What Happened to Brett Baty, Man?

After a fairly brisk start, the pace of free agency has bogged down in the new year. The clog in the pipeline is Pete Alonso, the burly first baseman late of the New York Mets. Alonso’s free agent case fascinates me, as he represents a possibly rare intersection of fame and scarcity of skill, making him especially difficult to put a value on.

Given Alonso’s popularity in New York, the shortness of the Mets’ lineup even after signing Juan Soto, and the fact that owner Steve Cohen is so rich the Sumerians might not have invented currency if they’d known he was going to come along, a reunion makes a certain amount of sense.

Many writers (including me) have spent inordinate amounts of time this winter on the inflexibility baked into the left end of the defensive spectrum for the Los Angeles Dodgers. If Shohei Ohtani is locked into DH, Freddie Freeman to first base, and Teoscar Hernández to left field, where does that leave Max Muncy? Things of that nature.

Soto’s arrival presents a similar conundrum for the Mets, who already had some $41 million and change committed to corner outfielders Starling Marte and Brandon Nimmo. Any workaround raises further issues. Is Marte, who turned 36 during the playoffs and has looked every day of it over the past two seasons, capable of providing the requisite thump as a full-time DH? What of sometime corner outfielder Jeff McNeil, who since 2023 has looked less like post-grunge Jose Altuve and more like an average hitter?

And then there are the youngsters: Luisangel Acuña, who deserves an expanded role this season, and Mark Vientos. Count me among those who came away from last season massively impressed by Vientos’ bat, but he either needs a bilateral hand transplant or a move away from third base in the long term.

I don’t imagine Carlos Mendoza does everything RosterResource tells him to (though maybe he should), but our depth charts right now have Vientos taking over first base from Alonso, leaving third base in a platoon situation between Acuña and Brett Baty.

Oh yeah, bro. Brett Baty’s still around.

Two years ago, Baty was the no. 23 overall prospect in baseball. And while circumstances have conspired to bump him around since his debut — a season-ending thumb injury in 2022, the emergence of Vientos as a rival for playing time — he has not made the most of what’s now an ample audition period. In 602 major league plate appearances in his career, Baty is hitting .215/.282/.325, which works out to a 72 wRC+. Sprinkle in average third base defense and you get a player who’s just about bulls-eye’d replacement level.

That won’t cut it for a team with championship ambitions.

Mike Puma of the New York Post reported in early December that the Mets were getting calls from teams interested in trading for the 25-year-old third baseman. Around the same time, Abbey Mastracco of the Daily News wrote that Baty was slated for a utility role. Both of those reports came before the Mets inked Soto to a record-setting 15-year contract, so maybe the internal calculus has changed since then, but I’m not sure how useful Baty would be, either as trade bait or as a utilityman.

I’m ordinarily a huge sucker for former top prospects who could probably use a change of scenery, but I’m struggling to find a reason to be optimistic about Baty. He’s fine at third base and has played a little left field, but he’s not exactly Matt Chapman in the field, and the sum total of his experience at anything approaching a premium defensive position is 27 Triple-A starts at second base.

And it’d be one thing if he were striking out a ton but hitting for huge power when he made contact. Or if he were ludicrously aggressive or passive at the plate. But he’s close to average in both chase rate and in-zone contact rate. He will draw a walk, but not to the level where his eye is a carrying tool. Baty walked 9.4% last year, and his career walk rate is 7.8%; major league average in 2024 was 8.2%.

The problem is, I don’t see any low-hanging fruit here. One of the first adjustments I’d try with a young hitter who’d lost his pop would be to try to get him to pull the ball in the air more. Baty actually did that last year, upping his pull rate on fly balls and line drives from 23.8% to 43.1%. He just didn’t get the ball in the air enough for it to matter.

Last season, 455 players registered at least 100 plate appearances in the major leagues. Baty’s groundball rate was 28th among those players. His line drive rate was 423rd. Line drive rate isn’t a perfect indicator of offensive production; Garrett Stubbs was first in the league, and Anthony Santander was two spots behind Baty. But it is where hits tend to come from, and if you’re not hitting line drives you need to do what Santander does and elevate the ball.

Baty didn’t really do damage anywhere. He was 314th in barrel rate and 343rd in HardHit%. Though Baty’s lack of hard contact did answer one question I had: How does an average runner who hits the ball on the ground this much have only 11 career double plays? Turns out he’s not hitting the ball that hard on the ground, either. League average on groundballs is a 34.8% HardHit% and an 86.0 mph exit velocity. Last year, Baty was at 30.5% with an 83.6 mph average exit velo.

Absent some hitherto unforeseen panacea, we’re left with a player who doesn’t play a premium position and hits for neither average nor power. Out of those 455 players with 100 or more plate appearances last season, Baty is one of just 11 who fits the following three criteria: a higher-than-average strikeout rate, an ISO under .100, and little or no reasonable expectation of playing an up-the-middle defensive position regularly.

This is, of course, a huge bummer. (It also raises the question of what the heck is going on with the Rockies.) I was a big proponent of Baty’s back when he was breaking into the league, and I find his utter failure to develop at this level as mystifying as anyone. If he is fixable, the person who figures out how to do it will have earned their paycheck and then some. Because right now, the outlook is pretty bleak.