The Mets have another guy who deserves less MVP consideration than Francisco Lindor.
The buzz around the New York Mets and the MVP race is centered on Francisco Lindor. The starting shortstop is among the league leaders in numerous categories if not at the top with some of the newer or more non-traditional ones. Unlike some of the other candidates, he performs a key role and does so admirably. Lindor gains an advantage by playing Gold Glove-caliber defense against players like Shohei Ohtani and Marcell Ozuna, who wouldn’t know the difference between a mitt and a mutt this year.
Lindor’s value cannot be underestimated. From such a bleak beginning to where he is now, he has made one of the most amazing comebacks. His attitude is nowhere to be found, and it is what pounds the most heavily.
Lindor is fantastic, but he cannot carry the team alone. In fact, one of his teammates merits a more distant MVP award. Now 81 games into the season, tripling Mark Vientos’ stats would place him among the greatest hitters in the National League.
Mets slugger Mark Vientos only has missing at-bats spoiling his inclusion in the MVP conversation
Vientos is not the top player in the league, and a full season of action this year would not have changed that. Let’s get that out of the way immediately. In terms of MVP, I’m thinking about Dominic Smith finishing 13th in 2020.
Voters can award places from first to tenth, and the points add up. Most of the time, those 10th-place picks are players who didn’t earn it but had a meaningful, albeit shortened, season. Hello, this is Vientos. He’d need far more than a single 10th-place vote to secure any sort of placement.
If we merely doubled Vientos’ stats, he’d be on track to smash 40 home runs and 108 RBIs by 2024. This is even more astounding when you consider the.278/.334/.549 slash line. His.884 OPS after going hitless on Friday against the San Diego Padres will not drop too low. In fact, it outperformed Pete Alonso in every season of his career except for his outstanding rookie season, when he finished sixth.
Many of these figures don’t quite compare to Ohtani and Ozuna, who are already where Vientos would finish in a whole season. We’d have to anticipate that he wouldn’t play all 162 games. This brings his home run and RBI totals down slightly.
Vientos is one of the top power hitters in the game this season. With one home run per 14.5 at-bats, his power is the most prominent on the Mets and among the greatest in Major League Baseball.
This season, Vientos has benefited greatly from consistency. This helps to refute the argument of what he could have done in the month and a half he didn’t play to begin the year. This season, there hasn’t been a single month in which he has fallen or put up absurd figures. August has been his lowest month so far, but he has not disappeared entirely.
A few things must happen for Lindor to earn MVP. Some of these events are required for Vientos to receive a vote. An outstanding finish is required, as is a Mets postseason berth. Vientos will be easily disregarded by many voters if the Mets do not make the playoffs because this is a club with veteran studs. He’s not even the most visible of the young guys.
Make no mistake. Vientos is one of the league’s top hitters this season. All that is missing is a month and a half of baseball, during which we cannot predict how he would have played.
