Jeff McNeil’s not done and trade talk among fans should stop immediately

The most interesting players to me are the ones where reasonable people can look at and see things in a completely different way. At various part of their careers, ChrisF and I have been on opposite sides of things when discussing Lucas Duda, Juan Lagares, Brandon Nimmo, Alex Torres and Zack Wheeler, among others. And right now, perhaps the most interesting player on the Mets is Jeff McNeil.

Back in 2022, McNeil won the batting title and if he wasn’t a fan favorite before then, he certainly became one. That came on the heels of a massively disappointing season in 2021, where McNeil did little right all year. And directly afterwards was a year that some say was as disappointing as 2021. Yet the ones who make that claim ignore how McNeil closed 2023. Yeah, the first four months of last year were not good. But in his finish to the season, McNeil was not only very good, he hit the way he needed in order to become an impact player.

In his last 228 PA of ’23, McNeil had a .302/344/.472 line. And while he has a lifetime .317 BABIP, McNeil closed last year with a .303 mark, so it’s not like the hits were just falling in. McNeil combined AVG and power in his season-ending stretch. And he produced that power by pulling the ball in the air. In the first 103 games of last year, McNeil had just a .072 ISO as he barely had any balls hit for distance to the pull side. Compare that to the .170 ISO of his last 228 PA.

But when people think of McNeil, they don’t think of him pulling balls in the air. Instead, they think of him surveying the field, seeing where the infielders are playing him – especially before the new shifting rules – and slapping a ball thru the hole. And McNeil absolutely did that, so it’s not that it’s erroneous for people to have that image of him.

It’s just that in 2022, before the shift ban and the year that McNeil won the batting title, he did the vast majority of his damage when he pulled the ball. For the season, McNeil batted .326 but when he pulled the ball, Baseball-Reference has him batting .449 with a 1.204 OPS.

It’s not that he didn’t survey the field and hit the ball everywhere. It’s that when he decided to pull the ball is when he had his greatest success, regardless of how you want to define success.

People get excited about the weirdest things. There was the cult of Jeff Francoeur, who by all accounts was a terrific person. It’s just too bad that his baseball skills fell well short of his personality, despite what his backers would have you believe. There was the speed of Eric Young Jr., which made people think that his stolen bases somehow made up for his inability to reach first base, despite the evidence to the contrary.

And now we have people who value McNeil because of his AVG and his penchant to slap the ball to the opposite field. It’s just valuing him for the wrong thing. Babe Ruth had 123 SB in his career but you hope no one thinks that’s what made him a great player.

Here in 2024, people want to bench McNeil or ship him out of town for broken bats and a pop-up toaster. They say he’s lost it. But the problem with McNeil so far this year is the same thing that’s afflicted so many Mets. And that’s the out-sized influence Citi Field is having on his stats. Here are his home/road splits this season:

H: .167/.244/.205 for a .449 OPS in 87 PA
R: .301/.369/.462 for an .831 OPS in 103 PA

No doubt some of you are getting tired of the emphasis in my writing about the impact of Citi Field. But you simply cannot take any player on the team’s stats at face value right now. McNeil has a 94 OPS+ overall, which ordinarily you’d say was a pretty big disappointment for a player counted on to be one of the team’s best hitters. But he’s just getting killed by his home park.

For MLB as a whole, hitters have a .712 OPS at home, compared to a .688 mark on the road. That split works out to a 103 OPS+ at home, versus a 97 OPS+ at home. But McNeil doesn’t have a slight advantage in his home park. Instead of anything remotely like a 103 OPS+ at Citi Field, McNeil has a 38 OPS+ at home, compared to a 152 OPS+ on the road.

McNeil has done better recently because of several factors. One is that he switched back to the knob-less bat he used earlier in his career. Another is because the last eight games have all been on the road. Perhaps most important of all, in his last six games, McNeil has pulled several balls that traveled at least 237 feet and, on those balls, he’s 4-5 with a double and two home runs.

My hope is that on this upcoming 10-day homestand that McNeil continues with what’s made him productive in the past six road games – pulling the ball in the air.

Kris Bryant was one of the early adopters of the fly ball revolution and he famously stated his desire to hit every ball in the air. Obviously, this was a case of exaggerating to make a point. But when Bryant said that, all pitchers in the league we’re throwing down in the strike zone, attempting to get batters to beat the ball into the ground whenever they made contact.

In 2016, when Bryant had the fourth-lowest GB/FB ratio in the majors, he hit 39 HR and had a 146 OPS+.

Just to state the obvious and leave no doubt, Bryant hits the ball harder and has more power than McNeil. Even if somehow McNeil fully embraced pulling the ball in the air, he wouldn’t hit 39 HR. Yet he could produce an ISO in the .180-.200 range and be a valuable player, even if he didn’t win the batting title.

So, while nearly everyone – including smart people – are saying that McNeil’s no longer a starting-caliber player, my take is the exact opposite. His struggles to date are a result of Citi Field playing as an extreme pitcher’s park. And in the last week, we’ve seen McNeil be the type of hitter he was the last two months of the 2023 season. And in that stretch last year, McNeil posted a 124 wRC+.

My opinion is that everyone would be very happy if McNeil put up a 124 wRC+. In road parks this year, McNeil has a 139 wRC+. Overall, he has a 96 wRC+.

We should all be rooting for McNeil to pull the ball in the air. If this was his approach on every pitch until he got to two strikes, he would be an impact hitter. Once he gets to a two-strike count, he can look to slap the ball, since that makes so many people happy for some reason. And maybe that player would be someone that everyone agreed was a good player.