Mets’ Reyes Is Becoming A Superstar

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Baseball players get hot all the time, and it’s usually best not to make too much of it. Over a week or a month the best hitter in the league can hit .100, and the worst can hit .400. It’s part of the nature of the game; more than in any of the other team sports, performance, especially over a short span of time, can be as reflective of a player’s opponents, the parks in which he’s playing, the hitters behind him, and simple good fortune as it is of his talent. At the end of the season the best hitter in the league is going to be hitting .320, the worst .220, and no one’s going to remember their particular ups and downs too much.

What Jose Reyes has done lately is something else. This is not a hot streak; this is one of the brightest young talents in baseball becoming a superstar. It’s different from the usual hot streak on two counts: The quality of the achievement, and his underlying skill.

Yesterday was Reyes’s second straight four-hit game, his third in five games. Two weeks ago his average was .246, today it’s .302,and over these 13 games he’s had more games in which he racked up four hits than he has games in which he’s had one hit. (He’s done that once.)

Bill James has written a few times about the kind of signal achievements by which you can identify a unique talent; it’s one of his better points, and one that doesn’t get as much attention as it should. Basically, it’s that there is a threshold past which short-term performance can’t be dismissed as a fluke. A lot of pitchers might in the right circumstances strike out 15 hitters in a game; one capable of striking out 20 in a game, as only Roger Clemens and Kerry Wood have done, can be assumed, even if one knows nothing else about them, to have first-order, Hall of Fame talent. (If not the health to take advantage of it, as in Wood’s case.)

Reyes’s recent hot streak, I think, passes such a threshold. Any hitter can have a nice two weeks; without having thoroughly investigated the matter, I suspect only Ichiro Suzuki would be capable of hitting .542 over 59 at-bats. That’s nearly a tenth of a season. Hitting .442 over a couple of weeks happens; hitting a hundred points higher for that long is the sign of a highly unusual ability to hit for average.

This shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. By today’s standards, Reyes strikes out quite rarely, he has linedrive power, and he’s one of the two or three fastest players in the game. Even without his newfound plate discipline, that’s the profile of a .300 hitter, and over the course of a season, most .300 hitters hit .300.

Reyes does, though, have that newfound plate discipline (he surpassed last year’s walks total weeks ago), and that’s what’s made all the difference. This April, he worked the count to three balls more often than he did all of last year, and he’s kept that patience up. That’s had tangible benefits: Aside from drawing more walks, he’s been getting more strikes just by showing he won’t swing at balls, which he’s been able to line into the gaps for doubles and triples.

The hitter we saw up until two weeks ago – a .250 hitter with solid line-drive power and excellent speed, taking a walk two or three times a week – was a very good one, and given that Reyes turned 23 a few weeks ago, his performance was the kind you could project toward a Hall of Fame career along the lines of Roberto Alomar Jr.’s.

What happened to turn Reyes into Alomar, rather than a player you could see developing into Alomar? He figured out how to hit a curveball, and the league hasn’t figured that out yet. When word gets around, he’ll come back to earth, but I expect his current numbers (.302 AVG/.361 OBA/..495 SLG) are a lot closer to what you can expect out of him going forward than the .246/.315/.407 line he was sporting before his hitting streak began. We’re not only seeing a quantum leap forward in his development, but a sustainable one.

This wasn’t inevitable, but now that it’s happened, Reyes’s prospects have become unbelievably bright. Before this season, Reyes had a better chance of turning into Garry Templeton than Alan Trammell; having demonstrated that he can play at this level, precisely the opposite is now true. It’s something like what happened to David Wright last year, when he went from a first-tier prospect to a player on a clear Hall of Fame career path. (That Wright has since improved is a subject for another day; what he’s doing this year may be even more unlikely than what Reyes is doing.) To put it another way, salary considerations aside, I not only wouldn’t trade Reyes for Derek Jeter straight-up, I would laugh at the idea. His numbers will go down, but Jose Reyes has arrived.


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