This Week in Mets: Is Francisco Lindor having the best season ever by a Mets position player?

“The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’.”
—“Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Thomas Hardy

You know you’re having a special season when you’re getting M-V-P chants on the road.

Francisco Lindor’s two-homer performance Saturday earned those plaudits in San Diego and served as a reminder of the remarkable season Lindor is putting together. After Sunday’s game, he’s hitting .269 with a .339 on-base percentage and .487 slugging percentage — while playing his customarily excellent defense at shortstop.

Lindor thus has about as strong an MVP case in the final week of August as any Met has in years. (I knew this was a lost cause in 2018, though any Mets fans in Phoenix this week can thank the Arizona Republic’s Nick Piecoro for voting Jacob deGrom first that season.)

On the other hand, Lindor has the misfortune of putting together this remarkable season at the same time that Shohei Ohtani has a reasonable chance to become the first player in the sport’s history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season. (And you thought this would be the easy year to win MVP over Ohtani since he isn’t pitching.)

There will be time to dissect Lindor’s case against Ohtani over the final month, especially since it will largely be predicated on the shortstop leading New York into the postseason.

What I’m wondering right now is this: Is Lindor in the midst of the greatest season ever by a Mets position player?

The chief competition here, in my view, are David Wright in 2007, Carlos Beltrán in 2006, John Olerud in 1998 and Darryl Strawberry in 1988.

Wright’s 8.4 wins above replacement are the most by a position player in club history. If not for the Mets’ brutal September collapse, he’d have become the first Met to win MVP. (And don’t blame Wright for that September: He hit .352/.432/.602 that month.) It was his only 30-30 season, and he won the Gold Glove at third base. He did everything well.

Strawberry and Tom Seaver are the only Mets to finish second in MVP balloting; the outfielder did it in 1988, placing behind Kirk Gibson. As the product of a different offensive era, Strawberry’s offensive numbers don’t jump out like others do: a .269 average and .366 on-base percentage but a league-leading .545 slugging percentage.

By most measures, Olerud owns the finest offensive season in club history. He set franchise records for average (.354) and on-base percentage (.447), and his slugging percentage (.551) is top 10 in team history. That ’98 season is tops for the Mets in wRC+ (adjusted weighted runs created) and fourth in OPS+. He only placed 12th in MVP balloting, which seemed crazy to me until I remembered what else happened in the National League in 1998.

Beltrán’s 2006 season has generally been my favorite of this group: He played at a nine-win pace for the season but missed 22 games. He hit .275/.388/.594 while playing Gold Glove defense at a premium position in center field. He was the best player on the Mets’ first division winner in 18 years.

The case for Lindor

Heading into Sunday’s action, Lindor had been worth 6.5 wins above replacement, according to FanGraphs. That’s already tied for the 11th-best season by a Mets position player and puts Lindor on pace to join Wright and Olerud and become just the third Met batter with more than eight wins above replacement in a season.

Lindor does it differently than Wright or Olerud; he’s closer to Beltrán with how comprehensive his contributions are. He plays Gold Glove-caliber defense at a premium position, anchoring an otherwise mediocre defensive infield for New York. He’s carried the club offensively since at least late May, his OPS getting better with each passing month. He’s been a leader in the clubhouse — think back to that meeting in late May — and a constant presence in the lineup, playing in every game this season and starting all but one. He’s shown a penchant for strong Septembers while in Queens; if he delivers another to get the Mets to the playoffs, the title could be his.

The case against Lindor

Lindor’s offensive numbers aren’t quite in line with what some other Mets have done in their best seasons. And if his competition here were more one-dimensional players, he could make up for that with his outstanding defense. But Wright and Beltrán are Gold Glove winners, Olerud was good enough to win it.

And Beltrán’s season, of course, ended with a division title and a postseason berth. Without a hot September, without a postseason berth in a six-team field, it’s tough to pick Lindor over others here.

But hey, this is still a better conversation than the one happening in the comments section in May, about how much money the Mets would have to eat to trade him.

The exposition

The Mets blew a late lead Sunday, capping off an ultimately disappointing split with the Padres. New York is 68-63, 2 1/2 games behind Atlanta for the final wild card.

The Diamondbacks swept the Red Sox in Boston and have won six in a row and 36 of their last 49. (That’s a 119-win pace over 162.) Arizona owns the top wild card at 75-56 and is within three games of the Dodgers in the NL West.

The White Sox lost their 100th game on Sunday — the first team to lose 100 of their first 131 games since the A’s — the Philadelphia A’s of 1916. (The ‘62 Mets were two games ahead of this pace.) Chicago has lost 33 of its last 37 games. It finishes its wraparound series with the Tigers on Monday before hosting the Rangers for three games.

The pitching possibles

at Arizona

LHP Sean Manaea (9-5, 3.48 ERA) v. RHP Brandon Pfaadt (8-6, 4.08 ERA)
RHP Luis Severino (9-6, 3.84) v. LHP Eduardo Rodriguez (2-0, 3.94)
RHP Tylor Megill (2-5, 5.17) v. RHP Ryne Nelson (9-6, 4.29)

at Chicago (AL)

LHP David Peterson (8-1, 2.85) v. RHP Jonathan Cannon (2-8, 4.57)
LHP Jose Quintana (6-9, 4.36) v. RHP Davis Martin (0-2, 3.22)
LHP Sean Manaea v. LHP Garrett Crochet (6-9, 3.64)

Injury updates

Red = 60-day IL
Orange = 15-day IL
Blue = 10-day IL

• Not listed here but still impactful: Brett Baty is likely done for the season after breaking his left index finger. Baty had a chance to be a part of the Mets’ September roster by the end of this week. Instead, he’s out for four to six weeks.
• It looked briefly as if Blackburn may have avoided the injured list when X-rays on his right wrist came back negative. But he still felt pain trying to play catch Sunday, so the right-hander is on the IL with Megill likely to take his spot on Thursday in Phoenix.
• Scott has been playing catch for more than a week and could progress to a mound soon. It’s important for Scott and the Mets that he return to the big leagues this season to get a sense of how his elbow feels heading into the offseason.
• As I reported last week, the Mets haven’t closed the door on Senga returning for the final week of the regular season. Next up on his to-do list: throwing the ball while standing. A regular-season return remains a long shot, similar to Edwin Díaz last season.

Minor-league schedule

Triple A: Syracuse at Lehigh Valley (Philadelphia)
Double A: Binghamton at Hartford (Colorado)
High A: Brooklyn at Winston-Salem (Chicago, AL)
Low A: St. Lucie v. Jupiter (Miami)

Wild-card schedule

Arizona (75-56): v. NYM³, v. LAD⁴
San Diego (74-58): at STL⁴, at TB³
Atlanta (70-60): at MIN³, at PHI⁴
San Francisco (66-66): at MIL³, v. MIA³
Chicago (65-66): at PIT³, at WSH³

Last week in Mets

Trivia time

What’s the best season by a Mets position player that I didn’t list here? There is one right answer (in my mind).

(I’ll reply to the correct answer in the comments.)

(Top photo of Francisco Lindor: Denis Poroy / Getty Images)