Can Brett Baty become Joe McEwing?

Wanna make a Mets fan smile? Mention Joe McEwing.

Super Joe! The man who could do a lot of things well, but nothing spectacularly so. Super Joe! Early mentor to the budding Captain America, David Wright. Super Joe! Purported to be a pretty damn good manager nowadays. If you looked up the phrase “fan favorite,” you’d see Joe McEwing’s picture. He was also the textbook definition of the term “utility man.”

A glance at McEwing’s Baseball-Reference page could make you blind, what with all the positions listed. McEwing did everything on the field except pitch or catch – and the memory fails at the moment, but I seem to recall his being mentioned as the emergency backstop, should any awful thing have befallen Mike Piazza, Todd Pratt, Vance Wilson or Matt Franco. He cemented his position – the only position he ever had completely nailed – as a Shea Stadium Darling with his 3-for-5, two doubles-and-a-homer performance against Randy Johnson, of all people, in a mid-May 2000 tilt. And look how that year turned out. Well, 25 years on, the Mets may have found his most unlikely heir apparent.

Remember Brett Baty?

Amid much fanfare, Baty wrested the starting third baseman’s job from a struggling Mark Vientos and a not-yet-ready Ronny Mauricio in the benighted 2023 season – you know, the year we all had so much hope and ended up dragging our sorry tails home without so much as a sniff of the postseason. In tandem with catching phenom Francisco Alvarez, Baty was supposed to show us exactly how bright the future was going to be, in those pre-David Stearns days. He homered in his first Major League at bat in 2022. He could look so…good… and then simultaneously frustrate you. I remember sitting behind third base when the Los Angeles Dodgers visited and Max Muncy hit an eminently catchable pop fly that fell behind Baty’s left knee. The ball made a sickening *thud* as it plugged in the damp infield dirt. He also struck out in a key moment. With Vientos’s emergence last season and the Mets’ re-signing of Pete Alonso – who would be blocking any consideration of moving Vientos across the diamond – it would appear that Baty is the odd man out.

Oh, but wait…

Baty has been taking reps at second and the outfield here in the early spring and he’s looked pretty good, certainly offensively, anyway. Yes, yes, I know… this is spring training, where stats are written on the wind. Through eight Floridian – St. Lucien? – games he’s sporting an OPS of 1.357, courtesy of two homers and a double in 21 plate appearances. If he can figure how to pick it at his new, secondary positions, he might stand a decent chance of making this club in 2025. With the way injuries have a way of piling up, eerily often where the Mets are concerned, the “utility man” becomes one of the most important positions on the field. In an article in the Athletic – sorry: it’s paywalled, or I would cite it -- former MLB GM Jim Bowden listed Baty as one of the Mets who is “turning heads,” here in the early days of spring. President of Baseball operations David Steans was quoted, saying “[Baty] worked hard this offseason and has come in playing freely.” At this time of year, playing freely is a good thing.

For sure, Baty possesses more power than McEwing could ever have hoped for, and he might be a superior defender, as well, but will he light up the crowd like McEwing used to? Only time will let us know, of course, and the Citi Field crowd is far less forgiving than the Shea mob was a quarter-century ago. If he gets a couple of clutch knocks off a Paul Skenes or Gerrit Cole, though…

I don’t know. “Super Brett!” doesn’t quite have the same kind of ring to it. Baty will just have to forge his own legend.