Mets call up prospect Michael Conforto after placing Michael Cuddyer on DL
— -- NEW YORK -- The New York Mets relented Friday, placing left fielder Michael Cuddyer on the disabled list after weeks of indecisiveness. The team summoned 2014 first-round pick Michael Conforto from Double-A Binghamton to replace Cuddyer in left field.
Cuddyer has been dealing with a bone bruise beneath his left kneecap for weeks and had started only six games this month.
The Mets had been hesitant to promote the 22-year-old Conforto, but with the team's offense floundering, general manager Sandy Alderson decided to bring up the 10th overall pick in last year's draft.
A former Pac-12 Player of the Year at Oregon State, Conforto had been hitting .312 with five homers and 26 RBIs in 173 at-bats at Double-A Binghamton. He went 2-for-2 and threw out a runner at the plate in the Futures Game earlier this month.
The 6-foot-1, 215-pound Conforto hails from Woodinville, Washington. His father, Mike, played linebacker at Penn State under Joe Paterno. His mother, Tracie Ruiz-Conforto, won two gold medals in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in synchronized swimming, then a silver four years later in Seoul, South Korea.
Conforto -- a prep quarterback and safety -- was recruited to play college football and baseball by some Division I schools and to play football only at Ivy League schools. He went exclusively into baseball in part because of the physical toll that football took on his father.
"I think my mom, she obviously was in a different type of sport, but she knew how hard you needed to work to become the best in the world at something that you wanted to do and something you enjoyed," Conforto said. "She always preached that to me. She always said she wasn't the most talented, but she worked the hardest. She obsessed over it. That's what she does now. She's golfing. She's doing all kinds of stuff. She's obsessing over all kinds of things. She always told me you need to obsess about the sport that you're playing and what you want to do. So I've taken that with me.
"My dad is a competitive guy. He was my football coach. He wasn't afraid to get in my face, but he always built me back up in the best way. He's lit a fire under me a few times when I needed it. So I'm happy to still have him as a role model and as a coach today."
Alderson on Thursday had noted that tempering expectations for high-profile call-ups is prudent. The immediate success of catcher Kyle Schwarber with the Chicago Cubs since his June 16 debut is the exception across baseball, Alderson maintained.
"We've got an example, a player in Chicago right now, who has done pretty well in the short term," Alderson said. "But if you look overall at young players who come to the big leagues, it's not like they make an immediate impression.
"We've been fortunate here with the pitching we've brought up and the immediate impact most of them have had. They've been pretty uniformly successful from the time they got here, with maybe one or two exceptions I'm not thinking about. They quickly established themselves. That doesn't always happen.
"And in the case of those pitchers, we've had the opportunity to pick and choose a spot for them to debut, the timing, etc. We haven't always had that luxury with some of our position players. But most young position players that come to the big leagues for the first time aren't all that successful."
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