Bo Bichette Is Finding His Groove and Hopefully the Mets Will Be Soon to Follow

New York Mets star infielder Bo Bichette has gotten plenty of criticism for failing to produce the numbers that a $126 million player should. Coming over as one of the star offseason signings of the team, he has slumped to a 61 wRC+ in 28 games and 123 plate appearances.

That performance is not worthy of a man who hit .311 last year with a 134 wRC+. However, and even though it may not feel like it at times, Bichette has actually improved a bit in recent games. 

He has hit safely in five of his last six games, and in nine of his last 11. Bichette had just two hits and one walk in his first five games, covering 24 plate appearances, but since the calendar flipped to April, he hasn’t been as bad as you might think, as his .276 batting average, 92 wRC+, and .332 xwOBA (prior to the doubleheader against the Rockies) are all passable. That’s certainly not vintage Bichette, but not the disaster it might seem sometimes.

Bo Bichette's Shocking Power Outage

There are a few problems with Bichette’s play up to this point, though. The first and most obvious one is that the power hasn’t been there this year, with just one homer in 123 trips to the plate. A career-high 54.8 percent groundball rate might help explain this; it’s hard to hit the ball out of the park if more than half of your batted balls are to the ground.

Bichette is not exactly a pull-heavy slugger, but he is running a six percent pull AIR %, one of the lowest figures in the league. That may also be contributing to the power drought.

On top of the power outage, Bichette is also striking out significantly more often than last year. His 22.0-percent strikeout rate is not exactly alarming, but for a guy with little power to speak of, it’s definitely noisy. It’s only slightly higher than his career 19.5 percent mark, but considerably worse than last year’s 14.5 percent.

Why Bo Bichette Could Be About To Turn His Season Around

Even if the totals and the season-long rate stats don’t look good, Bichette might be on the verge of putting together a strong run if the Mets are patient. He is still consistently hitting the ball hard, with a 45.2 percent mark that ranks in the 69th percentile, which is pumping up his expected batting average to .288 (85th percentile). His 76th percentile average exit velocity is also promising.

The best thing of all is that the production is starting to match the underlying stats, even if the sample is tiny. Over his last four games prior to Sunday's doubleheader, Bichette slashed a strong .353/.353/.471 with a 133 wRC+. Over that span, he had two doubles, four runs scored, three RBI, and a stolen base.

On Thursday, he had this incredibly clutch bases-clearing, go-ahead double that helped the Mets win their second game in a row after their 12-game losing streak. Of course, you could see in the celebration that he cares.

To put it simply: Bichette needs to start pulling some balls and hitting them in the air with authority, whether they are line drives or fly balls. He is not fully out of the woods until we see him sustain a nice run over a significant stretch, but he has started to show some signs of life, which is more than we can say about a Mets team that just got swept by the Rockies.

Don’t expect him to knock 30 balls out of the park, but this is still a 20-homer, .300-batting average type of hitter in his prime. Expect the numbers to start resembling that player in due time.