Baty Time

Morning Dose: Thursday, March 20

☀️ Good Morning:

It’s understandable if you’re choosing to ignore spring training results.

Many of you are grizzled Mets fans who know better than to get excited about an ERA or batting average during the month of March.

This is probably especially true of Brett Baty.

Nevermind that he’s still only 25 years old, has only 602 major-league plate appearances to his name, and has turned a rocky season that ended with a fractured finger into a productive winter where he found a new swing that has resulted in a Grapefruit batting average on par with Juan Soto.

If fans are going to get excited about Baty, he needs to do it against big-league pitching on a consistent basis. So the logic goes.

But does he? Which is to ask: could Brett Baty bitcoin the start of this season and suddenly become a highly tradeable commodity?

I think he can.

The former first round pick had his strongest performance of camp on Wednesday, collecting a double, a triple, and most importantly, looked good at second base.

We don’t have fancy Statcast metrics to tell us how he is doing at second in his limited opportunities, but based on the eye test, he appears fully capable of ranging to his right, but will need time to adjust his throw angles.

If Baty holds his own at second as a short-term replacement to Jeff McNeil, playing a platoon role with Luisangel Acuña (who made his second throwing error of the spring on Wednesday), once everyone is healthy, Baty would be caught in a roster squeeze: having proven he belongs, but with no obvious position or role to play him.

David Stearns is better suited trying to move Baty as a young prospect who is ready to contribute but blocked from the roster than one who is toiling away in the minors because he hasn’t proven he can hit or field at the major-league level.

So whether you are a long-term believer in Baty, or not, it’s the right time to hope for his success. And maybe, just maybe, it could turn into something more than a short-term thing.

☕️ Grab your coffee for your morning dose of Mets Fix!

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As a preview to our next podcast dropping tomorrow, one of the discussions will be on the Opening Day starter. Not that it matters very much, but as Blake texted me and Peter last night, “Does David Peterson deserve the start more than Clay Holmes?”

After another five-inning shutout performance, a case could be made. The tall, left-hander has allowed one earned run this spring over 15.2 innings of work. That equates into a microscopic 0.57 ERA. Even if you added that to his impressive 2.90 ERA in 21 starts last year, you would have an earned run average below Holmes’ career ERA of 3.71 as a reliever.

We discussed earlier in the week, the Mets are already playing the matchups; the Astros only have one left-handed hitter (Yordan Alvarez) in their projected Opening Day lineup, so Peterson will likely get his first 2025 start against Miami. Perhaps that’s why they weren’t too worried about essentially using him in a regular start against Houston’s starters on Wednesday.

But if we sort the rotation among pitchers who have thrown at least 10 innings this spring by the gap between their ERA and fielding independent pitching (FIP), we see things a bit differently.