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Can Brett Baty Save His New York Mets Career?
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- Can Brett Baty Save His New York Mets Career?
Plenty of New York Mets players had strange seasons this year, but for sheer weirdness, it's hard to top Brett Baty. The Mets did Baty dirty by signing Bo Bichette to play third base late in the offseason , which left Baty as a man without a position as the Bichette signing helped completely sabotage their initial stated goal of run prevention.
So Baty took off for Texas with a truck full of different gloves to work with a fielding coach with the goal of becoming a super utility player, and the results were close to what you'd expect. Baty looked lost in right field and clumsy at first base, which exposed how ill-conceived this plan was in the first place.
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Now the Mets have Baty penciled in as part of a possible platoon with Marcus Semien, and he may get time at first as well. But even that's tentative, as the Mets won't know Bichette's fate until he makes a decision on his option, and if the erstwhile third baseman opts out, a whole new plan may have to be formulated.
What's especially sad about this is that two years ago Baty was on track to be a perfectly good third baseman himself, and maybe even a little more than that. He posted a slash line of .254/.313/.435 with 18 home runs in 2025, which is the same number of home runs Bichette had in the season before he arrived in New York.
Offensively, though, last year was mostly a lost season for Baty. He struggled early, and for most of the first half his average wasn't much over .200. He was chasing, and it seemed fairly obvious that all the position shifting was affecting his offense.
But Baty seemed to find something down the stretch. He started going the other way and managing the strike zone better, and he finished the season at .236 with an overall slash line of .236/.309/.371, which obviously isn't great but was far better than it looked like it was going to be early on.
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What complicates Baty's situation is that he could be trade bait. There are plenty of teams that would love to take a run at fixing a young infielder like Baty, and the Mets have a reputation for letting players like Baty go and watching them have massive success else where (see also: Peralta, Freddy).
It would be fun to see Baty have success at Citi Field, as he's an easy player to root for given his athleticism, skill set and team-oriented nature. It may not be in the cards with the Mets, but hopefully he will somewhere given his talent and resilience.
