Bo Bichette is now the full-time third baseman for the New York Mets, but he’s never played the position before. It comes with a host of new challenges, and the ball found him with one of them in his spring training debut against the Miami Marlins on Saturday.
The play happened in the fourth inning during an at bat by Marlins second baseman Connor Norby. It was a ground ball down the line that forced Bichette to back up to play the hop, and while he fielded the ball smoothly, the throw didn’t go as well. It was up the line and pulled Jose Rojas off the bag, according to Manny Randhawa of MLB.com, and Norby had himself what may or may not have been an infield hit.
Mets manager Carlos Mendoza didn’t mind this, however. He expects plays like this to happen with his new first baseman, who’s still learning the position.
“He took a good angle there,” Mendoza said. “He created a long hop, which is the right play. … We have to stay on top of him.”
Bichette said he’s still “experimenting” with his positioning, and he was in constant communication with the coaching staff during Saturday’s game. (This is called hand-holding for those unfamiliar with the technical baseball term.)
“The deeper you play, the more range you have,” he said. “It depends on the situation of the game and who’s hitting. I think you see a lot of the great third basemen in our game playing as deep as they can, so I’ll be figuring out what that means for me.”
What it means for the Mets is still unclear. These are things that prospects already know when they get to the low minors, so most of what happens after that is mostly about fine-tuning and learning the nuances required at the next level.
But Bichette is still learning the basics. The throwing error isn’t suprising, as Bichette’s arm was part of the reason he was moved from short to second.
What happened against the Marlins certainly isn’t a big deal, as it’s where Bichette is at the end of spring training, not the start, that matters most. What matters even more than that, though, is if Bichette starts making understandable miscues in real games in April and May.
The Mets lost a ton of games in the second half of last season because they couldn’t make basic plays, and that was what GM David Stearns was trying to fix this offseason.
Bichette’s presence at third as a prospective regular undercuts that strategy, especially since the Mets already had a viable third baseman in Brett Baty, who’s now on the shelf with a hamstring issue, perhaps because he was forced to learn a new position as well. It will be interesting to see how far the Mets are willing to go with this experiment as Bichette goes through what’s basically an instructional-league learning process.