PORT ST. LUCIE – Everything about Carlos Delgado last season screamed “end of the line.”
The numbers were down, in some cases plumbing career lows. The bat speed was alarmingly slow. Even Delgado’s body language signaled a 35-year-old whose best years were fading from view.
Then, to cap it off, the Mets’ veteran first baseman fractured his left hand on the final day of the season in an ugly home loss to the Marlins that capped the Amazin’s amazing collapse.
“It was a horrible end to a horrible year,” he said yesterday.
So horrible that it prompted Delgado to report to camp early this year, both visibly leaner and stubbornly determined to show that his miserable 2007 was an aberration, not a sign of things to come.
“I wasn’t as focused as I needed to be,” Delgado said of last season. “I ended up thinking too much, trying to do much and trying to fix it too quick. [Last year] was like a roller coaster – too many ups and downs.”
Delgado would love to forget an injury-filled season that saw him limited to 139 games and hit just .258 with 24 home runs, 87 RBIs and a .448 slugging percentage. The hitting numbers were all Delgado’s lowest since his first full season as a Blue Jay in 1996.
Delgado got hot late in the season, hitting .321 with four homers in September, which indicated his slump might have stemmed largely from elbow and wrist surgeries last winter and knee and hip injuries suffered during the year.
Delgado, though, shrugged off the health problems yesterday, pointing instead to poor mechanics. He insisted that he never doubted himself during the lengthy slump.
“There were stretches I felt as good as I did all season,” he said. “I was hitting it out of the park. The power and bat speed were there – it was just a matter of timing and hitting position.”
Once he was cleared to work out in early January, Delgado took apart everything about his approach to hitting and put it back together, piece by piece.
What Delgado said he found – that age wasn’t catching up to him – heartened the slugger.
“My hands are still good,” he said. “It’s just a matter of getting into [the proper] hitting position.”
The Mets, who need production out of Delgado if he wants to stay in the critical cleanup spot, don’t consider him in physical decline, either.
“I don’t have any doubt that he’s going to bounce back,” Willie Randolph said. “This is not, in my mind, any type of steady decline. He’s probably going to play three or four more years.”
Randolph said Delgado’s problems last year resulted mainly from being uncharacteristically passive at the plate and chasing too many high pitches.
“He was good at times, but he wasn’t the Delgado we all know,” Randolph said. “He couldn’t find that comfort zone and stay with it.”
If Delgado doesn’t rebound, this could be his final season as a Met. He is in the last year of his contract, and the club could decline Delgado’s $16 million option for next season should he underperform again.
Delgado said he won’t be consumed by that situation.
“I don’t have to prove anything,” he said. “The moment I step on the field, I’m going to play like it’s my last year. I don’t play that free-agent thing. I would like to continue to play and feel comfortable in New York, but you can’t play this year thinking about next year.”
bhubbuch@nypost.com