The early numbers are, once again, not pretty for Francisco Lindor.
He snapped a skid of 11 hitless at-bats with a seventh inning single in his fourth trip to the plate in the Mets’ 7-1 loss to the Diamondbacks on Thursday night at Citi Field.
He now has just eight hits all season, and just three of those have been for extra bases.
Lindor knows he’s off to another rough first few weeks to a season, but he insists it’s not because of the surgery to remove the hamate bone in his left hand in February.
He can point to the pair of hits, including a double, he had Tuesday against Arizona, with three balls over 100 mph.
Lindor noted the ball he hit off Pittsburgh’s Mitch Keller on March 28, a shot that went to deep center at 106 mph, as proof that the procedure, which can rob hitters of power, is not to blame for any slow start.
“They said the power was gonna be down, and I’m hitting the ball just as hard as I have before,” Lindor said before Thursday’s game against the Diamondbacks at Citi Field. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Despite his confidence that he will hit like he typically does, Lindor acknowledged he still feels the effects of the injury “here and there, but I’m good.”
“Of course you worry about not being the same,” Lindor said of his mindset early in the season. “You do grips and strength tests, and you don’t know if it’s strong enough or what it once was. But then you feel you’re hitting the ball like normal and you think you’re fine. That’s where I am.”
The results so far haven’t followed. That’s nothing new for Lindor, no stranger to shaky Aprils, which is what Carlos Mendoza called this one.
“The injury has nothing to do with it,” the manager said of the fact Lindor, who is now Thursday just 8-for-51 (.157) with three extra-base hits and no runs batted in. “He’s fine. Throughout his career, only last year were his numbers in April good. He’s hit a lot of balls hard that have gone right at people.”
But with Juan Soto sidelined with a calf injury and Jorge Polanco dealing with Achilles tendinitis, Lindor’s lack of production — along with Bo Bichette’s — is especially ill-timed.
“I’d like to contribute more to the team in this spot, but my struggles are not because of my hand,” Lindor said. “I have to put more quality at-bats together every day and the results will come.”
Asked if the absence of Soto has added more pressure, Lindor said, “No. Juan is irreplaceable. The stuff he does on the field and in the batter’s box, I can’t make up. None of us can.”
But Lindor can certainly do more than he has in the early going.
“You understand these starts are gonna happen sometimes,” Lindor said. “And at the beginning of a season, it looks worse because you don’t have numbers to make it better. It’s part of it. But you have to have a sense of urgency, which I do, to get going. You can’t just say, ‘I’ll get there.’ ”
And to Mendoza’s point, Lindor didn’t have a multi-hit game last year until the ninth game of the season, and in 2024 he was a mess at the plate well into April and slumped all the way to the middle of June.
“He’s an aggressive hitter,” Mendoza said. “He’s going to swing. He’ll get out of it and be fine.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
