Lucas Duda hit another home run last night. It looked sort of like this — not exactly like this, but since I can’t show you last night’s for a couple of days, I’ll just embed this one again:

Look at that. Watch it again. Revel in Lucas Duda’s grandeur.

When the Mets called up Ike Davis last season (was it really just last season?), Jerry Manuel praised his “easy power.” I liked that.

Duda appears to have the easiest power of any young player we’ve seen in Flushing in years, with a big uppercut swing as uncomplicated as his public persona. He is 6’4″ and 255 pounds and capable of smashing 450-foot home runs, but in interviews, he is almost bashful. His teammates joke about his reticence. Fans, broadcasters, bloggers and beat reporters seem eager to give him a nickname: The Dude, the Big Lebowski, the Lumberjack, the Liger.

He has all the makings of a folk hero. But will it last?

Plugging Duda’s remarkable Triple-A totals from 2010 and 2011 into the Minor League equivalency calculator yields a Major League line of .257/.334/.480, not terribly far off his .260/.328/.454 career mark in the bigs. And his small sample of at-bats in Buffalo in 2011 run through the same tool turn out a .248/.348/.467 mark, distinct mostly in batting average from his .287/.358/.472 stint with the Mets this season.

Obviously any estimator like that paints in broad strokes; I mean only to point out that there’s plenty of precedent in Duda’s Minor League resume for the production we’re now seeing.

He’s 25, so he’s likely still got a bit of improvement ahead of him. And if you want to be nice about it, you might cut him some slack for his awful first handful of games in the Majors and bump up his career OPS a tick.

In any case, if the bat’s really this good, it plays just about anywhere. Problem is, in the coming years the Mets likely won’t have much room for Duda at first base — his natural position and the one he has been playing every night of late.

Davis plays first, is a year younger than Duda and has done more than Duda to show he belongs in the Majors. There has long been talk that Davis could move to right field, but that move seems unlikely to happen anytime soon given the ankle injury that ended his 2011 season. Provided he is healthy, Davis should be back at first for the Mets in 2012 and beyond.

Terry Collins admitted last night that he had to consider using Duda in right field moving forward because Duda will likely be competing for time in that spot next spring. Might as well get to it. You can find someone else to play first. Nick Evans is still on the team, right?

It’s reasonable to doubt whether Duda could handle right field defensively, but there’s no time like right now to figure out if he can. The ability to pencil in Duda’s bat to the Mets’ 2012 lineup would give Sandy Alderson more flexibility with his offseason resources, and give Mets fans the promise of more awesome moonshots to come.