DENVER -- The thing about a Mark Vientos breakout is that it’s not hard to envision. He’s shown all this before.
“We’ve seen it,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “We haven’t seen that in a while, but when he gets hot, man, he can carry a team.”
The first such example came during Vientos’ actual breakout year of 2024, when he followed up a 27-homer regular season with an otherworldly performance in October, batting .327/.362/.636 with five home runs in 13 playoff games. Even with Francisco Lindor at the height of his powers, Vientos was the Mets’ best hitter that October.
Given a chance to play every day at the start of last season, though, Vientos took a significant step backward, producing a .678 OPS over his first 53 games before a strained right hamstring further upended his campaign. Not only did Vientos finish the year with just a .702 OPS, he lost his grip on any sort of guaranteed job heading into this season. A miserable Spring Training performance might have even pushed him back to the Minors if not for the fact that he was out of options.
But now?
“I feel good,” Vientos said. “I just want to keep on it and keep putting good at-bats together.”
Early this season, Vientos said, he was “seeing the ball great” but “missing stuff” -- swinging through hittable fastballs, that sort of thing. Vientos has always been susceptible to chasing pitches out of the strike zone, and this year has been no different.
Better results have come only recently. In Sunday’s series finale against the Angels, Vientos pulled a 95 mph fastball from Jack Kochanowicz over the left-center-field fence for a 427-foot homer.
“When he’s doing that,” Mendoza said, “good things are about to come.”
Four innings later, Vientos waited on a Nick Sandlin slider, crushing it 378 feet. He followed up this multihomer performance with a two-run single in Monday’s 4-2 win over the Rockies, giving him six RBI over his last two games. Since April 17, Vientos has three home runs and an .856 OPS in 13 contests.
Sunday’s first homer, as Mendoza mentioned, was important both for Vientos and for a Mets team that has struggled to hit fastballs. Only two active Mets have a slugging percentage above .440 on fastballs of at least 95 mph: Juan Soto (.668) and Vientos (.556).
Vientos can, in other words, do things that other Mets hitters simply cannot. And the Mets’ injury situation means he’s going to get a long runway in May to (once again) prove himself. With Lindor and Ronny Mauricio both on the injured list, Mendoza has been lining up his infield most days with Brett Baty at third base and Vientos at first. That should continue for the foreseeable future.
If Vientos keeps hitting like this, of course, he’ll stay in the lineup regardless of who’s healthy.
“The injuries for sure suck. I’m not too happy about those,” Vientos said. “I just feel like if I trust my process and my routine throughout the season, eventually I’m going to come through and I’m going to do my thing.”