brett baty mets
Reinhold Matay-USA TODAY Sports

Spring training games just started for the Mets and the rest of Major League Baseball. As I sit here to write this, it’s still February. There’s more than one month until Opening Day. It’d be irresponsible to draw any legitimate conclusions from the first weekend of Grapefruit League action. However, it’s hard to start things much better than how top prospect Brett Baty has.

Baty has appeared in three games since Friday: one intrasquad game and two Grapefruit League contests. He’s hitting better than .500 with an OPS up over 2.000. His performance in the intrasquad game included a single and RBI double. Here’s a glimpse of that double to the left-center field gap:

The following day, the Mets split the squad up for two games: one on the road against the Houston Astros, and another at home against the Miami Marlins. Baty’s trip to West Palm Beach was a noteworthy one. The third baseman went 2-for-2 in three plate appearances with the below two-run homer, a walk, and a single.

He didn’t start Sunday’s game against the Washington Nationals, but he accumulated two plate appearances as a sub. Baty went hitless with a run scored, but one can imagine the impression has been made.

During the Mets’ spring home opener on Saturday night, Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling briefly discussed New York’s third-base situation. You know, when Keith wasn’t giving us classic moments. The booth said what many are thinking — of all the position battles in Mets camp, third base is the one that could go either way. Eduardo Escobar is the favorite to head north as the starter, but if Baty lights the world on fire over the next month, there’s a chance he breaks camp in the big leagues.

Baty will have to keep up some semblance of his current pace to eventually force the Mets’ hand ahead of Opening Day. Fellow top prospect Francisco Alvarez also needs to do that if he wants to start the year in the big leagues. However, Baty has a better chance at forcing his way onto the Opening Day roster than Alvarez.

We got wind of how Baty spent this past offseason before a pivotal year in his development. If not to start the year, we could already assume he’d be back in the big leagues at some point early in the season. There’s still plenty of work for him to do to prove he’s ready for the challenge. But hey, he couldn’t have started things much better than he did this past weekend.

Matt Musico can be reached at matt.musico@xlmedia.com and you can follow him on Twitter: @mmusico8.

Matt Musico is an editor for ESNY. He’s been writing about baseball and the Mets for the past decade. His work has been featured on numberFire, MetsMerized Online, Bleacher Report, and Yahoo! Sports.