The New York Mets have locked up another member of their position player core, inking second baseman Jeff McNeil to a four-year, $50M contract extension that buys out his last two years of arbitration and first two years of free agency. The deal also includes a club option for 2027 at $15.75M.

This deal has seemingly almost universally been hailed as coup for the Mets, as evaluators are laser focused on his 2022 mainstream stats, as he won the NL batting title with a .326 average, made the All Star team, won a Silver Slugger award and finished 15th in the NL MVP voting.

While I don’t believe that this will turn out to be a disastrous contract for the Mets, I’m not nearly as sanguine about the deal. First, McNeil turns 31 in April, and will be 34 or 35 years when this deal ends. Secondly, he is a fairly ordinary defensive player as we speak - he is likely to be a clearly below average defensive middle infielder by the later stages of this deal. Most importantly, however, I believe that McNeil - while a useful, somewhat unique hitter - is significantly overrated at the plate.

First, let’s talk about the clear, obvious positives. Jeff McNeil does not strike out. His 10.4% whiff rate last season was a career low, and was over two full standard deviations lower than league average. This dovetails nicely with his other key strength - his ability to consistently square up the baseball. His 23.8% liner was over a full standard deviation above the NL average last season, and was the second best of his career. For most hitters, liner rates can be quite volatile, but there is a small subset of hitters who have a knack for doing this, and McNeil is in the club. The lowest single-season liner rate of his career is 20.4%, squarely in the league average range.

A hitter who doesn’t strike out and hits plenty of liners has a shot to hit .300 in any given season, and despite the overrated status of the batting average statistic, there’s real value in that. Unfortunately, that represents the sum total of McNeil’s offensive pluses.

Minuses? The big one is that McNeil simply does not hit the ball hard. Now when you’re hitting line drives, even weakly hit ones tend to go for singles. It’s in those other batted ball types where subpar exit velocity becomes a problem. McNeil has consistently hit his fly balls (and liners) over a half standard deviation more weakly than average, and only in 2021 did he hit his grounders (by over a half standard deviation) materially harder than average.

Among NL batting title qualifiers in 2022, McNeil posted the lowest Adjusted Fly Ball Contact Score (31). That is, on a scale of 100, with the higher the number the better, the level of production that “should have” resulted from the fly balls he hit, based on their respective exit speeds. His Unadjusted (based on actual results) Fly Ball Contact Score of 40 wasn’t much better. His subpar average fly ball exit speed only begins to tell the story - McNeil hits more cans of corn between 85-95 mph than anyone in the game. He hit 74 of those last season, and MLB bats .088 on such flies.

Well, if McNeil didn’t do much on flies or liners (98 Unadjusted vs. 96 Adjusted Liner Contact Score), where did his big 2022 numbers come from? Somehow, someway, McNeil batted .339 AVG-.402 SLG (289 Unadjusted Grounder Contact Score) on the ground last season. His mediocre grounder exit speeds support a much lower .193 AVG-.211 SLG (89 Adjusted Grounder Contact Score). He was easily the luckiest player in major league baseball on ground balls last season.

Put it all together, and McNeil “should have” batted a much lower .268-.319-.366 last season, for a respectable 95 ‘”Tru” Production+ mark. If he put up those numbers, I don’t believe he would received this extension.

Jeff McNeil is not a bad ballplayer. He has defensive versatility, and his ability to handle the bat is in short supply in today’s game. But he’s not even the player he was a few short years ago. His fly ball rate has crept up, and he’s a dead out when he hits the ball in the air. His walk rate has trended downward. We’re heading toward nothing being left except a decent but relatively empty batting average.

Mets’ owner Steve Cohen has gotten tons of attention for his big-spending ways, and truth be told, if his major play for Carlos Correa had held up, would be sitting pretty with the Mets as prime NL pennant contenders. The reality is, however, that the Mets are currently slated to run out relatively ordinary thirtysomething players like Eduardo Escobar, Mark Canha and McNeil on a near everyday basis in 2023 and beyond. That is not the recipe for dominance.