Mets Demote Scuffling Brett Baty Amid a Brutal Slump

After trading away veteran pieces and restocking the farm system at the deadline, the Mets have pivoted and are now focusing on the future. That being the case, it both was and wasn’t a curious time for the team to option Brett Baty, seemingly their third baseman of the future, to Triple-A Syracuse on Monday. Now is the time to let the kids play and figure things out at the big-league level, but Baty has been struggling so mightily that he might need a change of scenery. He’s running a 77 wRC+ on the season, and since the start of July, he’s at a measly 39. He hasn’t recorded a hit since July 23, a stretch of 25 plate appearances. That’s the second-longest active streak in baseball, behind the also recently demoted Corey Julks with 42. Combine that with poor defense, and Baty certainly sounds like someone who could use a little time away from the spotlight to figure things out.

The Mets have said the same. “We think this is what’s best for Brett, which is what’s best for the Mets, for the time being,” Buck Showalter told reporters. “Just because something’s delayed doesn’t mean it’s denied.” He added, “I’d be surprised if he doesn’t take a little time – two or three days – and then all of a sudden kind of get back to who he is and who he’s capable of being.”

What complicates the issue is Baty’s service time. It’s a tricky situation because, to borrow a phrase, the timing is nothing short of predominant. Between this year and last, Baty has accrued 162 days of major league service time, just short of the 172 that constitute a full year. When the Mets started the season with him at Triple-A Syracuse, it seemed like they might be deliberately gaming the system. He was 23rd overall in our prospect rankings and, along with Mark Vientos, had torn up the Grapefruit League. The Mets did call Baty up in mid-April, early enough that he’d have a chance to accrue a full year of service time, but once he arrived in Flushing, they still seemed to be on the fence about him, even though he had raked in Syracuse and continued raking for his first month in the big leagues. He was kept in a loose platoon with Eduardo Escobar, starting against righties and sitting about half the time against lefties — not necessarily how you handle your third baseman of the future.

I can’t quite decide whether the way the Mets handled Baty in March and April means that they deserve more or less benefit of the doubt with regard to service time manipulation. Whether it was right or wrong from a baseball perspective, the way they acted once they called him up really does make it seem like they just weren’t sold on him yet. Now they’re sending him down a suspicious 10 days shy of earning a full year of service time, but at a time when he really does seem like he could use a reset.

For his part, Baty has indicated that he might need to re-focus. On Sunday, he was quoted by the New York Post as saying, “You’re under a microscope up here, so you have got to be engaged from Pitch 1 to the end of the game. That is something I have got to work on and something I have got to learn, so I am going to do my best at it.”

As we look on Baty’s performance, there are several things to dive into. His 8.7% walk rate and 27.7% strikeout rate are much worse than the numbers he put up in the minors. Although his chase rate is in the vicinity of league average, his strikeout rate puts him in the 18th percentile of MLB hitters, and his 31% whiff rate puts him in the 17th. He’s also been extremely passive: among the 189 players with at last 300 PAs, his 65.5% swing rate on pitches in the zone ranks 139th, and his 80.4% contact rate swing rate on pitches in the zone is 168th. Baty isn’t making great swing decisions and is missing pitches that he should hit. By Baseball Savant’s swing/take metrics, he’s been worth -14 runs, 17th-worst in the league.

The thing is, when Baty does connect, he’s still hitting the ball hard. His 90 mph average exit velocity and 43.9% hard-hit rate are both solidly above average. He’s just not making the most of that hard contact, and you likely already know the biggest reason why.

Here’s a quote from Baty’s entry in the 2022 Top 200 Prospect list:

The length in Baty’s swing makes it hard for him to turn on velocity and causes him to drive the ball into the ground more than is ideal for a hitter with this much raw power. He may be vulnerable to big league fastballs on the outer edge since he already tends to work to the opposite field against inferior pitching. That Baty is capable of taking the ball the other way is not a bad thing, and his strength and feel for contact are both solid enough to project him as an everyday player even if he hits like this forever. We just think he’ll need to turn on and roast more inner-half pitches to be the star-level player we over-projected him as during the summer, which probably requires a swing change to occur.

The knock on Baty was always that he hit the ball on the ground too much until a 2022 swing change unlocked his ability to elevate; his 42.6% groundball rate at Double-A in 2022 was the lowest of his professional career. But with the Mets, he was running a 51.3% groundball rate; of the 189 players with at least 300 PAs this season, that’s good for 16th-highest, and his 1.94 GB/FB is 10th. But before we decide that he needs to revamp his swing again, take a look at his stats when we break them down by batted ball type:

This year, MLB as a whole is hitting grounders at 85.3 mph, liners at 94, and fly balls at 92.2. Not only is Baty hitting the ball much harder when he lifts it, but he’s also outpacing the league by quite a bit. When he hits it on the ground, he’s only slightly better than the league average. What I’m getting at is that even though Baty is back to putting the ball on the ground, it doesn’t seem like he needs to overhaul his swing again in order to elevate the ball. If his swing were designed to hit the ball on the ground, his grounders wouldn’t look like mishits.

Watching video, my main takeaway is that Baty is catching the ball very deep, letting it travel rather than making contact out in front of the plate. That approach makes you more likely to hit the ball on the ground, since your bat is still on a downward trajectory. It also makes you more likely to hit the ball the other way, and wouldn’t you know it, Baty’s 36.3% pull rate is far below what he put up in the minors. Of the 189 players with at least 300 PAs this season, it puts him in the 23rd percentile, and his 30.1% oppo rate puts him in the 89th. A cursory look at the numbers makes it seem like failing to pull the ball shouldn’t be hurting Baty much:

He’s actually hitting the ball harder when he goes the other way and seeing the best results when he goes to straightaway. But look at what happens when we strip away all those groundballs and look only at fly balls and line drives:

When we limit things to air balls, where the real damage is done, Baty’s opposite field production absolutely craters.

Let’s recap all these factors: Baty is striking out too much. He’s been too passive on pitches in the zone, and he’s been missing his pitch way too often when he does swing. He’s letting the ball travel deep, content to hit it on the ground and to the left side, a plan that isn’t working for him. That’s just not the way a power bat usually operates, but it sounds very familiar to the scouting report that we had in 2022.

Baty has made some detectable changes to his swing in the last couple months. His swing is slightly more closed off than it was in April, and he’s toned down his leg kick. It strikes me that those are the kinds of changes a hitter makes when they want to get quieter at the plate, buying time and sacrificing some power for some contact. They make sense if you think that pitch recognition and swing and miss the core of his problem. But they haven’t worked yet, and Baty always seemed likely to have a lot of swing-and-miss in his profile. It strikes me as more likely that he needs to get comfortable again and get back to what got him to this level in the first place.