Jared Young's Old-School Evolution At the Plate Has Been A Saving Grace for the Mets

[Cade Lalim]

Image courtesy of © Kyle Ross-Imagn Images

Jared Young has been given a clear role for the first time in his major-league career after breaking camp with the New York Mets this spring. It’s the first Opening Day roster that Young has been a part of and he’s been taking advantage of the opportunity.

Young, a former 15th-round pick by the Chicago Cubs, has never played more than 23 MLB games in a season so far in his career. He’s a 30-year-old utility player who is a career .220 hitter with 14 extra-base hits and a 102 wRC+.

He spent his first two major league seasons with the Chicago Cubs after debuting in September of 2022. He took his career overseas in 2024 to play with the Doosan Bears of the KBO. He had a solid season posting a slash line of .326/.420/.660 spanning 38 games, which was good enough to earn him a major-league contract with the Mets in December of 2024, where he’s been ever since.

Jared Young's Contact-Fueled Emergence Aiding Mets' Ailing Lineup

This year across 23 plate appearances, Young has hit for a .350 average with a 139 wRC+. He has not hit a ball out of the yard yet, but has logged two doubles. His surface stats are backed up by his .268 xBA and .362 xwOBA which are both well above league average.

There have been some intriguing improvements to his process that are keying those results. In his small sample size so far in 2026, Young has been swinging a lot more pitches in the zone; he’s up to a 77.1% rate. His overall contact percentages have also seen a healthy jump. Young’s zone-contact percentage has jumped from 81.8% last year to 88.9% this year. Looking at his overall contact numbers, he’s posted a 82.5% contact rate, compared to 69.9% last year. 

Of course, with more contact often comes worse contact quality. It's a trade-off nearly every hitter faces, and Young is no exception. So far, his average exit velocity has only been 87.6 mph. That's likely due to his drop in bat speed (sitting around 73.3 mph this season, a small drop but is still a good place to be); less swing speed leads to better bat control, hence his improved contact numbers.

And while he’s only managed two extra-base hits so far, he does have an excellent 18.8 barrel% to go along with a 50% hard-hit rate. The power is definitely in his bat, but has yet to be seen so far in the majors. His hardest-hit ball this year had a recorded exit velocity of 113.5 mph, a career high from his previous best of 109.4 in 2023. He hit 10 home runs in a very small sample size in the KBO, and it would be nice if he could tap into that with the Mets. To do so, he may need to sacrifice a little bit of the gains he's made in the contact game (and he definitely needs to stop hitting so many ground balls), but the overall process he's undertaken has clearly led to better results. From the fringes of the roster to a lineup staple, Young is making a name for himself in 2026.

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