Cabrera making changes reminiscent of Murphy

If the New York Mets finish the 2016 season as World Series champions, they’ll have done it with a drastically different approach than the one with which they began the year.

See, New York is something like a bat-first team now. Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey and Steven Matz won’t pitch again until 2017. And while the Mets still have Noah Syndergaard and a suddenly impressive bullpen, it’s the offense that’s really carried their second-half resurgence.

Since the All-Star break, the Mets have the Majors’ seventh-best Weighted Runs Created Plus, an all-inclusive offensive stat which sets “100” as “league average.” Over the past month (through games of Wednesday), they’ve had the second-best offense by that same measure, at 117.

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And so, barring some unforeseen heroics from the likes of Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo, it seems that the World Series aspirations in New York that began with the starting rotation now fall heavily on the starting lineup. If the Mets want to win this thing, they might have to slug their way there, the way Daniel Murphy nearly did for them last postseason. But even though the super-charged Murphy will now play for the rival Nationals in the postseason, the Mets suddenly have a super-charged middle infielder of their own in Asdrubal Cabrera.

While guys like Curtis Granderson and T.J. Rivera have been huge at the plate for the Mets lately, nobody has been bigger than Cabrera. After returning from the 15-day disabled list following a knee injury in August, Cabrera has posted a slash line of .366/.427/.687 over 150 plate appearances, running a Brian Dozier-like (that’s a compliment now) .321 isolated slugging percentage and a 197 wRC+. Few hitters have been better over the past month. Few have been better over the entire second half. And Cabrera, himself, is on a run like none other in his career:

Cabrera has reached a new height, and when players reach new heights, it’s reason to wonder if anything has fundamentally changed. Beyond the platinum-blond hair, that is.

With Murphy on our minds, and Kevin Long still the Mets’ hitting coach, I was curious if we could find any shades of Murphy in this current Cabrera breakout. As the Murphy story goes, he …

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