Jeff McNeil sticking with the ‘damage’ approach that sparked his Mets turnaround

FORT MYERS, Fla. — This did not look like vintage Jeff McNeil, a contact-hitting savant who won a batting title by spraying the ball to all fields.

On Sunday, McNeil took a strong cut and launched a leadoff double off the center field wall, more than 400 feet away, against Boston’s Walker Buehler.

In his next at-bat, the lefty swinger pulled a well-struck single into the right-center gap.

This looked like a McNeil who was looking to pound pitches rather than looking to place his batted balls where fielders were not.

A hitter who has traveled down different paths toward success has picked the avenue that he believes will work best this season — the same one that easily worked the best last season.

“You got to have the intent to do damage,” McNeil said after the 6-4 loss to the Red Sox at JetBlue Park. “Not be afraid to … you’re going to chase some balls out of the zone. But when you get that one pitch, you’ve got to be ready to hit it with authority. You can’t just try to guide it out there.”

For the first few months of last season, McNeil used his bat as a pingpong paddle, trying to spray rather than smack.

The technique led to a low point of a roller-coaster career, when he began to lose time to Jose Iglesias and was one of the worst regulars in baseball through the first half (.216 average, .591 OPS).

The midpoint of the season was a turning point for a hitter who has had wonderful seasons (a two-time All-Star who hit a league-best .326 in 2022) and OK seasons (hitting .270 in 2023) but had not sunk this deep.

“Just wanted to try something new,” said McNeil, who used the All-Star break to regroup. “Wasn’t feeling great at the plate.”

The turnaround was drastic.

His second-half OPS jumped by over 300 points, up to .923.

After hitting five home runs in 88 games before the break, he smacked seven in 41 games in the second half before a wrist fracture ended his regular season.

His swing speed had averaged 68.3 mph pre-break.

In the last few months of the season, it ticked up to 69.5 mph.

He simply was taking healthier cuts that were less “pushy” and “slappy,” as hitting coach Eric Chavez put it, and McNeil has picked up this spring where he left off.

“Now he’s just rotating his hips better, and the barrel is actually getting through the zone. He’s actually hitting the ball a little bit harder [this spring],” Chavez said. “Jeff’s never going to be a high exit velocity guy, but just the sound off his bat has been a lot better.”

The solution for McNeil might sound peculiar to fans who prefer hitters to sell out for contact.

McNeil’s bat-to-ball skills are among the best in baseball, and they will naturally dip a bit as he prioritizes power.

When McNeil won the batting title in ’22, he hit .364 when teams shifted against him.

It is possible that McNeil, who has the ability to survey a defense and guide the ball to a spot, was a rarity: a hitter dinged by the ban of the extreme shift that came in 2023.

“I think he got away from [a hard-swinging approach] because of the shifting a couple of years ago, when he was more like: Let me spread the ball around,” manager Carlos Mendoza said.

McNeil has bounced back and forth with his approach, which sometimes has favored contact and sometimes has aimed for damage (like back in 2019, when he swatted 23 homers).

Ahead of a season in which he looms as a wild card — how good can this lineup be if he replicates his second half? — he feels confident that his approach is the correct one.

“For him mentally to know what he’s working on is the right stuff — he’s working on exactly what he worked on last year, and he feels good about what he’s doing,” Chavez said. “When he gets going, it’s going to be really helpful for us.”