ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — A solid offensive start to Brett Baty’s season came with red flags.
The Mets’ third baseman was hitting .316 with a .757 OPS after his first 16 games, but more than half (51.1 percent) of his batted balls were ground balls.
He was not striking pitches particularly hard and sported a .386 batting average on balls in play, which screamed for a regression that then came.
In Baty’s next 13 games, he went 5-for-35 (.143) with a double as his only extra-base hit.
He was not able to show off his power, and balls that had crept through the infield instead were being caught.
To eliminate any batted-ball luck, Baty simply hit it over everyone’s gloves on Friday.
The 24-year-old stroked a pair of home runs, his first multi-homer day in the majors, which was a positive sign for the Mets for several reasons.
His dingers led to four RBIs, which helped the Mets first take a lead and later close the gap in a game they would lose to the Rays at Tropicana Field.
But more importantly, Baty began to lift the ball, which has long been a problem for the otherwise promising young hitter.
His 54.5 percent ground-ball rate entered play Saturday as the ninth-highest in the league despite the drives — one a moonshot that was launched so high that it got lost in the catwalks of the dome, then reappeared deep into the right-field seats — that he launched the night prior.
“I feel good,” Baty said after home runs No. 2 and 3 of his season. “My main goal is just to go out there and have quality ABs every night and hit the ball hard.
“And tonight it was in the air, so feels good.”
A first-round pick in 2019, Baty came up through the system with obvious talent and with a tendency to send his batted balls south.
He made swing adjustments prior to his breakout 2022 campaign that allowed him to shoot all the way to his major league debut after smacking 19 home runs in 95 minor league games.
Baty proved not to be fully past the issue, and co-hitting coach Eric Chavez acknowledged this week that his fly-ball rate is “still too low.”
“Jeremy [Barnes, the other hitting coach] and I are going to have to help guide him through that and make some changes along the way,” Chavez said Tuesday, and perhaps that changes are beginning to bear fruit.
In the second inning Friday, Baty got under a middle-of-the-plate sinker from Aaron Civale and launched it toward the Tropicana Field ceiling.
“I haven’t seen many go to the pull side from a lefty [at this park],” said manager Carlos Mendoza, who is plenty familiar with the Rays’ home from his days with the Yankees. “I’ve seen a lot of righties go pull side to left field. As soon as he hit it, I knew it was out.”
In the ninth, Baty turned on a hanging slider from Jason Adam and demolished it 421 feet to right.
One game, in which he also singled, lifted his OPS from .628 to .725.
A lot can change this early in the season, which Baty is telling himself, too.
“It’s very early — very, very early,” Baty said. “We have a lot of baseball to play.”
But the signs are growing more encouraging.
Baty’s results for half of April were solid and the other half disappointing.
The Mets will gladly take Friday’s results.
But the home runs might be a signal that Baty is learning to get his bat under the ball.
His power previously had been down, as had his strikeout rates. Perhaps that trend will shift as Baty taps into power that the Mets know he possesses.
The Mets want Baty to swing away and find the type of contact he has shown he can make.
“We’d rather have him be aggressive and make mistakes,” Chavez said. “And if those come with more strikeouts — we don’t want guys striking out. But his DNA is capable of hitting the ball hard. So we’d definitely prefer that.”
