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Lucas Duda Is Finally Making Himself At Home At First

Lucas Duda took the longest possible route to prominence, with misbegotten stops in the outfield and on the wrong side of a platoon. Now, finally, he's arrived.
Photo by Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports

Since the start of the 2014 season, Lucas Duda is one of 22 big league first basemen to play at least 250 games at the position. Among that cohort, his 133 OPS+ ranks sixth. The list of those ahead of him—Paul Goldschmidt, Miguel Cabrera, Jose Abreu, Anthony Rizzo, and Freddie Freeman—all enjoy various trappings of stardom in reputation and contract. (Though Freeman is just ahead of Duda in OPS+, Duda's outhomered Freeman over that time, 64-39.) So do some of those beneath him, from Adrian Gonzalez and Chris Davis to Albert Pujols and Mark Teixeira. In every way but perception, Duda is in the same tier with the best first basemen in baseball.

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But perception matters, too, and among those who express skepticism at the undeniable production is Duda himself, who finds himself either unable or unwilling to embrace the idea of himself as an established big league star just yet. "You know, that's a very small sample size, a couple of years," Duda said, sitting in front of his locker prior to a recent game at Citi Field. "It's not a decade."

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No, it's not a decade, and maybe his daily proximity to Bartolo Colon has colored Duda's judgement on what qualifies as longevity. But at a position with fewer stars than the imagination commonly conjures up—that hulking cleanup hitter nobody wants to face plays first base for only a few teams these days, with more of baseball's best hitters found in the outfield or even the middle of the diamond—Duda is somehow an afterthought. This despite a season in 2015 that both validated his 2014 success, and even improved upon it in some key areas, and helped lead his team to the World Series.

Perhaps the simple answer lies in how he got there. Many baseball players who'd faced the obstacles placed in front of Lucas Duda wouldn't have succeeded the way Duda has, let alone view it all as some kind of ancillary benefit. Then again, it's unlikely that those players would have had those obstacles placed before them by their own team. That's been Duda's lot from the start.

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Everybody hug the big and good slugging man. Photo by Anthony Gruppuso-USA TODAY Sports

The Mets selected Duda in the seventh round of the 2007 draft. Immediately, they set about trying to make him a corner utility man, mixing in first base with right and left field at the lowest levels of their system. Duda's power took a while to show up regularly, but a 23-homer campaign with Double-A Binghamton marked him as someone who could punish pitching at higher levels. The problem was, Duda's outfield sojourns simply weren't very credible, and were at times rather darkly comic. His managers throughout the system always praised his efforts, but the big man was clearly a first baseman. And the Mets had taken Ike Davis, their presumed first baseman of the future, in the first round of the 2008 draft.

That also marked the year ownership lost a tremendous amount of its money to Bernie Madoff. Accordingly, the team had two first basemen in Davis and Duda, no outfielders, and no capacity to spend. And so Duda's journey began—he spent 2012 as the team's everyday right fielder, where he registered as the worst defensive outfielder in the game and his hitting suffered as well. Still desperate, the Mets shifted him to left field in 2013, where his offense recovered. He finished with a 117 OPS+, but his defense gave back all that value and more.

There was a certain tragic beauty in the futility of Lucas Duda in those years. Here was a man clearly capable of going to another team and contributing as a first baseman or designated hitter, gamely trotting out to vast expanses he simply wasn't built to cover and doing his very best to cover them anyway. There are all sorts of half-tragic metaphors in that—those Mets teams were full of such metaphors.

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And then, the opening. Davis contracted Valley Fever, and his career went the way so many promising athletes who suffer from the disease, from Johnny Moore of the San Antonio Spurs to outfielder Conor Jackson. Which is to say that it cratered. The Mets didn't have the means to add a slugging first baseman at that point any more than they could add outfielders, but Duda was still on hand, and once Davis bottomed out the team handed him the job at last.

One thing that has never been an issue for Duda is being MUCH BIGGER THAN MATT DUFFY. Photo by Noah K. Murray-USA TODAY Sports

He's been hitting ever since. It's easy to wonder what might have been if he had first gotten the opportunity to play his natural position full time prior to age 28.

"Actually, I'm very thankful," Duda said of that period of wandering through the Citi Field outfield before largely empty stands. "First of all, to be in the big leagues, which was always a dream of mine. But my route to the big leagues was playing the outfield. Clearly, that's not my natural position. I struggled out there. But what got me to the big leagues, and where I am right now—it's very far apart. As far as confidence, as far as position, defensively and offensively. I feel like when I first got to the big leagues, I started growing, but I also have an immense amount to grow, still. Never take a day for granted. Never get complacent. And try to have fun, because we're not going to get to play this game forever, unless we're Bartolo Colon."

What lifted Duda from useful platoon player to top-tier first baseman in 2015 was his newfound ability to hit lefties. In 2014, his .915 OPS against righties dwarfed his Paul Janish-ian .516 mark against lefties. The Mets even signed John Mayberry Jr. during the 2014 offseason as a hedge against this perceived Duda weakness.

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But in 2015, his .823 OPS against righties actually trailed his .878 mark against lefties. I remember back in March of 2015 asking Duda about whether he'd changed anything in his approach against southpaws, and he'd simply answered that getting to do face them regularly would allow him to succeed against them. A year later, having done precisely that, it's easier to appreciate that all Duda really needed was to be in the lineup all the time, especially after how long that took to happen.

"I think just to have some confidence and belief in myself," Duda said on what changed against lefties for him in 2015. "It was pretty well-documented that I did struggle against lefties early in my career. But it wasn't on a daily basis. I'd be thrown in there one day, be off the next, off the next, then play against another lefty. It wasn't like that string of playing every day, facing whoever it was, every day. Seeing them more often, believing in myself, I think that's essentially it."

When you have arrived. In Queens. But still! Photo by Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports

Duda's next goal is to try and level out his performance within a season. It's a common criticism of Duda, one that doesn't make much sense when applied to a 2015 season in which he topped .915 OPS in four separate months—April, May, August and September.

"I mean, the media here in New York really likes to blow things up, expand things to maybe hint at a problem or issue you may have," Duda said when asked why he thinks that perception exists. "I understand that. I've been here a long time. I know they have a job to do, they have to write stories. I think the second month, third month I was struggling a bit, but I brought it back up. And, to me, that's baseball. The opponents are good, too. If it gets exploited, I don't take too much from it."

Even now, the constitutionally reserved Duda is slow to tell his own story, his own side of things. He's 30 years old. He'll make $6.73 million this year, a pittance for a hitter of his magnitude; his salary scale has been artificially depressed by years of wandering out of position for no good reason. Ask Duda if he considers himself an established player, and he sounds like an overprotective mother.

"I think it's kind of a question that's tough to answer," Duda said. "Baseball's such a humbling sport—anything can happen, from not producing, to a whole array of events. So for me, it's always, you have to produce the next day. Last night doesn't matter. Next day, next day, next day, next day. Complacency is not your friend in baseball. There's always someone behind you, always someone ahead of you.

"Baseball's going to have ebb and flow, ups and downs, but I want to limit the lows and expand, accentuate the highs. Is that going to happen?" Duda paused. "Mmm… maybe. This season will tell."