Baty will almost certainly begin the year in Syracuse.
This wasn’t how anyone had drawn up the start of Brett Baty’s major league career. A highly-rated prospect as he worked his way up through the Mets’ system, the 25-year-old is at something of a crossroads in his professional baseball career this year.
Before the 2022 and 2023 seasons, Baty was considered one of the better prospects in all of baseball. All three of Baseball Prospectus, Baseball America, and MLB Pipeline ranked him in the upper tiers of their top-100 lists ahead of both of those seasons. Here at Amazin’ Avenue, we ranked him third among the Mets’ prospects going into the 2023 season, and he trailed only Francisco Alvarez and the then-recently-signed Kodai Senga.
Baty got his first major league cup of coffee in August of 2022, and he struggled, hitting .184/.244/.342 with a 69 wRC+ in just 42 plate appearances. He started the 2023 season in Syracuse and came out of the gates hitting extremely well, earning the call up to join the Mets for a much longer stint. In his first 15 games back with the Mets, he looked much better than he had the previous August. Through 52 plate appearances, he hit .319/.385/.511 with a couple of home runs.
From there, though, things went south. In 306 plate appearances over the remainder of the major league season, Baty hit .196/.258/.294 with seven home runs. He spent most of the month of August back in Syracuse following a demotion. The Mets had hoped that spending time back at the level would help, but even just the September portion of his line—.200/.221/.293—wasn’t good.
Despite those struggles, Baty won the Mets’ starting job at third base to begin the 2024 season, while Mark Vientos—who had struggled as a major league hitter himself up to that point—started the year in Syracuse. Aside from a few spot starts at the position by Zack Short and Joey Wendle, Baty was the Mets’ guy at third base.
Unfortunately, things went roughly as poorly as they had the year before. Through the end of May, Baty owned a .225/.304/.325 line. The Mets sent him back to Syracuse, and aside from getting added to the major league roster for the team’s series against the Phillies in London, he spent the rest of the season in Triple-A. In the part of the year that he did spend with the Mets, he had just an 83 wRC+.
This year, Baty will almost certainly open the season in Syracuse, and his most likely path to getting another shot at major league playing time is an injury to an infielder who is penciled in to break camp on the big league roster. And even if that were to happen, there’s no guarantee that Baty would get the first crack at the third base job. Ronny Mauricio is working his way back from knee surgery and has some experience at the position. Jeff McNeil has some experience there, too, and recent addition Nick Madrigal has played a bit of third base in his major league career. Even Luisangel Acuña, who hasn’t played third base at all in his professional career, might factor into filling in at the position if the need arises.
The Mets have deployed Baty in left field occasionally in the minors, and last year, the organization gave him some playing time at second base in Syracuse. Whether or not Baty could stick at either of those positions defensively is a question of its own, but if he proved to be a capable defender at three positions, his potential opportunities for getting called up would obviously increase.
Whenever Baty gets his next shot in the big leagues, what he does at the plate will determine if he sticks or gets sent back down to Syracuse. Per FanGraphs, he has one year of options remaining, and given the way the Opening Day roster looks going into spring training, the Mets will almost certainly be using that up. If he has a Vientos-like breakout this year, nobody will care that he’s out of options heading into the 2026 season. But if he doesn’t, his time with the Mets could come to an end following the 2025 season.