Even With Mark Vientos’ Injury, the Mets Have a Crowd of Young Infielders

It’s been a frustrating season for Mark Vientos. After two years of trying to stick with the Mets, he broke out by hitting 27 homers in 111 games last season, and handled third base well enough to look as though he’d locked down a regular job. Yet this year, he’s regressed on both sides of the ball, and on Tuesday night in Los Angeles, he added injury to insult when he strained his right hamstring. The silver lining is that the 25-year-old slugger will get a chance for a reset once he’s healthy, and in his absence, the Mets have an opportunity to sort through their talented but still largely unproven assortment of young infielders.

Vientos’ injury occurred in the top of the 10th inning in Monday night’s opener of a four-game NLCS rematch between the Mets and Dodgers in Los Angeles; the series was an exciting one full of late-inning lead changes, with the two teams emerging with a split and three games decided by one run. Los Angeles had tied Monday’s game in the bottom of the ninth on a Shohei Ohtani sacrifice fly, and New York answered by scoring runs with back-to-back hits to start the 10th. With two outs and runners on the corners, Vientos had a chance to break the game open. He’d been hitting the ball hard lately but not getting great results, and when he smoked a 97-mph grounder to the right of shortstop Hyeseong Kim, it appeared to be more of the same. Kim reached the ball before it cleared the infield, but his throw to first base was an off-line one-hopper. It didn’t matter, as Vientos had fallen down before making it halfway down the line, because his right hamstring seized up.

On Tuesday, the Mets placed Vientos on the injured list and sent him back to New York to determine the severity of the injury. Manager Carlos Mendoza said on Wednesday that Vientos has a low-grade hamstring strain and is expected to receive treatment for 10-14 days before resuming baseball activities. To replace him on the roster, the Mets recalled 24-year-old Ronny Mauricio from Triple-A Syracuse. The former Top 100 prospect (no. 44 in 2022, and no. 90 in ’23, both as a 50-FV prospect) missed all of last season due to a right anterior cruciate ligament tear suffered during winter ball in February 2024. More on him below, but first, Vientos’ struggles are worth a closer look.

A second-round draft pick out of a Florida high school in 2017, Vientos debuted in the majors in September 2022, and grazed the lower reaches of the Top 100 the following year, once his defense at third base improved enough to boost his prospect grade to a 50 FV. After hitting a combined .205/.255/.354 (68 wRC+) with 10 homers in 81 games with the Mets in 2022 and ’23, Vientos began last season with Syracuse and made a brief foray to Queens in late April before being recalled for good in mid-May. The plan was for him to platoon with Brett Baty, but by the end of the month, he had claimed the full-time job, and his performance helped turn the Mets’ season around after their 24-35 start.

Vientos finished with a .266/.322/.516 line and a 133 wRC+, good for third on the team behind Francisco Lindor and (shockingly) Jose Iglesias. He was subpar defensively (-4 FRV and -6 DRS in 880 1/3 innings) but still finished with 2.9 WAR. This year, it’s been a different story, as he’s sputtered to a .230/.298/.380 (93 wRC+) line and has been dreadful in 341 innings in the field; his -8 DRS is the lowest mark among all third basemen, while his -5 FRV is second worst.

A couple things stand out. Vientos isn’t swinging as hard as he did last year, with his average bat speed dropping from 71.8 mph to 70.4, and his fast swing rate dropping from 20.6% to 9%; while his squared-up rate has increased slightly, his blast rate has fallen from 13% to 9.6%. His bat is slower to the ball, he’s connecting a bit later (his average intercept has moved back a couple of inches), and his attack direction has increased from 1 degree to 3 — on the opposite-field side, not the pull side. That means he’s likely to pull the ball less often, and indeed, his overall pull rate has dropped from 36% to 30.7% and his pulled air rate from 15.2% to 12.9%.

As a result, Vientos’ average exit velocity and hard-hit rate are both down a bit (from 91.2 mph to 90.7 for the former, and from 46.6% to 45.7%), his barrel rate has been halved (from 14.1% to 7.1%) and his xSLG has plummeted from a robust .463 to a mediocre .376. Lately he hasn’t had much to show for his hard contact, but overall, his expected and actual numbers are right in line, suggesting he has work to do to rebound once he’s healthy. A minor league rehab stint could help, but he’s the only one of this group who’s out of options.

Mauricio, a switch-hitter now listed at 6-foot-4 and 166 pounds, played 26 games with the Mets in 2023, hitting .248/.296/.347 (79 wRC+) in 108 plate appearances in a September cup of coffee. After beginning this season on the IL, he went out on a rehab assignment on April 27, and played five games apiece at A-level St. Lucie and Double-A Binghamton, then nine at Syracuse, generally splitting time between second and third with a bit of shortstop and DH duty as well. He was on fire at Syracuse (.515/.564/.818 in 39 PA), and between his hot bat and Vientos’ injury, the Mets accelerated their plans even though he hadn’t played more than two games in a row. He started at third base on Tuesday and Wednesday, going 0-for-8 with three strikeouts.

Selectivity and contact are real issues for Mauricio. While he has 70-grade raw power and has hit as many as 26 homers in a season, his hit tool grades at just 30. He’s chased 44.3% of pitches outside the strike zone in his brief major league career and struck out in 29.3% of his plate appearances. The low point was his striking out against Clayton Kershaw on a 59-foot curveball on Tuesday — career strikeout no. 2,976 for the future Hall of Famer.

Said Mendoza afterward:

“We understand that’s an area where he needs to improve. We’ll see him chase, especially with how good the pitching is here at the big league level. That’s why I am saying, we gotta be patient with him… We also know that there’s impact there. And he’s going to be aggressive. That’s part of what makes him who he is. He’s going to go out there, and he’s going to hack.”

Here’s part of what Eric Longenhagen wrote about Mauricio in an update so fresh the pixels haven’t dried:

This is a huge-framed switch-hitting shortstop with power from both sides of the plate and a rocket arm, but his swing decisions are often so reckless that even though he’s met expectations since his high-profile amateur signing, he’s still an extremely volatile prospect. Mauricio has historically had chase rates near 40%, and things have been no different so far in 2025. He has a career .313 OBP in the minors and is likely to be a streaky, feast-or-famine hitter during the course of his career. His secondary pitch recognition isn’t good, and he’s very vulnerable to soft stuff at the bottom of the zone and below. There are some players who are as aggressive as Mauricio (or more so) who find a way to be impact big leaguers anyway, and almost all of them tend to make at least an average rate of in-zone contact and have power. Ronny Mo is on the very edge of viability in this respect, with in-zone contact rates of 83-85% during his last few healthy seasons, which is right around what successful low-OBP hitters like Ozzie Albies and Jonathan Schoop have shown. A typical performance for Mauricio projects like juiced ball-era Freddy Galvis: a low OBP with 25-30 homers and plus infield defense.

The defense part of Mauricio’s game is a tad rusty right now, which is no shock coming off the torn ACL. He’s mostly played second base so far in 2025, but doesn’t always look comfortable making the long range plays asked at that position. He isn’t apt to go to the ground to make plays, and instead relies on his arm to clean up the mess of his footwork. At third base, he is a fish in water, as a great percentage of plays are in front of him, and when they aren’t, he has the arm to hose guys from the hole. He’s easily the best third base defender on the 40-man roster, and he remains viable at shortstop.

The plan for now is for Maurico to split time at second, third, and DH without the Mets overworking him. Platoon-wise, he’s stronger against righties, so in the absence of Jesse Winker (who’s been sidelined since early May by an oblique strain) he could share time with Starling Marte at DH.

Like Vientos, Baty — a 2019 first-round pick, and the only one of the bunch that Longenhagen graded as a 55-FV prospect (2023, when he was no. 23 on our Top 100) — has been up and down a fair bit. Though he’s played as many as 108 games with the Mets in a single season (2023), he’s spent time at Syracuse in each of the past four campaigns. After hitting .229/.306/.327 (83 wRC+) in 50 games last year, he didn’t get another chance with the Mets after June 9, but at Syracuse he took up second base, a position he’d never played professionally. With Jeff McNeil sidelined by a strained oblique to start this season, Baty got to try the new position in the majors, and he’s handled both the keystone and the hot corner well when given the chance. That said, he made a crucial error in the eighth inning of Thursday’s 6-5 loss, with a poor throw home on an Andy Pages grounder that allowed Will Smith to score the tying run.

Baty didn’t hit much at the outset of the season, so when McNeil returned from the IL, he lost the numbers game; he actually hit his first homer of the season on April 23, his final game before being optioned. His performance since returning on May 7 has been uneven, as he’s been in a funk for the past two weeks, but his numbers have improved:

Those strikeout and walk rates are ugly, and Baty’s 82.8% zone contact rate is bottom-quartile stuff. Still, he’s been barreling the ball more than twice as often since returning, and his expected numbers suggest he could be even more productive:

Baty is swinging hard, averaging 75.9 mph, up 2.4 mph from last year and on par with late 2023, not that it did him any good then. Relative to last year, he’s opened his stance a bit (from 4 degrees to 8), and he’s flattened the tilt of his swing slightly (from 38 degrees to 35), but his angle of attack has shifted from 1 degree pull to 3 degrees oppo. Since returning, he’s pulling the ball almost as often as he did last year (42.9%), and his recent pulled air rate is higher than it was last year (17.8%). The samples are small enough, and that post-promotion .301 OBP is not terribly convincing, but he’s the only lefty of this group and the one producing at league average. That’ll earn him playing time.

In his notes, Longenhagen offered a brief assessment of Baty: “I don’t think he looks great. Slow-of-foot defender with good actions, some inaccurate throws. His swing has huge effort, it was always pretty long. I’ll have been too heavy on him by more than one grade.” He placed Baty fourth on his personal preference list, behind Mauricio, Luisangel Acuña, and Vientos.

Acuña has the most name recognition of the bunch as the younger brother of superstar Ronald Acuña Jr. The only one of the four not originally drafted or signed by the Mets, he arrived from the Rangers — who signed him out of Venezuela on July 2, 2018 — in the 2023 deadline deal for Max Scherzer. A 45-FV prospect who’s listed at 5-foot-8 and 181 pounds, he has plus speed, above-average raw power and the ability to play every infield position except first base, and he even has 31 games of Triple-A experience in center field, though in the absence of Jose Siri, Mendoza has only deployed him there for a two-inning cameo.

Acuña has more starts at second base (32) than Baty and McNeil combined (15 apiece), though his playing time and offense have both receded. He’s started just eight of the team’s last 20 games — including Thursday at shortstop in place of Lindor, who’s day-to-day after suffering a broken right pinky toe — going 4-for-31 to drag his overall batting line to .244/.295/.289 (69 wRC+). He’s tied with Lindor for the team lead in stolen bases with 11, which suggests a tactical role come October, but if Mauricio catches on, Acuña could be Syracuse-bound.

For all of the promise of these players, McNeil is hardly a bystander. He’s coming off two league-average-ish seasons, but through his first 111 plate appearances of 2025, he’s slapping his way to a .237/.342/.441 (118 wRC+) line despite a 3.1% barrel rate and a .394 xSLG. Even given some regression and his recent struggles against lefties, that production — and the versatility that has allowed him to play 44 1/3 innings in left field and 43 in center — isn’t easily dismissed. For a team with championship aspirations, this kind of depth is a great thing to have, and it may come in handy when the Mets approach this year’s trade deadline. For now, they’ll keep cycling through their options.