Reese Kaplan -- Sometimes You Are All Alone Yet You Are Right

While many of us have in our baseball fan careers championed guys who simply never produced at the level we fully expected, every now and then we advocate for a player who doesn’t get the accolades from other fans and the media but inevitably we have a moment of baseball erudition that gets buried under the Johnny-come-lately crowds who now cheer the guy they’d long ago abandoned.  Our early enthusiasm for this athlete is long forgotten but inside we know we were right from the very beginning.

Back in 2022 one of the Mets’ most highly regarded prospects made his brief appearance in the majors for the first time and over his 42 plate appearances he hit 2 homers but managed just a .184 average.

Still, they saw enough and had a need so he made the return the following year and this time got 389 opportunities to swing and improved slightly with a final tally of 9 home runs and a .212 batting average. 

In 2024 it was a pretty much foregone conclusion that Brett Baty was “the guy” despite not having done much at the major league level.  He was given that third base role and while holding a reputation as a decent fielder was struggling.  What didn’t change was the offensive ineptitude.  In 179 plate appearances he did hit 4 HRs and raised the average to .229 but the front office apparently had seen enough and sent him packing to Syracuse.

The forgotten guy in all of this waiting for the next David Wright is named Mark Vientos.  Now he had gotten small chances in previous years, too, but people focused so much on his defensive awkwardness that he never got to play enough to see whether or not his bat was for real.  I’m probably a little more impatient when it comes to cultivating baseball talent but if someone is not getting it done on the field I have already looked for alternatives and am ready to test them out.  

While Baty was demonstrating that his adjustment to the majors was a major hill to climb, Mark Vientos remained either in Syracuse or on the bench not getting starting assignments.

Perhaps it was David Stearns who did not have the prospect investment nor playing history of Brett Baty, but at a relatively early extended trial he was ready to send Baty back to figure out whatever it was that was not working for him in Queens.  At the time he had not too many infield options and settled upon Mark Vientos and his questionable glove to see how he would handle major league pitching. 

Now to be fair, Vientos did struggle during his early trials in the majors just as Baty did.  In 2022 he hit just a single home run in his scattered 36 ABs.  Come 2023 he as again the odd man out until the August/September time frame when he began playing regularly.  

The season ending numbers overall were not great but in 218 ABs he hit 9 HRs and batted .211.  Bear in mind that his totals included his awful first part of the season when he played at best once a week.  When he started getting penciled in regularly his bat started to come alive in the last 6-8 weeks of the season.

This year after the failed Baty experiment they turned to Vientos and all you heard initially was his glove, his glove and his glove.  What people weren’t noticing is that like Francisco Alvarez who noticeably improved the more he played, Vientos slowly started making progress on his work as a fielder. 

What no one expected was what kind of hitter he would morph into when playing regularly.  Right now if we still consider Jose Iglesias a reserve, Vientos is leading all Mets regulars in batting average with a .280 mark.  He’s played in 79 games (about half a season) and already has delivered 20 HRs and 51 RBIs.  

Perhaps most surprisingly he leads the club (over both Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor) in OPS at .894.  He’s also leading in slugging at .564.  It’s no wonder that despite his defensive issues he still has proven himself worth 2.7 WAR, halfway to what Lindor has done while being a superlative defensive player and baserunner. 

Nowadays when I remind people I was advocating for more opportunities for Vientos in 2022 and 2023 folks claim I am front running.  I’ll accept their mistaken characterization because in my head and heart I know that I was right all along.