'The power is real': Vientos living up to potential with 2 more HRs

NEW YORK -- Outside of Pete Alonso, who was an overnight star in Flushing, and Francisco Alvarez, who might still become one, the Mets have routinely watched their most talented position-player prospects struggle to gain footholds at the starts of their careers. For every Alonso, there has been an Amed Rosario or a Michael Conforto or a Brett Baty -- players who had their moments, to be certain, but found the path between the Minors and Majors far from linear.

Entering this season, Mark Vientos seemed like one of those players. A forgettable cup of coffee in 2022 gave way to a difficult ’23 in which he fought for playing time, spent more days in the Minors than he preferred and, ultimately, did not receive regular reps until the Mets were well out of contention. Vientos began this season back at Triple-A, blocked -- perhaps indefinitely -- at his natural position of third base.

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All the while, a question lingered: What would it look like if he played every day?

Finally, this month, the Mets began empowering Vientos to give an emphatic answer. Since Baty’s surprise demotion at the end of May, Vientos has started at third base nearly every day, proving to be not just an adequate solution there, but one of the more productive players in the entire National League. His second career multi-homer effort helped give the Mets a 9-7 win over Gerrit Cole and the Yankees in the Subway Series on Tuesday, leading them to their 14th victory in their last 18 games.

“He’s crushing it,” Mets starting pitcher David Peterson said. “It’s fun to see him do what he does.”

Mostly, what Vientos does these days is punish baseballs. He pulled a high, arcing 382-foot homer over the left-field fence in the second inning, then lined a 385-foot shot to the opposite field against Cole -- the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner -- in the fourth. That marked the third consecutive plate appearance with a homer for Vientos, who also went deep in his final at-bat Sunday at Wrigley Field.

“Doing it in the Subway Series is sick,” Vientos said.

Harrison Bader and Brandon Nimmo homered as well for the Mets, who have hit seven home runs in their last 15 innings. And they needed every one of them, as Aaron Judge’s eighth-inning grand slam made the game far closer than it was for most of the evening.

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That the Mets won anyway was largely due to Vientos, whose OPS increased to .925 -- fifth in the NL among hitters with at least 100 plate appearances this season. He rates sixth in wRC+, another metric with strong predictive value.

“The power is real,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said, lauding the adjustments Vientos recently made to “stay short and keep it simple,” which helped him snap out of an 0-for-14 funk.

“When he’s thinking less,” Mendoza added, “he can drive the baseball.”

Vientos credits his newfound success in that area to Mets special assistant Carlos Beltrán, who sat him down in Chicago last weekend and advised him to keep his sights focused on center and right-center field. Doing so, Beltrán said, would allow Vientos to make better contact without sacrificing his power, because he possesses enough natural strength to drive balls out of any park.

“It’s just fortunate for me that I have so many great people to ask questions and give me such good advice,” Vientos said of the conversation.

In that way and others, it’s all coming together for the 24-year-old Vientos, who will continue to play for as long as he’s productive. The Mets already have more than a full season’s worth of Major League data on Baty, who owns a career .607 OPS over 169 games. And while Baty continues to thrive at Triple-A Syracuse, with six home runs in 16 games since his demotion, Mets officials have noted that the gap between Triple-A and Major League pitching has perhaps never been greater. Success in the Minors is not the same as success in MLB.

Of those two, only Vientos has enjoyed sustained production at the highest level. Then again, so have Alvarez and several others currently propelling a Mets offense that’s been the league’s most prolific unit since the end of May.

“When you see really good teams clicking -- not only the veterans, but some of these young players making adjustments, feeling better -- it’s contagious,” Mendoza said. “Vientos and Alvarez in particular, they’re fitting right in.”