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In 2022, Jeff McNeil had the best season of his career. He made his second All-Star team, won his first career batting title after hitting .326, won his first Silver Slugger Award, and even received some down-ballot MVP votes.
This season has been an entirely different story for the Mets’ second baseman. McNeil’s batting average dropped to .267 after Wednesday’s 10-8 loss to the Astros. He went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and was the only starter in either lineup to not record a hit or a walk (he reached base after being hit by a pitch.)
His two at-bats that didn’t end in strikeouts were not Jeff McNeil-like at-bats. He popped up a first-pitch fastball to third base with the bases loaded in the first inning, and hit a soft fly out to shallow left field after two non-competitive swings and misses in the eighth inning.
After going 2-for-5 with a pair of singles in the Mets’ 11-1 blowout win in the series opener on Monday, McNeil went 0-for-7 in the final two games of the series and added three more strikeouts.
McNeil has hit just .206/.299/.279 over 68 at-bats in June, striking out 10 times after striking out just 20 times in his first 198 at-bats of the season. While the Mets’ offense has started to show some signs of life as of late, McNeil is trending in the opposite direction.
The left-handed hitter is on pace to finish with less than half as many extra-base hits as he had in 2022. His slugging percentage has plummeted from .454 in 2022 to .338 this season, and he has just 12 extra-base hits on the year. Hitting for power has never been a strength of McNeil’s game outside of the second half of 2019 when everybody was hitting home runs, but the Mets still had to assume McNeil would be producing more in that department than what he has given them to this point in the year.
McNeil’s struggles are surprising considering he has improved on both his strikeout rate and walk rate so far this season, but he has not been able to parlay the improved eye at the plate and decrease in strikeouts into a second consecutive All-Star caliber season.
So what is going wrong for McNeil? His BABIP on the season is just .292, which is well below his career mark of .327 and the .353 mark he had in 2022. The .292 BABIP would be the second lowest of his career behind just the 2021 season where his BABIP was .280. McNeil’s bat-to-ball skills are well known, and he thrived in 2022 by hitting the ball to wherever the defense gave him. Perhaps the lack of a shift taking away his ability to slap the ball to an open side of the field has hurt the two-time All-Star’s 2023 campaign.
Whatever the reason for McNeil’s slump, the Mets are running out of time to get back on track. McNeil is hardly the biggest issue for the Mets in 2023, but with so much going wrong at once, the Mets need their two-time All-Star to start to resemble the player he has been for nearly his entire career.
