Carson Benge has gone from winning the Mets’ starting right field job to leaving the club with a sharper question than the one it answered in camp: how long does he keep playing every day after a 6-for-46 start? The 11th-ranked prospect is hitting.130 with a.426 OPS through 14 games, and the early returns have turned a spring opportunity into an immediate test of patience.
Benge earned that chance with a.366 average in 14 Spring Training games, then won the job after Mike Tauchman suffered a torn meniscus at the tail end of camp. David Stearns had said all offseason that Benge would get a legitimate shot to prove himself, and for a few weeks it looked as if the organization’s plan was paying off.
What makes the slow start harder to dismiss is how strong the track record was before he reached Queens. Drafted in the first round in 2024 as a two-way player out of Oklahoma State, Benge quickly decided to focus on his bat. He then hit.281/.385/.472 with an.857 OPS across three levels in 2025, adding 15 home runs and 22 stolen bases. Even a rough 24-game stint at Triple-A, where he hit.178 while dealing with a hand injury, did not erase the broader picture of a player moving fast.
The problem now is that the major league production has not caught up to the résumé. Benge’s strikeout rate has climbed from 20% in spring to 26.9% in the regular season, while his walk rate has improved from 8.9% to 11.5%. His hard-hit rate is up to 40.6% and his average exit velocity has reached 90.5 mph, both better than the 34.5% hard-hit rate and 88.3 mph average exit velocity he posted in the Grapefruit League. But the results have lagged behind the underlying contact, and a.161 BABIP has left him with little to show for it.
There is a gap in the numbers that explains why the Mets are now facing the question that has followed Benge from the moment he won the job. His batted-ball data in the majors has actually been better than it was in spring, but the hits have not come. A 53.1% ground-ball rate has only deepened the concern that the contact is too often finding the dirt instead of the gaps.
That leaves the Mets with a decision that is not hard to see coming. They can keep betting on the player who tore through three levels in 2025, or they can start trimming his runway after 14 uneven games. For now, Benge is still getting the chance Stearns promised. The next stretch will show whether that chance still looks like an audition or starts to look like a warning.
