Mark Vientos and how everything gets exaggerated in small samples
On April 26, they are all small samples.
We know that Juan Soto isn’t going to finish the year with a .149 ISO, when he has a lifetime .247 ISO coming into the season.
We know that Tylor Megill isn’t going to finish with a 1.09 ERA, when he entered the year with a lifetime 4.56 ERA.
Soto may not reach his lifetime ISO, while Megill may very well beat his lifetime ERA. While we don’t know where they’ll end up, we do know the direction they’ll move in the rest of the season. We can all apply our own individual adjustments to what they’ve done so far. We’re able to make some decent assumptions because Soto and Megill have a fair amount of playing time in the majors under their belt. Yet what happens when that’s not the case?
Soto had 4,088 PA before the 2025 season, while Mark Vientos had 728. Should anyone feel confident with the adjustments for the rest of the year we should apply with Vientos? There’s not a giant spread among the four projection systems on FanGraphs that show rest of season forecasts. THE BAT has him with a 106 wRC+ going forward, while Steamer has him with a 115. Still, Vientos had a 133 wRC+ last year. Should the default assumption be that he’ll finish that much worse than he did a season ago?
My preseason forecast for Vientos was a decline of 117 points of OPS, from an .837 to a .720 OPS. Pretty much everyone who responded felt he was going to be significantly better than my projection. So, if you thought he was going to have an .800 OPS this year, shouldn’t you feel he’s going to have something close to an .800 OPS from now until the end of the season? Here’s how the four projection models thought Vientos was going to do, with the first one being preseason OPS and the second one being his ROS numbers:
ATC -- .751, .753
Steamer - .781, .761
THE BAT - .716, .727
ZiPS -- .772, .752
These numbers are surprising, at least to me. It seems odd that two of our four models project Vientos to do better than what they forecasted in preseason, despite his poor numbers to date. And the two that had their projections decrease did so by 20 points of OPS, which feels extreme, given that it’s only 94 PA of new information. If our non-biased projection models can act like they’re drunk, regular fans should be able to do the same.
My expectations are that Vientos will perform better the rest of the year than he has to date, perhaps even by a big enough margin to exceed my preseason .720 OPS forecast. So far, Vientos has a .622 OPS, almost identical to the .620 OPS he had in 233 PA in 2023. The big difference between the two partial seasons is that Vientos had a 4.3 BB% and a 30.5 K% in ’23, compared to 10.6% and 20.2%, respectively, in ‘25. Well, that and he has a BABIP 42 points lower this season.
Assuming Vientos keeps his strikeouts in check, it’s almost impossible to believe that he won’t improve upon his numbers to date. And the thing is, even with how poorly his numbers are right now, we’ve already seen a big improvement from how he started the campaign.
In his first 13 games and 54 PA, Vientos had a .393 OPS. In his last 10 games and 40 PA, Vientos has a .904 OPS. And the latter stretch was interrupted by his groin issue, which forced him to leave a game early and then miss the next two completely. The game where he was removed after two PA is the only one in the last 10 where Vientos didn’t have a hit.
Everything gets exaggerated – both positively and negatively – in short samples. How much should Vientos’ horrible play in his first 13 games alter the way we view him? How much weight should we put on what he’s posted in the last 10 contests? If it’s not fair to judge Vientos on an unbelievably bad start, was it fair to do that same exact thing with Brett Baty?
In his first eight games and 21 PA, Baty had a .238 OPS
In his last 11 games and 37 PA, Baty had an .818 OPS
While my preference would have been to keep Baty and send down Jose Azocar, it was a reasonable decision to prioritize center field defense in the short term and do the opposite. No one should construe this as a “Baty got robbed!” point of view.
Instead, the takeaway should be that if a player performs over 400 points of OPS worse than expected over X amount of PA, it’s going to take significantly more PA than X to get back to expectations if the player “only” performs 100 points of OPS better in the good stretch. And that maxim applies to Soto, Vientos and Baty equally.
May Vientos keep hitting like he’s done recently and make the results from the first 13 games of the season virtually meaningless.
I am pretty salty at the start from Soto, and everyone keeps saying he'll return to form. His series with the Nats saw him on base 9 times in 4 games, and that's amazing, except for the fact that his production came mostly in loses and his outfield play has left a lot on the table. I just want more out of Soto because of the contract we gave him. I want him to be Ohtani, despite how unfair that might be.
As for Vientos, I don't expect him to replicate last year exactly, but to come in around 20 HR and 80 RBI would be solid enough for a first year of full-time MLB play. He still has room to grow as he's still a young guy with not a ton of MLB experience, so if we continue to look at him as a guy who's establishing himself, his outlook will seem less bleak.
I agree that Baty should have stayed and Azocar should have been sent down. If we were going to put McNeil in CF anyways, why was it necessary to keep Azocar on the roster instead of Baty? I hope he's recalled soon.