Mets Season in Review: Juan Lagares

Areas for improvement

Where Lagares can improve is seeking more pitches early in counts to attack. For his career, Lagares is a .324 hitter when the count is either 0-0, 0-1, 1-0, or 1-1. That includes a .317 clip on the first pitch of an at-bat. By contrast, Lagares is a .222 hitter in all other counts.

In fact if you take even more data, Lagares is just 5-for-29 career on 2-0 counts. When he’s gotten to 3-0, Lagares almost always works a walk (only one career at-bat with a 3-0 count). Deep into counts (2-2 and 3-2 combined), Lagares is just a .240 hitter.

Of course, that approach could put Lagares on base more often which means more opportunities to steal bases. Lagares isn’t a premium base stealer by any means, but he’s normally pretty efficient in that category. In his best season at the plate which was 2014, Lagares was 13-for-17 in steals-to-attempts.

For his career, Lagares has 30 steals in 42 tries. This is all while hitting .259 for his career. The one season he spiked above those numbers, we saw a career high in stolen bases. That’s something the Mets could use more of from Lagares since there isn’t much other speed on the roster.