What’s Up with the Mets? 💭

OF Carson Benge, AJ Ewing and Luis Torrens are finalists for NL Gold Glove Awards
Former Mets manager Carlos Mendoza is joining the Phillies coaching staff for 2027 (FanSided)

An honest evaluation on the old baby Mets ✍🏻

In sports, the formula is generally simple, although these days it has gotten more scientific— if you have good players, you’re going to have a good team. If you don’t, you won’t have a good team.

That simple formula applies to all levels of sports of all ages. It’s about talent in the end. The science and the metrics help us understand why a given player is talented or not, what specific areas of whichever game they’re playing they’re good and not good at.

Sure, players who weren’t good before might be now, and the same is true in the reverse. For some, the candle burns for a decade or longer. Others, they’re lucky if they get five years in before being shunned from their respective sport. And that is mostly true at all levels, whether it’s for a youth athlete or one that ends up in the professional ranks.

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For the Mets, this couldn’t be more relevant. Between Mark Vientos and Marcus Semien specifically, they had two of the worst 20 baseball players in the sport on their roster, with Vientos taking the cake with a -1.1 fWAR, tied for the worst in baseball.

It was these poor performances, in part, that contributed to the Mets’ poor season.

We already talked about Semien here; we know what Stearns is thinking on this date anyway with second base, so we will leave it at that.

Then there is Brett Baty, who for the first five months of the season was also in the conversation for being among the worst players in baseball, by fWAR’s measurement anyway. But, like he always seems to do, Baty gave the Mets a taste of what he is capable of being in this league over the season’s final month. His ascent this year started later than it did in 2025, when he had a strong 3–4 months stretch to close out the season. From August 22 through September 27, a span of 30 games to end the season, Baty hit .352/.427/.592 with eight doubles, three home runs, and 18 RBI, ranking him the 37th best player in the game during that stretch.

The problem for Baty was what he did before August 21, which of course spanned most of the season.

Over his first 113 games of the season, Baty hit .212/.285/.327 with 14 doubles, a triple, eight home runs, and 38 RBI, a span of 391 plate appearances. He had a 0 fWAR through August 20, ranking him the 10th-worst player in MLB by that measurement (min. 350 PA).

Combine that with Semien’s -0.4 fWAR through August 20, and that’s two of the bottom ten players in the game for nearly five full months of the season.

So, which one is it at this point? Quite frankly, nobody really knows. Even David Stearns said at the end of the season they need more consistency out of Baty if he’s going to be a regular player. That consistency has been largely absent for him since he arrived in the Major Leagues in 2023.

Through the end of August, it just felt like Baty’s time was running out with the Mets. He is heading into his first year of arbitration and, again, he was among the least valuable players in the game heading into the last month of the year. And while nobody should ever read into a player’s performance in September, especially that of Baty, who just hasn’t been that good in the big leagues, he probably earned himself another shot in a utility role in 2026. He demonstrated versatility at all four infield and two outfield positions this past year, although the only positions he demonstrated positive fielding run values were at second and third base, the latter being his natural position.

The question I had all year long about Baty was how much bouncing around the field might have been affecting his performance at the plate. Of course, there’s no real evidence he can sustain any sort of consistency in this league yet, but he was being asked to learn a bunch of new positions at the same time and evolve as a Major League hitter as well. To be fair, Baty put himself in a position where he has to find playing time at multiple positions due to his inability to show any consistency at any single position, but it’s fair to wonder about his ability to do all of these things well at the same time.

After all, being a utility player isn’t for everyone. It’s not for most people at that.

It’s hard to believe the Mets had three of the worst players on the field at the same time for long stretches of the season, but given that, it’s completely unsurprising the Mets were one of the worst teams in baseball for most of the year.

Even so, if I were to bet, I would expect Baty to be on this team in 2027. I am not sure how much more rope he has left, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to non-tender him this fall.

As for Vientos, that’s an entirely different story.

As I said, if the players are good, the team is good. And if the players are bad, the team is bad. Short of five months in the big leagues, Vientos has not been a good player, and his performance on both sides of the ball, whether he is at third base or at first, is making it really, really hard to keep him around.

His power is unquestionably tantalizing. The problem is, that’s pretty much the only thing he does well, and he seems to only do that well against left-handed pitching. He did produce an .513 slugging percentage against left-handed pitching this year, but only a .308 (!!!) slugging percentage against right-handed pitching.

He chases way too much, he swings-and-misses way too much, he doesn’t walk a lot, he strikes out a ton, he can’t get to anything down in the zone, he can’t hit a breaking ball, and he can’t lay off breaking balls running away from him, either. He produced an OPS+ of 81, 19 points below league average with a .212/.258/.394 line with 11 doubles, 13 home runs, and 41 RBI with 15 walks and 71 strikeouts over 295 plate appearances.

What’s worse, there has been no growth, no adjustment, nothing.

None of that even touches on his defense, either, which is just unplayable and that’s only being fair. At first base, he produced a -8 fielding run value and -9 outs above average in 2026.

Vientos was unplayable to the point Andy Green told him when he came back from the injured list late in the year that he was going to have to earn his way back onto the field. That pretty much spells it out as far as where Vientos stands even on a broken roster on this date. Where will he stand when the Mets make external acquisitions this winter?

The part that bothers me the most about the Vientos situation is that the Mets knew exactly what they had in him not only after the 2024 season, but after the 2025 season as well. Sure, he was a dynamic power source for them down the stretch and into the playoffs in 2024, which is what earned him an opportunity in 2025. But, again, they knew he was a minus defensive player then, yet they were still considering him as a replacement for Pete Alonso when they didn’t want him the first time. Then they did it again after Alonso walked, combining Vientos with Baty, Jorge Polanco, and whoever else has played baseball before as options at first base.

As I’ve said many times, that’s exactly what they thought of Alonso. But I digress.

At any rate, the point is the Mets aren’t exactly innocent as far as overexposing Vientos is concerned. I appreciate they were trying to recreate what he was between June and October in 2024, but it was pretty clear early in the 2025 season that was an anomaly. They should’ve seen what everyone else saw and mitigated it after the 2025 season, with or without Alonso. If he hadn’t been out of options in 2025, he probably would’ve been in the minor leagues then.

In short, I’d be super surprised if Vientos was a Met by Thanksgiving. There’s just no place for him anymore if the Mets are truly endeavoring to solve first base and find more value for this critical roster spot. At a minimum, they need a better and more well-rounded designated hitter option, and certainly it would be ideal to replace Vientos with an actual first baseman, although that is another thing that is going to be very hard to do this winter.

Vientos is entering his first year of arbitration this winter, and he is out of minor league options. Sure, he’s going to be cheap by MLB standards— he might get $1 million next year. But even at that salary with respect to his skillset combined with where the Mets stand from a payroll perspective, it would seem foolish to keep Vientos around considering he pretty much represents everything the Mets haven’t been good at in two years on the diamond and in the lineup all in one package.

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Is time running out for the old baby Mets?