Mark Vientos' Data Suggests He Should Be Breaking Out Again. So Why Is He Struggling?

To put it mildly, the New York Mets' offense has been a dumpster fire on top of a tribal burial ground. They don’t get on base, they can’t hit for average, and when they do connect, they barely put a charge in the ball. As with any early-season slump, a lot of things have to go unexpectedly wrong all at once for a team this talented to sport a wRC+ of 80 over 22 games. 

First, Juan Soto went down with a calf injury, and then everyone this side of Francisco Alvarez and Luis Robert Jr. decided that letting go of the slack would be a great idea. The Mets’ bats will turn it around in some capacity. Soto is a metronome of consistency, and Francisco Lindor, Bo Bichette, Marcus Semien, and Jorge Polanco have track records I trust far more than their current production. However, that probably won’t be enough for the Mets to get where they want to go. They’ll need more, which means they need Mark Vientos to break out… again. 

Only 18 months ago, Vientos was viewed as a future building block for the Mets. Hot on the heels of his explosive 2024 season, where he belted 27 home runs in 111 games, good for a wRC+ of 132, Vientos and his plus-raw power were poised to solidify their spot in the middle of the Mets lineup. Unfortunately, nearly everything has gone south since. 

Vientos’ 2025 was as underwhelming as the entire team's season. He slumped to 17 home runs in 127 games and posted a wRC+ of 97. That’d be fine for a catcher, but not for a corner infielder who isn’t an elite third-base defender; that’s replacement level. However, the whiplash between his 2024 and 2025 was more extreme than his underlying performance.

In 2024, Vientos was one of the luckier hitters in baseball. His wOBA of .356 far outstripped his xwOBA of .333, and the 32 home runs he hit between the regular season and playoffs exceeded his expected total of 25.8. Now, for a 24-year-old, it was fair to dream he could continue to improve, but instead, he mostly stayed the same and got far less favorable results. His xwOBA in 2025 was .320, but his actual wOBA came in at .303. So, while Vientos, under the hood, only shed .013 points of wOBA between seasons, in reality, his wOBA dropped by a gargantuan .053. 

The Mets, realistically, don’t need the 2024 version of Vientos to be real challengers, but they desperately do need something approaching the 2025 version, just with a bit more batted ball luck. Unfortunately, the 2026 version of Vientos has looked absolutely lost at the plate, but there are a few promising developments that could portend a second breakout. 

Normally, you don’t highlight a player with a wRC+ of 71 and an xwOBA of .271. Those are dreadful figures, and as the expected data suggests, Vientos has earned those numbers. However, just because your batted balls have been lackluster doesn’t mean the foundation of the operation is totally kaput. 

The basis of Vientos’ operation is power. In 2024, he struck out in 29.7% of his plate appearances and walked in 7.3%. Both of those figures were below the league average, but it didn’t matter because he slugged .516 against the league average of .399. In the seasons since, Vientos has dramatically improved his K%, but at the cost of his walk rate and power. On the surface, the answer seems pretty simple for a player who has seen his K% drop from 29.7% to 23.4% and isolated power drop from .249 to .114. But Vientos isn’t really trading contact for power, even if that’s what the results have been. 

The best underlying metric for power-intention is swing speed. While a bunch of factors go into how hard you hit a ball, the most fundamental one is how fast you swing the bat. According to physics, the faster you swing a bat, the faster the ball should come off it, and Vientos has never swung harder than this season. 

In 2024, the season Vientos slugged his way into the heart of the Mets’ order, he averaged a swing speed of 71.8 MPH, with a fast swing rate (the percentage of swings above 75 MPH) of 20.6%. He followed that up in 2025 by cutting his swing speed to 71.2 MPH with a fast swing rate of 14.8%. The result, unsurprisingly, was less power but also fewer strikeouts, as he cut his K% from 29.7% to 24.8%. Now, in the early going of 2026, his average swing speed is a career best 73.7 MPH with a fast swing rate of 28.7%. 

Vientos, based on his swing speed, is going up to the plate looking to slug, but his hard-hit rate (the percentage of batted balls hit 95 MPH or harder) has plummeted to a career low 41%, compared to 50.5% in 2025 and 46.6% in 2024. So, what exactly is going on here?

Well, swing speed is necessary for high-end exit velocities, but it isn’t the only factor. To really put a charge in the ball, you need to square up the ball while also swinging fast, and it’s here where Vientos has fallen off. In 2024, Vientos' blast rate (a fast swing that also results in squared-up contact) was 19.3% on contact and 13% on all swings. In 2025, he saw that decline to 16.9% on contact and 11.7% on all swings, and in 2026, those figures have eroded further to 16.4% and 10.6%, respectively.

While the results for Vientos in 2026 have been more or less atrocious, he may be on the cusp of turning it around. His contact and swing decision metrics are almost identical to 2024, and he’s striking out at a career-low rate, while also swinging harder than ever. The only issue has been converting all of those hard swings into well-struck balls. This could simply be a timing issue, which all hitters go through at some point during a long season, but I also think Vientos could benefit from getting his stance back to where it was in 2024. 

Over the past two seasons, Vientos has slowly crept closer to the plate. In 2024, he stood 29.7 inches off the plate, but in 2026, he measures in at 27 inches off the plate. Now, 2.7 inches is not much in the real world, but in the high-stakes reality of Major League Baseball hitters, it might as well be a mile. The benefit of getting closer to the plate is that it increases your plate coverage, but a drawback is that it can make impacting pitches on the inner and middle third more difficult, and if your timing is off, it can make turning on fastballs all but impossible. Based on the change in Vientos slugging percentage on fastballs between 2024 and 2026, it's clear something is off.

In 2024, Vientos absolutely crushed middle-in fastballs to the tune of a .500 slugging. In 2026, that figure has halved to .250. Needless to say, that’s not a good development. Obviously, we're in small-sample-size territory, but it's pretty easy to see the through line between the decline in production and an inability to crush inside pitches.

There’s a chance that Mark Vientos has completely lost it at the plate. That, in his quest to cut down on strikeouts, he muted his one carrying trait. However, I think the fact that he is swinging as hard as ever suggests he’s just a small adjustment away from getting back to his best. Whether it’s backing off the plate an inch, getting his timing down, or simply just starting to see the ball a bit better, Vientos is still swinging as hard as ever and putting the ball in play as often as ever. Those two things should be a potent combination. The Mets just need to survive long enough for the results to match the data.