PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — The vibes, owner Steve Cohen said Monday, have been different at Clover Park. Pitchers and hitters are talking trash during live batting practice sessions, and the confidence built during a 101-win season and a strong offseason is flowing smoothly into spring.
It hasn’t quite felt that way around Darin Ruf.
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Ruf is the Mets’ embattled right-handed side of their platoon at designated hitter. Acquired for four players from the Giants in the last trade deadline, Ruf’s two-month stint with the Mets last summer was — look, we don’t go in for puns that easy. He had 10 hits in 66 at-bats, and more than half of those came in his first week. He collected just four hits in his final 48 regular-season at-bats, striking out 16 times during that stretch.
On a team without a lot of question marks, Ruf stands out as one in bold.
“Maybe (it spiraled) a little bit,” Ruf said. “As a baseball player, you always go through high points and low points. You have to have the mentality that it will turn around at some point. In such a short amount of time, it didn’t turn around for me as quickly as I would have liked it to. If you look around this locker room, you’ll see guys who have gone through 50 at-bat stretches also where they didn’t perform as well as they wanted to. Mine just happened to come with a new team in a new place, so it was magnified.”
Ruf attributed the slump, in part, to a lack of comfort in new surroundings following his midseason trade. He had never switched teams in-season before — once the struggles kicked in and the booing started in Queens, it was tough to steer out of the skid.
“In 2021 when I had my best year, it felt like every inch went my way,” he said. “Every ball that I hit went off someone’s glove or just over the fence or they just missed making a diving play. Last year a lot of the times it was the reverse for me. When you play this game long enough and as long as I have been lucky to play it, you go through ups and downs. Sometimes those inches go your way, sometimes they don’t.”
As a team, the Mets were worse against left-handed pitching last season. Ruf’s addition did nothing to change that, and the club’s offensive additions this winter included bringing back lefty Brandon Nimmo, adding lefty Omar Narváez, and signing righty Tommy Pham — the last of them a threat to seize at-bats from Ruf. New York will need someone to perform better against southpaws.
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Ruf can take solace in the relative brevity of those struggles: It was only 48 at-bats, not 480. His track record before that, especially against the left-handed pitchers he was acquired to face, was quite strong. Ruf’s career OPS against southpaws is still .891. The number he posted last season despite the late struggles, .753, wasn’t that far below the .784 Pham had against lefties in 2022; Pham and youngster Mark Vientos figure to be Ruf’s primary competition for at-bats early in the season.
That said, the early indications out of Port St. Lucie haven’t exactly been encouraging for Ruf. For one, he received a cortisone injection in his right wrist over the weekend to mitigate soreness he said he’s been dealing with for a while.
“It’s just something over the last few years that has bothered me. Ramping up for this spring, I got to a point where I thought it would be beneficial to take care of it instead of trying to grind through it another year,” he said. “As I progressed this offseason, not only was it not getting better, it was getting worse. I don’t think I could have been as productive as I need to be having to go through the way it was feeling swinging.”
Ruf expects to be swinging a bat again in a couple of days.
Second, general manager Billy Eppler didn’t reference Ruf when asked directly about him and the DH platoon over the weekend.
Asked about Darin Ruf, Billy Eppler's two-minute answer did not reference Ruf. It did not come across as a vote of confidence in the veteran. pic.twitter.com/fTA0Kp0zJ5
— Tim Britton (@TimBritton) February 18, 2023
Finally, on Tuesday manager Buck Showalter went out of his way to talk about both the playing time he would proactively seek for Pham and the improved first-base defense of Daniel Vogelbach. Both developments would come at the expense of Ruf, who bats from the same side as Pham and served as Pete Alonso’s primary backup at first base late last season.
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It’s the last week of February, and overreacting to vibes this early in spring training is a good way to misevaluate almost anything in baseball. The range of outcomes for Ruf is wide: He was an integral piece of a 107-win behemoth in 2021; he was basically unplayable down the stretch last season. Few Mets have as important a spring training in front of them.
(Photo: Wendell Cruz / USA Today)
