When Steve Cohen bought the Mets this winter, turning a penny-pinching laughingstock into baseball’s richest club, he reached into his deep pockets to change the team’s reputation with a single splashy move. The Mets didn’t just trade for Francisco Lindor. They also signed him to a $341-million contract tying him to the team for another decade.
So far, the shortstop has been Cohen’s worst bet since landing on the wrong side of the GameStop short squeeze.
Lindor’s start in Queens happens to have coincided with the worst stretch of his entire career. Entering Friday’s action, he’s batting .163, the fourth lowest among qualified hitters in all of baseball. He batted .189 in April, the lowest of any month in his career, and his paltry .542 on-base plus slugging in that month reflected a grand total of two extra base hits. Then he began May by going hitless in his first 17 at-bats of the month.
“I don’t feel like I’m in a slump,” Lindor said on April 28. “A slump, for me, is when I’m 0-for-35, 0-for-30.” That came near the start of an 0-for-26 stretch that dragged into Thursday. Now he admits he’s in a slump.
The idea behind the Mets’ sending a raft of players to the Cleveland Indians for Lindor wasn’t just fixing a position that had become a bigger headache than the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. They were securing a face of the franchise known throughout baseball as Mr. Smile. He was 27 years old, had the charisma to play in New York, and produced the highest Wins Above Replacement of any starting shortstop over the previous five seasons. Until this season, he was a career .285 hitter with three seasons of at least 30 home runs, plus electric speed and defensive prowess.
