Mets shut down Wilmer Flores for rest of the season with broken nose

Add Flores to the list of Mets players whose season is done after an injury

Wilmer Flores will not see any action for the remainder of the season, the Mets announced on Thursday afternoon prior to their game against the Cincinnati Reds. The 26-year-old infielder broke his nose on a foul tip over the weekend, and has been sidelined since then as he received some opinions from doctors about his injury’s prognosis. The news was obviously not good as the best course of action is to just shut him down.

There’s no word from the Mets as to whether Flores will require surgery, but it seems like the team prefers to just be cautious when it comes a break like his in a season that’s just begging to end.

While Flores’ campaign will be shortened, it will still go down as his best one as a major leaguer. He appeared in 110 games, the fourth highest on the team behind Jose Reyes, Asdrubal Cabrera, and former Met Curtis Granderson.

He hit for an average of .271 over his 362 plate appearances with an on-base percentage of .307, and a slugging percentage of .488. Flores hit 18 long balls in 2017 (a new career best) and drove in 52 runners (seven RBIs short of his career high from 2015).

Flores will undoubtedly be looked as a potential starter in 2018. The question is obviously where will he play. He got most of his playing time at third base (55 games) this year, and his defense wasn’t great. He committed eight errors for a fielding percentage of .929 at third. At second base, he only played 12 games in 2017 and only committed one error while there. Maybe going forward the Mets should look to put Wilmer on that side of the infield.

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Obviously where Flores ends up will depend on what the Mets do this offseason and how they decide to address the holes this roster has. Second base may not be as big of an issue as third base, the bullpen or center field, so there’s a chance we could see Wilmer Flores as the Mets starting second baseman on Opening Day 2018.