Mets' hit-happy McNeil deserves All-Star shot

Jeff McNeil of the Mets, a contact guy in this age of the long ball in baseball, ought to be an All-Star this season. McNeil doesn’t hit a lot of home runs. He just hits. And keeps hitting. And ought to be in the process of hitting himself all the way to Cleveland on July 9.

McNeil didn’t get a hit against the Braves on Friday night, something that doesn’t happen very often. His 0-for-4 dropped his batting average to .341, though he brought it back up to .344 on Saturday with a 2-for-4 day (two RBI doubles) in the Mets' 5-4 loss to the Braves. He had it over .350 as recently as Wednesday.

What McNeil is doing for the Mets and has been doing since being called up last summer doesn’t get noticed very much outside of New York, where all Mets fans see is that their team was just two games better than the Marlins in the loss column after Saturday’s games.

McNeil might not make it to Cleveland for the All-Star Game. Pete Alonso, who hit his 28th home run on Friday night and will likely get to 30 before the All-Star Game, still might be a backup at first base. It’s hard to believe that two guys from a team currently sliding into Flushing Bay might get picked for the All-Star Game. Maybe Alonso, home run guy in a home run world, has the better chance.

McNeil is still an All-Star, pretty much by any definition. This isn’t about launch angles with him. He is way more Pete Rose than Pete Alonso. He comes out of the dugout swinging away. With most of his at-bats, that usually means the first pitch he sees. But you have to keep pointing out that since he did make it to the big leagues at the end of July last year, only one player -- reigning MVP Mr. Christian Yelich himself -- has a higher batting average than McNeil does.

McNeil got called up from Las Vegas and nearly missed a red-eye flight to New York. But when he got to Citi Field for the Mets-Padres game on July 24, 2018, he got a hit. No one should have been surprised. King of his thing. As he moves toward the first anniversary of his callup, he hasn’t just put himself into the conversation about the All-Star Game. He has put himself into the conversation about a batting championship.

"It felt amazing," McNeil said at the time of his debut. "You always want to get your first hit out of the way. I'll come back tomorrow and try to do the same thing."

That is exactly what McNeil did and keeps doing. He hit .329 over the rest of last season. He has been better this season, even with moving off second base when the Mets got Robinson Cano in a trade with the Mariners. So far Cano has been a massive disappointment for the Mets. As of Saturday, McNeil is hitting more than 100 points higher. The Mets have been let down by Cano, by their bullpen, even by their starting pitchers. It’s why you sure can make a very good case that it is the two young guys at the top of the order, McNeil and Alonso, who are keeping the Mets out of last place.

Alonso is every bit the modern slugger. McNeil is a throwback guy, using the whole field, a dirty uniform out of the past. He was a 12th-round pick in the 2013 Draft. He went to the Kingsport Mets of the Appalachian League and hit .329 that year -- exactly the same average he hit for the Mets when he finally made the big leagues last year.

He is 27 now, and you’d say he’s a late bloomer, except when you look at his Minor League stats, from Kingsport to Savannah to St. Lucie to Binghamton to Las Vegas. He was hitting .368 in Vegas last season when he had to make that red-eye to Citi Field. Last year he had the most home runs he’s ever hit in one Minor League year, 14 with Binghamton and then five in Vegas.

He currently has six homers in 70 games this year. But the guy who hardly ever takes a walk -- McNeil has 262 at-bats this season and just 18 walks -- still has an on-base percentage of .409. The guy who doesn’t even have much of a glamour nickname -- Noah Syndergaard started calling him “Squirrel” in Spring Training -- just keeps hacking away, getting to first or second, evoking an expression that is as old as baseball: Hit ‘em where they ain’t.

Here is something he said back in April, when I wrote my first column about him, but clearly not my last:

“Every level of the Minor Leagues, I’ve hit the ball hard. When I got here, nothing changed.”

He’s not bragging. He’s just stating a baseball fact. He also said this about being on base that first night against the Padres, and all the way through August and September:

“It was a great feeling, just to know what I had been doing in the Minor Leagues had translated here. From the start, I felt like I was getting consistently good at-bats. And hitting the ball hard.”

He has made a name for himself in this home run time by hitting singles and doubles. That ought to be honored in Cleveland along with home runs.