New York Mets: Lucas Duda Turning into Terrific All-Around Hitter

Not too long ago, Lucas Duda was the epitome of a one-dimensional player.

He didn't hit for average, he didn't hit left-handed pitchers, he didn't play good defense and he wasn't a good baserunner. But he did hit for plenty of power last year with 30 home runs and 92 RBI in his breakout season.

Through the first 45 games of 2015, he has been a completely different player. He has been hitting for a much higher average than he has throughout his previous five seasons—.294 through May 25—and he has also hit six home runs, which puts him on pace to hit more than 20 for the season.

Arguably the biggest contributor to that increased average has been an improved approach against lefties. In the past, he has struggled mightily in that area. Prior to this season, he had a career .180 batting average against southpaws. It got so bad that he had to take a seat whenever a left-hander was on the mound.

But now, he isn't just holding his own against lefties, he is feasting on them. He is hitting .391 against southpaws to date, and four of his six home runs this year have come off them.

So what has catalyzed the sudden improvement?

Well, it might be because he made a philosophical change. He told Newsday that he has been a little pull-happy in the past against lefties, and he has certainly started taking the ball the other way when he finds himself locked in left-on-left battles.

Also, he spent some time with five-time All-Star and former Mets left-handed hitting first baseman Keith Hernandez during spring training. During their time together, Hernandez passed along some knowledge to Duda, and Mets manager Terry Collins gave Hernandez some credit recently in that regard.

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Another thing that has benefited Duda is his positive nature. Even as most people doubted his ability to hit lefties, he still repeatedly said he could do it. And as Craig Edwards of FanGraphs wrote in a recent article, it usually takes about 1,000 at-bats against lefties to get an accurate reading of how good a hitter someone is.

In other words, before this year, there was simply too small of a sample size to go by.

But Duda was always positive and willing to help the team in any way he could.

"As far as lefties go, I feel like in the past I've hit lefties a little better than I've shown," Duda told Kristie Ackert of the New York Daily News last December. "But if [Michael Cuddyer] has to spell me at first base versus lefties, whatever is good for the team, whatever is going to help us win, I'm all for it."

Luckily for Duda, he has performed so well against lefties that a platoon is no longer even a consideration.

He is hitting for a little less power, but he is making up for it in other areas. For example, even with the decrease in homers, Duda currently has a better OPS+ (per Baseball-Reference.com) and wRC+ (per FanGraphs) than last year, when he hit 30 round-trippers.

His 151 wRC+, which measures how many runs a player creates for his team, is well above the league average and ranks 18th in the MLB. Some of the guys right around him on the leaderboard include Michael Brantley, Justin Upton, Mike Trout and Joc Pederson. Simply put, he is becoming one of the elite pure hitters in the game.

His slugging percentage is also higher than it was last year, which comes as a surprise considering the decrease in home run power. But he has already hit more than half the number of doubles that he did last year. His 14 doubles currently rank ninth in the majors.

So Duda is not hitting as many homers as he did in the past, but he is now a much better hitter than he used to be. He is spraying line drives all over the field now as opposed to pulling high fly balls. It is an adjustment that the Mets have to be happy with.

And who knows, a guy with a thick 6'4", 255-pound frame like Duda could easily find that home run stroke sometime this season and reach the 30-homer plateau again.