As the Mets continue their unrequited courting of uninterested executives, throwing the future of the franchise further into disarray, one important piece of the club’s future is showing a twinkle of promise.
Third baseman Brett Baty, the 12th overall pick in the 2019 draft who repaid the Mets with shimmering minor league numbers in 2021, has continued swinging a hot bat in the Arizona Fall League. Playing for the Salt River Rafters, the team’s No. 2 prospect according to MLB.com has hit .267 in his first 30 at-bats with an .854 OPS. Half of his eight hits have gone for extra bases.
Playing against stiff minor league competition — the Fall League is regarded generally as somewhere between Double-A and Triple-A, talent-wise, giving youngsters looking for further development the opportunity to do so in an MLB-governed setting — Baty has shown improved patience at the plate. Between the High-A and Double-A levels in 2021, Baty walked in 12% of his plate appearances. Though it’s still a small sample size from the desert, and offensive numbers across the entire league are sky high, Baty’s 18.4% walk rate and .421 on-base percentage give the team a reason to smile as the rest of the organization hangs in peril.
A string of COVID-related game cancellations while Baty was at Double-A Binghamton shortened his season, one summer after the entire minor league calendar was wiped out, so the fact that he’s not over anxious at the plate is another impressive characteristic of the 21-year-old’s profile.
“I’m just out here to have fun, just get better at the game of baseball,” Baty told reporters in Scottsdale last week. “It’s a good way to get ABs because we did miss a couple of weeks during the season.”
After graduating to Double-A and proudly wearing a jersey with “RUMBLE PONIES” written across the chest, Baty compiled a .272/.364/.424 slash line with five home runs in 40 games and no significant jump in strikeouts despite facing the best pitchers of his life. A 118 wRC+ tells us that he was 18% better than his Double-A peers after being 45% better than the other hitters at High-A.
Reports from Arizona show Baty consistently whipping balls all over the diamond with exit velocities above 100 miles per hour. The left-handed hitter from Lake Travis High School, an Austin, TX sports hotbed, has a ton of helium in his game right now. The only question is what position he’ll play when he eventually makes it to The Show.
Baty is a natural third baseman who didn’t play anywhere else in his first professional season. During his 2021 campaign, though, he dabbled in left field. With Mark Vientos even closer to the big leagues (Vientos, the third baseman at Triple-A Syracuse, is the sixth-ranked Mets prospect), any sort of positional versatility raises Baty’s stock even higher. Third base is the only spot he’s taken in the field during the Fall League, but his deployment during the 2022 minor league season bears monitoring as the Mets figure out where he fits in their prospect puzzle.
The most important thing, in the short term, is that Baty is feeling good. According to the kid himself, the Arizona sunshine seems to be providing energizing effects.
“I feel like I could play 30 more games easily,” Baty told reporters. “I’m ready to go.”
That makes one person who’s excited about the idea of joining the Mets.
OTHER METS FARMHANDS
In addition to Baty, the Mets sent tenth-ranked prospect Carlos Cortes to the Fall League. Cortes, an outfielder who plied away at Double-A in 2021, is hitting .286 with a .407 on-base percentage but not showing any power whatsoever. The 24-year-old is slugging a minimal .381 and does not have a double or home run to his name, though he did leg out a triple.
Catcher Hayden Senger (21st-ranked prospect in the Mets’ system) has given less to write home about, but less-heralded infielder Wilmer Reyes is getting on base more than 42% of the time and has walked more than he’s struck out through his first eight games. Reyes also leads Salt River with four stolen bases.
