JASON A DREAM: Jason Bay said he understands he has not done for the Mets what he was signed to do in 2010, but intends to change that this season. (Paul J. Bereswill)
PORT ST. LUCIE — Jason Bay has got it all figured out — sort of.
The underachieving left fielder arrived at Mets camp yesterday ready to forget about the last two seasons and give his team some bang for its $66 million.
“For everything I’ve done in my career, I haven’t done any of it in New York,” Bay said. “I completely understand that. I would like nothing more than to show everybody why I’m here, what I’ve done in the past and just kind of be me.”
Bay is coming off a season in which he hit .245 with 12 homers and 57 RBIs. That gave him 18 homers combined in his first two seasons with the Mets, or exactly half his total from 2009, when he hit 36 bombs for the Red Sox and entered the MVP conversation.
Bay’s 2010 season with the Mets was cut short two months after he sustained a concussion crashing into the fence at Dodger Stadium. Last year, he brought a new hitting approach to spring training and then scrapped it weeks later because he wasn’t getting results. Nothing seemed to work until it was too late to resurrect his season.
But Bay may have learned something in the process.
“I’m a pull hitter,” he said. “I can hit the ball the other way, but that’s not my bread and butter. I think at one point I was trying to be perfect and hit every pitch in every spot the right way and I wasn’t hitting anything.”
Manager Terry Collins said he expects Bay to bat fifth in the lineup, behind David Wright and Ike Davis, and hopes he won’t have to change that plan. Last season, Bay was shuffled around the lineup as his struggles mounted. In June, he fell to as low as seventh in the batting order.
“You don’t like to do that to those kinds of guys,” Collins said. “When you’re in the status of Jason Bay and David Wright, when you come to the ballpark there should be no doubt in their mind where they’re hitting. They get comfortable in it, they understand it, they get themselves prepared and then you let them go do their thing.”
Bay tried to downplay the notion he will automatically thrive with the new drawn-in fences at Citi Field.
“If everything operated in a vacuum you would say, ‘Hey, here’s all the fly balls I hit,’ whether it’s me or anybody else, and this would translate into ‘X’ more home runs,” Bay said. “That’s easy to say on paper. Not just for me, but for other guys.
“It’s probably just going to help out a little bit. I don’t think it’s going to make a difference between having a down or an average year to a phenomenal one. But it’s probably going to play, I would guess, fair. It’s probably going to help a little bit.”
At least Bay has kept his sense of humor. When asked about changes to his hitting approach, he joked that he’s now batting left-handed, after discovering he’s been on the wrong side of the plate.
He also believes he’s capable of becoming the Jason Bay of pre-2010.
“You go out for batting practice sometimes and do some things and it’s there,” Bay said. “It’s not there consistently. Toward the end of the season it started to show itself. I just have to find a way to keep it on.”