One evening last January, the new manager of the New York Mets asked his best hitter to dinner. Mickey Callaway had been hired a few weeks earlier, after the Mets lost 92 games during a disastrous 2017 season. He wanted to get to know Yoenis Cespedes, who is regarded around the clubhouse as the team’s moodiest, most tempestuous player. He also wanted to persuade Cespedes to try something that would make him uncomfortable.

During his seven major-league seasons, with four teams, Cespedes nearly always hit third or fourth in the batting order. The Mets’ statistical analysts were convinced that if he hit second instead, the team would score more runs. Over the course of a season, they told Callaway, a No.2 hitter is likely to have substantially more chances to drive in runs than a No.3 hitter, despite the tradition of power hitters batting third or fourth. (Babe Ruth hit third for the 1927 Yankees, the lineup known as Murderers’ Row, and Lou Gehrig hit fourth. Does the name of the second hitter come immediately to mind?)

Soon after Cespedes sat down at Seasons 52 in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., Callaway broached the subject. “I’m the three hitter,” Cespedes said, in a tone that seemed to discourage further discourse. Callaway nodded. If Cespedes wanted to hit third, he would hit third. But Callaway wanted Cespedes to understand that, over a season, the third hitter typically comes up to the plate 55 percent of the time with two out and nobody on base, while that’s true only 30 percent of the time for the No. 2 hitter. And did Cespedes realize how many more plate appearances the second hitter gets than the third?

This was news to Cespedes. Terry Collins, Callaway’s predecessor, was known during his seven-season tenure with the Mets as a “player’s manager,” which is a baseball way of saying that he would typically insulate his players from what the front office, or anyone outside the dugout, wanted them to do. Collins had been given the same information by the team’s analysts. But he recognized that his team’s best hitter preferred to hit third, so he put Cespedes third and constructed the batting order around him. Callaway, who isn’t known as any particular kind of manager because he hasn’t managed at any level, understands that Cespedes probably won’t hit well if he’s unsettled. But if he could get Cespedes to embrace the idea, the benefits seemed clear.