Jeff McNeil: The Best Hitter You Probably Don’t Know
Jeff McNeil has always been good…
This year Jeff McNeil made the All-Star team while leading Major League Baseball in hitting. His .349 batting average, is better than Cody Bellinger (.336), Charlie Blackmon (.330), and Christian Yelich (.329), yet in Fantasy Baseball, he is currently owned in just 88% of ESPN Leagues and 76% of Yahoo Leagues. For the numbers he’s putting up, he’s remarkably unknown – in fact at the Major League All-Star game in Cleveland this year, when he came up to bat they didn’t even have the right picture up. It was his teammate Jacob DeGrom’s face on the jumbotron instead of McNeil.
So who exactly is Jeff McNeil, and how did he wind up hitting .350 in the Major Leagues?
First thing to note is that baseball is actually Jeff McNeil’s sloppy seconds. When he was young, his primary focus was actually golf. When he struggled at the 2009 US Junior Amateur Golf Championship, he pivoted back to the national pastime, where he had performed well enough on the side to earn a scholarship. Originally committing to Cal State Northridge, he settled on Long Beach State, the school that produced former All-Stars Evan Longoria, Troy Tulowitzki, and Jered Weaver. Things went well, and in 2013 he was named to the All-Big West Team after hitting .348. He was drafted in the 12th Round by the New York Mets.
Through his first 164 career games – split between Rookie Advanced Kingsport (2013, 47 games; .329/.413/.409), Low A Savannah, and High A St. Lucie in 2014 – McNeil produced a .302/.380/.398 slash line with 95 runs scored, 28 stolen bases, and 3 home runs. In 2015 he played primarily at High A St. Lucie where he was an All-Star after hitting .312/.373/.382 – good enough for 2nd in the Florida State League. He also led all New York Mets minor leaguers in hits that year with 149. That fall he was assigned to the Arizona Fall League, somewhat of an advanced assignment for someone who had only played just four games above A ball.
After his 2015 season McNeil started to garner some minor attention, making the New York Mets top 30 prospects list (#29) as more of a deep sleeper type of player due to his versatility as a utility infielder that could hit for average from the left side. McNeil struggled to stay healthy the next two years, playing in only 3 games in 2016 and 48 games in 2017.
At age 26, and having only played 21 games above A ball, Jeff McNeil was hardly considered a prospect anymore. He would have been forgiven for hanging up the spikes, as many at that crossroads do, but McNeil decided to stick with it for at least another year.
Heading into 2018, while no longer a prospect, Jeff McNeil was a man on a mission. He started the year off at AA where he would hit .327/.402/.626 with 14 home runs in 57, games before getting promoted to AAA. There, he hit even better (.368/.427/.600) through 31 games earning a promotion to the majors on July 24th, 2018.
In his major league debut, Jeff McNeil collected his first base hit against Phil Hughes on the first pitch he saw, and he hasn’t stopped hitting ever since. In fact, McNeil has been the second best hitter in the majors, batting an even .340 since his debut on July 24th, 2018.
And for those who thought you had heard of Jeff McNeil, but weren’t sure why, it was probably for his ridiculous bat. In 2016 he began using a knobless bat, given to him by Lamar Johnson, the Mets minor league hitting coordinator, and he has continued using it since. He is curretnly the only Majopr Leaguer doing so.
