Brett Baty’s rise has been literal, too.
The Mets rookie had to adjust his swing to give some loft to batted balls in the minor leagues. It is possible another adjustment will have to be made to get balls off of the ground at the major league level.
Baty’s up-and-down introduction to the major leagues — a home run with his first swing, followed by a 3-for-26 stretch without an extra-base hit — bears some similarities to his minor league trajectory. He had to retool his swing to reach the majors, but that new swing has not performed right away.
In the short sample size of eight games, Baty has shown flashes of the potential that made him the Mets’ No. 2 prospect. But as Baty prepares for his Citi Field debut when a four-game series against the Rockies begins Thursday, there also have been signs he is a 22-year-old work in progress.
“He’s going to be a good player,” manager Buck Showalter said Tuesday, before the Mets were swept in a two-game set in The Bronx. “It’s not if, it’s when.”
On Monday, Baty blistered the hardest-hit ball of the night against the Yankees, crushing a Domingo German fastball 108 mph off the bat. But the smoked ball one-hopped second baseman Oswaldo Cabrera, who fielded it and threw Baty out.
That has happened too often in the third baseman’s first 31 major league plate appearances. Baseball Reference gives him a 66.7 percent groundball rate; no qualified hitter in the majors is above 58 percent.
The Mets could give Baty a chance to figure out an adjustment on the fly, even with Eduardo Escobar eligible to be activated from the injured list as soon as Friday. Showalter said Escobar might be used as a backup shortstop, which could make Yolmer Sanchez a roster casualty. With the switch-hitting Escobar — who has hit much better from the right side — and the lefty-hitting Baty, the Mets could have their third-base platoon until Luis Guillorme returns from the IL in the coming weeks.
But for Baty to reach major league heights, his batted balls need to reach heights, too. He has faced this problem before.
Baty had a fine 2021 season, which began at High-A Brooklyn before he was promoted to Double-A Binghamton. He hit at both stops, with a combined .292 average and .382 on-base percentage.
But in 91 games, the 2019 first-round pick swatted just 12 home runs. Among the 853 minor leaguers with at least 300 plate appearances last year, Baty’s 55.8 percent groundball rate, according to FanGraphs, was the 13th highest.
The Mets broached the subject to Baty, who wanted to dig into his swing mechanics anyway.
“Last year, I had a problem kind of jumping at the ball a little bit too much,” Baty said recently. “Now I’m kind of just letting it travel and let my power do the work. So kind of seeing it deep is probably the biggest thing. And then staying back instead of jumping at it and really just trying to hit the ball hard.”
Baty changed his batting stance between 2021 and this season, bending his knees more so he is less upright, which he felt made him dive at too many pitches.
The tweaked stance did not yield immediate results and Baty batted .250 with three home runs with Binghamton in April and May.
“It really just kind of clicked at the beginning of June this year,” said Baty, who hit .351 with 16 home runs in 53 games from the start of June through Aug. 7, after which he was bumped up to Triple-A Syracuse. “I was hitting the ball really hard to start the year, but it was like low liners and stuff like that.
“But then once June hit, I started to get up in the air a little more.”
This year, Baty cut his groundball rate to 43.5 percent in 420 minor league plate appearances, but the problem has arisen again in the majors. His hardest-hit ball of his short major league season was a 113-mph bullet that reached Braves shortstop Dansby Swanson on one hop and went for a fielder’s choice.
If he can adjust, those scorchers would stop winding up in gloves.
On Thursday in Queens, Mets fans can begin to witness Baty’s literal upside and downside.