NEW YORK -- Mets star Yoenis Cespedes does some amazing things on a baseball field, and in Monday night's game he amazed even some of the most veteran baseball folks. The 430-foot bolt of a home run into the upper deck in left field was one thing, the blazing 3.9 and 3.8 times to first base was even better, and taken together, it was almost too much baseball people to take.
"That's Mickey Mantle, Bo Jackson territory," one scout said of the speed-power combination Cespedes exhibited.
The power is amazing in itself, but that's almost to be expected from a two-time Home Run Derby champion. It was the speed that had baseball people buzzing into Tuesday, and it played big in the game, a 13-7 Mets victory; Cespedes beat out a fairly routine grounder to shortstop Jimmy Rollins (that was the 3.9), and he almost did it again later (that was the 3.8, or actually even a couple hundredths of a seconds faster than that) but Rollins rushed to nip him that time.
"That was incredible. That was huge," Dodgers third base coach Ron Roenicke, the former Brewers manager, said of Cespedes' sprints to first base. "And the thing was, it wasn’t on some little swing ... He's got crazy tools."
Very few right-handed hitters run a 4.0 flat to first, so few you can count them on one hand. Scouts named Mike Trout and Jose Altuve as two rare righty swingers ones who can hit that mark. The 3.8 mark is even in the range of speedy left-handed hitters, such as Billy Hamilton and Dee Gordon. That's how fast it was.
One scout said a 4.0 flat for a righty is an "8" on baseball's famed 2-to-8 scouting scale. So, after hearing Cespedes clocked a 3.8, the scout said, "A 4.0 is an 8. So that makes him a 10."
Cespedes' numbers are going to go up this winter, that's for sure. One rival GM, from a team not expected to play for the free agent Cespedes this winter, estimated he'd get $25 million a year for six years (and that's obviously a management person's estimate).
The Mets aren't a team known to go crazy for free agents, and they have a decent outfield situation now, but this is a guy they want to keep. They have seen first-hand the impact he's made, and it's somewhat reminiscent of when Mike Piazza came to town via trade. The Mets wound up locking Piazza up on a $91-million, seven-year deal. Only this, this is going to be more money, a lot more.
