On Opening Day, the Mets hit two home runs. The next day, Luis Robert Jr. won the game with a walk-off home run to defeat the Pirates. All together, those players trotted about 1,080 feet combined (90 feet times 12 total bases) -- give or take a few depending on the route each hitter took to round the bases.
That's much less than what Adam Bayatti had to run. That's because the Manchester, U.K., native has given himself a new challenge: He's running one mile for every home run the Mets hit this year. The calendar hasn't flipped over to April yet, and he's already the first viral star of the 2026 season.
"It's completely gone crazy," Bayatti told MLB.com over the phone. "Like four hours ago, the Mets actually followed me."
So far, the Mets have gone easy on him: After hitting three home runs in the season's first two games, they've gone homerless the past two games. Which is much better than a day like last summer when the Mets hit seven solo home runs against the Phillies. Barring an afternoon ballgame in the U.S., Bayatti will often find out how many miles he needs to run when he wakes up the next morning.
"It is scary, like, if I wake up at half-six in the morning and I see five home runs have been hit. I feel like that's going to hang over my head a little bit during the day," Bayatti said. "I'm fine with it as long as they win. If they hit five home runs and lose -- I don't know how that's possible."
As for why miles and not the more UK-friendly kilometers, that's simple: "I just thought if I'm doing a challenge on an American team, I should use the American metrics," Bayatti said. "Just like I would run one kilometer for every goal in a football game or something."
Bayatti has been a Mets fan his whole life thanks to his father, Ali, who caught a Mets-Astros game on TV during the 1986 season and chose -- fortunately -- to root for that season's World Series winner. He was 7 years old when he saw Jacob deGrom's first home opener during a family trip to Citi Field, and later was able to get up close when the Mets came to the U.K. for the London Series.
Now in his 12th year -- the equivalent of a high school junior in America -- at St. John Rigby College, Bayatti is working on the Duke of Edinburgh Award, which requires participants to tackle three challenges: "There's volunteering, physical and skills," Bayatti explained.
An outfielder for the Manchester Donuts, he wanted to find a way to incorporate baseball into the physical challenge. But because the Donuts' baseball training and game schedule doesn't always work with his school commitments, he needed to think of something different.
"What could I tie into baseball, but that I could also definitely do for one hour a week?" Bayatti said."That's where the idea came from. But I'm not even doing it for the scheme anymore. I'm just doing it for fun."
It's not just for the Mets that Bayatti is running, though: He's hoping that this experience will help him out on the ballfield.
"Because I play football and baseball, I'm fit enough to run a mile. It's just really slow," Bayatti said. "I'd like to get my speed up. I said to my dad, my one goal for this season is to hit a triple. I won hitter of the year in 2024, my first season, but it was full of singles and one or two doubles."
While Bayatti admits that the baseball fan community is still small, he has noticed the growth since he began playing just three seasons ago. This year, the Manchester baseball club needed to create a fourth team to accommodate all the players who were interested in playing. And when Great Britain played Mexico to start its 2026 World Baseball Classic campaign, the club teamed up with a local pub for a watch party.
"Sometimes we have watch parties for the club," Bayatti said. "So GB's first game against Mexico, we all went down to the pub that we usually go to and had a big watch party. There was a good 40 people there. We filled the pub."
Thanks to that early Citi Field experience, deGrom remains Bayatti's all-time favorite Mets player, though he cites Francisco Lindor as his favorite on this year's team.
"He's already hit two triples, and he's got that big smile on his face," Bayatti said. "I know he's a good presence in the clubhouse, definitely."
But if Lindor was to get hot and up his usual 30-or-so home runs to a much higher number, would that change Bayatti's opinion?
"It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but yeah," Bayatti joked.
With the season just beginning, the baseball fanatic has a long way to go, but he's looking forward to it. Should the Mets reach the postseason or the World Series, he plans on upping the challenge, too, and is already thinking about doing it again next year. No matter what happens though, Bayatti has already seen the baseball community come together -- whether in person at pubs or fields in Manchester or over Instagram. It's one of the things he would tell his baseball agnostic friends in England.
"I think it's just the friends that you'll make and the memories of getting your first hit or driving in your first run -- I've still never forgotten that," Bayatti said. "I think it's really changed my life in terms of the friends that I've made, as well -- different people that you'd never, ever speak to and you're bonding over the same sport. It's different from football -- you're a bit more like colleagues in football, if that makes sense. But when you're all sat there together [on the bench] while someone else is batting and you can just talk, it's really nice."