3 former NY Mets players who were One Hit Wonders

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Every so often there is a player who comes along and becomes the new phenomenon of the New York Mets. Some of them are actually promoted as a prospect while others are a bit of a surprise. And when they burst on the scene and have immediate success, it will seem like the Mets have found a player to be entrenched for a generation. Way too often, though, those hopes are dashed very quickly. Sometimes those successes are short-lived. Sometimes those players give the impression that they will be around for a long time when, in reality, they are only good for one season.

1) Mike Vail

Mike Vail came up during August of the 1975 season, a season in which he would end up winning Minor League Player of the Year playing for the Tidewater Tides. He would continue his great season with the Mets by hitting in 23 consecutive games, a modern day record for rookies. In 38 games for the Mets, he hit .302 with 3 home runs and 17 RBI.

Vail’s early success made it easy for the club to get rid of fan favorite Rusty Staub. The Mets needed an excuse to trade Staub and it became one of the ill-fated swaps in Mets history, when they got a washed up Mickey Lolich in return from the Detroit Tigers. Vail would be anointed as the next big star of the Mets but that would never happen. Vail badly injured his foot playing basketball just before the start of the 1976 season and would never live up to the billing.

The 1975 debut would be the only Mets highlight of Vail’s career. He would spend time with seven different clubs during his Major League career and a couple of productive seasons with the Chicago Cubs, but he never achieved the level of success he was believed to have after suffering the foot injury.

2) Ike Davis

Ike Davis came up early in 2010 and immediately proved what everyone was touting, that he was a Major League star. He hit .264 that season with 19 home runs and 71 RBI and he was playing first base like Keith Hernandez and John Olerud.

During the 2011 season, he got off to a good start but had his season ended very early on due to an ankle injury. He came back and did hit 32 home runs in 2012 but his average dropped to .227 and he began to struggle. Those struggles continued mightily in 2013 and he lost his job to Lucas Duda and finally found himself back in Triple A.

Davis lost his stroke and feel for the game, and surely lost his confidence as well. The Mets basically gifted him to the Pittsburgh Pirates and he bounced around to the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees.

Davis never regained his stroke, nor came remotely close to reaching the pinnacle he did in his first season with the Mets. His inability to duplicate his offensive achievements had him attempt to re-establish himself as a pitcher. Davis was out of baseball at the age of 29.

3) Juan Lagares

Juan Lagares was a shortstop and the Mets converted him to centerfield. And if you saw him play centerfield, you would say he was the second coming of the Atlanta Braves’ Andruw Jones. He was a joy to watch.

He arrived to the Mets in 2013 and was not expected to hit right away. He had a fairly good season and replicated that in 2014. But his first year as the anointed starting centerfielder of the New York Mets was 2015, and the Mets felt that they had seen enough to hand him a four-year contract extension beginning at the start of the 2016 season.

And it looked like the Mets had done the right thing as Lagares looked like the real deal during that 2015 season. And as every Mets will recall, the deadline acquisition of Yoenis Cespedes would propel the Mets to the World Series. It would also relegate Lagares to the bench and a defensive replacement role.

Once Lagares was cast aside, whether it was the right decision or not, he would never be an effective player again. His hitting was always a bit suspect, but suddenly his fielding became as bad as his hitting. What if he had remained a shortstop? One can only wonder.

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