first month of the season, Mets fans are now clamoring for Flores to come up to the plate rather than asking for his head on a plate.  It's amazing what a little production and some historical perspective can do to calm the savage beast.

Joey's Soapbox: The Mora Things Change, The Flores Stays The Same

I feel like I'm stuck in a snow globe writing about our Mets this off-season.

Greetings, everyone!  This is Joey Beartran, taking over the Studious Metsimus blogging duties on this snowy first day of spring.  My colleague, Ed Leyro, has finally allowed me to write something on the current Mets since he seems to have forgotten they still exist, what with all the ten-million word "One Mo-MET In Time" posts he's been writing this off-season.  Maybe you have the patience to read them, but I'm a fast-talking bear in a fast-moving world.  I don't have time for that.  What I do have time for is telling you about a mistake I hope the Mets don't make regarding the current shortstop situation - a situation that goes by the name of Wilmer Flores.

But before I get to Flores, I have a question to ask you.  Do you remember the 2000 season?  That was the year Mets were coming off a memorable 1999 campaign in which they made the playoffs for the first time since the Reagan administration.  That was also the year Rey Ordoñez got hurt, fracturing his left forearm on a tag play at second base in late May.

Ordoñez was a three-time Gold Glove winner at shortstop, swallowing up ground ball after ground ball, sometimes in spectacular fashion.  But once he got hurt at Dodger Stadium, the Mets were left with a defensive hole at the shortstop position.  They tried to fill it with Melvin Mora, who was in his first full season with the Mets, but he was much more comfortable with a bat in his hands than a glove.

Mora started 37 games at the shortstop position, batting .265 with four homers, 18 RBI and 27 runs scored in just 147 at-bats.  Compare that to Rey Ordoñez, who had a total of four homers in his five-year career up to that point.  Mora also boasted a .442 slugging percentage and .750 OPS in his seven-week trial at short while Ordoñez had a lifetime .292 slugging percentage and .580 OPS prior to his season-ending injury.

The Mets scored 216 runs in Mora's 37 starts, averaging nearly six runs per game.  They scored 212 runs in the 44 games started by Ordoñez prior to his injury, an average of 4.8 runs per game.  Now let's compare the offensive numbers put up by the two players while playing shortstop during the 2000 campaign, especially since they both had almost the same number of plate appearances in their abbreviated seasons.

• M. Mora (164 PA): .265/.308/.442, 12 doubles, 1 triple, 4 HR, 18 RBI, 27 runs, 5 SB.
• R. Ordoñez (155 PA): .188/.278/.226, 5 doubles, 0 triples, 0 HR, 9 RBI, 10 runs, 0 SB.

There's no question that Mora was clearly the better offensive contributor of the two in a similar sample size.  But from a defensive standpoint, Mora was no Ordoñez.  In fact, he wasn't even average.  In the 37 games he started at short as Ordoñez's replacement, Mora committed seven errors in 144 chances for a .951 fielding percentage.  He also participated in just 14 double plays and had 93 assists.  According to baseball-reference.com, Mora's defensive WAR was -0.1 in 2000.  For all you kids out there, that means from a defensive standpoint, he wasn't better than nothing.  Nothing was better than him.

Meanwhile, Ordoñez had a lifetime 8.8 dWAR leading up to his injury.  That's the highest dWAR through five seasons of any Met in the history of the club.  To this day, only Bud Harrelson (13.6 dWAR in 13 seasons) and Jerry Grote (11.2 dWAR in 12 seasons) have posted a higher lifetime dWAR than Ordoñez.

With Mora, the Mets sacrificed defense for offense.  They did the opposite when Ordoñez was in the starting lineup.  But back in 2000, general manager Steve Phillips panicked when Mora couldn't cut it defensively, even with the team scoring a run per game more than they did when Ordoñez was in the lineup.  So just days before the trade deadline, Phillips, in his infinite wisdom, dealt Mora to the Baltimore Orioles for shortstop Mike Bordick.

O, Melvin Mora.  If only you could have fielded like Rey O.  (James Lang/US Presswire)

Bordick basically did what Mora did as a Met, both offensively and defensively, although Bordick played more games at the position for the Mets than Mora.  In 56 games with the Mets, Bordick batted .260 with eight doubles, four homers, 21 RBI and a not-so-impressive 0.1 dWAR.

So what happened in the years after the Bordick-for-Mora trade?  Well, Bordick went back to Baltimore as a free agent at the conclusion of the 2000 campaign, where he became Mora's teammate.  In nine full seasons with the Orioles, Mora reached 20 doubles eight times, 20 homers three times, double digits in stolen bases four times, batted over .300 twice, led the league in on-base percentage once (.419 in 2004), made the All-Star team twice (2003, 2005) and won a Silver Slugger award (2004).  Meanwhile, Ordoñez played two more seasons with the Mets and played his final game in the big leagues as a member of the Chicago Cubs in 2004 - right around the same time Mora was becoming a legitimate star.

That brings us back to the current day shortstop situation with our good pal, Wilmer Flores.  (You thought I had forgotten about him, didn't you?)  In case you've been hibernating in a cave somewhere, let me remind you that Flores is generally not considered a good fielder.  But no one is complaining about how much better he is at the plate than Ruben Tejada.  In 2014, Flores split his season between AAA-Las Vegas and the Mets, spending approximately half of his time at the big league level.  Flores's numbers were strikingly similar to the overall numbers put up by Melvin Mora in 2000 prior to his trade to Baltimore.

• W. Flores (2014): 78 games, .251 average, 13 doubles, 1 triple, 6 HR, 29 RBI, 28 runs.
• M. Mora (2000): 79 games, .260 average, 13 doubles, 2 triples, 6 HR, 30 RBI, 35 runs.

Taking it a step further, Flores's offensive and defensive WAR in 2014 were also right on par with what Mora produced 14 seasons before him, as Flores had a 0.7 oWAR and -0.2 dWAR, while Mora put up a 0.6 oWAR and -0.1 dWAR with the Mets in 2000.

Let me give it to you straight.  Tejada is a good fielder, one who's clearly better with the leather than Flores.  But the difference between Tejada and Flores defensively doesn't even compare to the difference between Ordoñez and Mora.  Ordoñez was one of the best defensive shortstops of his era.  The nicest things we can say about Tejada is that he has nice eyebrows and he won't hurt the Mets in the field.

We've already seen how big of a mistake it was to let Melvin Mora go without giving him a chance to prove himself for more than 37 games.  We can't make the same mistake with Wilmer Flores, especially since Flores is also five years younger now than Mora was in 2000 and can still mature in every facet of the game.

Wilmer Flores may never become a Silver Slugger-winning All-Star like Melvin Mora was, but he certainly has the potential to establish himself as a very good baseball player.  We already know he can hit.  Let him prove to us that he can learn from his mistakes on the field.

At the very least, it would prove that the Mets are trying to learn from their mistakes off the field.  The team certainly doesn't need another Mike Bordick situation in Flushing.

Let him play!  Let him play!  (Brad Barr/USA TODAY Sports)