It seems hard to believe after all that’s gone down with the Mets this offseason that the top priority of the club after the World Series ended was to sign Ben Zobrist to a multi-year deal starting with his age 35 season. When Zobrist picked the Cubs over the Mets, Sandy Alderson had to go a different route. It seems safe to say that the team would look different now if Zobrist elected to sign with New York.

But let’s focus on what the Mets did do at second base. They had several internal options yet Alderson went outside of the organization and swapped Jon Niese for Neil Walker. On the surface, this was a solid trade, the kind that doesn’t seem to happen as often as it used to in the sport. The Pirates had an extra infielder and lost two members of their 2015 rotation. The Mets lost their starting second baseman and had Zack Wheeler’s return just a few months away. It’s a trade that could help both teams immediately.

Walker replaces Daniel Murphy, who had been one of the most consistent players in recent memory. In 2012, Murphy had a .735 OPS and he followed up the next two seasons with .733 and .734 marks. And through August 16 of last year, Murphy sat with a .736 OPS. But then something happened. In the last 37 games of the regular season, Murphy put up an .856 OPS. And of course we all remember his magical NLDS and NLCS.

Now, despite his year-to-year consistency, Murphy has always been a player prone to streaks. But the difference in this late-regular-season streak was the power that it contained. Murphy had 41 hits in this span but 22 of them went for extra bases. The result was a .253 ISO and the great OPS despite a .265 BABIP. Compare that to a hot streak he had earlier in the year, where he posted an .869 OPS from May 1 to June 1. But in this stretch he had just nine of his 38 hits go for extra bases. He had just a .120 ISO and the OPS came about largely due to a .371 BABIP.

Murphy did what we had been asking him to do for years – stop going up to the plate looking for a ball he could flick to left field for a hit and instead look for a ball he could drive for extra bases. Baseball-Reference shows 63 of Murphy’s hits last year were pulled, compared to 18 that went to the opposite field. Compare that to 2014, when 37 of his hits were pulled and 41 went to the opposite field.

In a New York Post article by Mike Puma, Murphy credited new hitting coach Kevin Long for encouraging him to make changes to his approach.

“[Long] had broken down everybody’s swing, I think that was going into spring training,” Murphy said. “So, when you have somebody in the offseason who has gone through that much film to prepare himself to get to know you to prepare himself for spring training for the season, I feel like you almost have no choice automatically but to just buy in because you know he’s buying in and he’s all in.” Murphy said a simple change in mechanics started the transformation. “He sent me some video about, ‘I think you can use your legs a little more, you put your foot down, you’re late,’ ” Murphy said. “I said, ‘This guy is talking my language, because I have been. I’ve spent my entire career late to the ball.’

It will be curious to see what Long has in mind for Walker.

Most of us have not had the chance to watch Walker nearly as much as Murphy, being Mets fans and all. So, we can look to his stat page to see if anything jumps out. Obviously, the big thing is that Walker has a pretty big left/right split, with a lifetime OPS 145 points higher as a lefty batter. We could call for the Mets to run a platoon at second base and call it a day. But there’s been no indication from the brain trust that the club has any intention of doing that. So, what else is there?

Walker has a little bit of the same trouble as Murphy did, where he’s not trying to pull as much as he should, particularly from his weak half of the plate. As a RHB, Walker has 58 hits and an 1.115 OPS when he pulls the ball, compared to 35 hits and a .707 OPS when he goes the other way. The plurality of his hits batting righty go up the middle but that’s where his results have been the worst. There he’s got 84 hits and a .544 OPS.

Even in 2014, the only time in the last five years he did well as a righty batter, we see he excelled when pulling the ball. That year, he had a 1.381 OPS when he pulled the ball, compared to a .620 mark when he hit up the middle and a .588 mark when he went the other way.

It’s a common story for batters to do better when they pull the ball, especially RHB. In 2015, righties had an OPS 377 points higher than when they hit the opposite way. Walker’s lifetime totals are right about that range. But righties tend do better hitting the ball up the middle (.784 OPS in 2015) than they do the opposite way and Walker is not typical in this regard.

So, it will be curious to see if Long has Walker look to sell out and pull the ball whenever he can as a righty. Or, if this is what Walker is doing already, and he’s making weak contact on balls up the middle, if Long has him go the opposite way and has Walker look to hit more balls to right field as a RHB.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Walker’s splits is how well he fares hitting fly balls. Obviously, line drives are the balls that end up with the best results. Typically you have a good average on ground balls and more power with fly balls, with the extra slugging making flies more valuable. Last year in the NL, the league had a .567 OPS on fly balls compared to a .511 OPS on grounders.

In his career, Walker is slightly above average on grounders, where he has a .532 OPS. But he really excels when hitting fly balls, where he has a .782 OPS, a whopping 215 points above last year’s league average.

And this isn’t a case of one or two outliers. In four of his six seasons in the majors, Walker posted an OPS on fly balls between .826 and .903 – which seems amazing given that these are not huge samples year to year. Interestingly in 2011, the year he had the most fly balls with 177, he had a .903 OPS, the highest mark of his career. And if there was an outlier, it happened last year when with 133 fly balls, Walker had a .585 OPS.

It seemingly took Murphy four-plus months last year to turn Long’s suggestions into results. And he claims to have bought in on the changes from Day One. It would be most interesting to hear if Long has any changes for Walker and if Walker embraces those and tries to put them into action.

Of course, we may not be privy to whatever suggestions Long makes. If that’s the case, I’ll be looking to see if Walker looks to avoid going up the middle as a RHB and if he hits more balls in the air. B-R has Walker lifetime hitting the ball in the air, either on a line drive or a fly, on non-bunts at a 58% rate.

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