The Rockaway Wave
Originally Published May 30, 2025
There’s a prospect breakout happening right now on Coney Island.
Carson Benge, the Mets’ most recent first-round pick, has been one of the best hitters in all of Minor League Baseball — and that’s not an exaggeration.
“I feel like I’ve just been putting good swings on balls,” Benge said. “I’ve been doing it all season, but I feel like I’ve just trusted my swing and it’s been paying off.”
At the time of writing, Benge has the third-highest wRC+ of all minor leaguers with at least 150 plate appearances. He only trails Mike Sirota of the Dodgers and Jacob Reimer, his teammate, who was the subject of The Brooklyn Cyclones Report a few weeks ago.
After being selected with the No. 19 overall pick in the 2024 MLB Draft, Benge made his professional baseball debut last season for Single-A St. Lucie. He played well in limited action, hitting .273/.420/.436/.856 with two home runs and three doubles in 15 games.
He started the 2025 season with High-A Brooklyn and scuffled very briefly out of the gates, hitting just .200 with a .574 OPS through his first 12 games. Then, the tear started.
“I think at the beginning he was taking too many pitches early in the count, that he knows that he needs to pull the trigger,” Cyclones manager Gilbert Gómez said. “I think right now he feels like he’s in a good spot mechanically, getting ready early, making sure that he’s thinking ‘go’ every time rather than ‘let me see a pitch.’”
On April 23rd, Benge was on base twice, the next day four times, and the day after that he hit his first home run of the season — an opposite field grand slam in a two-hit effort. He has a reputation as a hitter who is adept at going to the opposite field, and fellow Cyclones outfielder Eli Serrano III has said that about him in the past.
“The ball’s thrown away, I like to take it the other way, so,” Benge said. “It’s about as simple as it gets.”
He kept hitting after the grand slam, racking up four more multi-hit games before seeing his seven-game hitting streak snapped on May 2. That would be the first of just two games in the first four weeks of May where Benge failed to reach base, and one of just six games where he failed to record a hit.
Since April 23, Benge is hitting .353/.485/.627/1.112 with four home runs, four triples, eight doubles, and more walks than strikeouts in 28 games.
He’s even hitting at Maimonides Park, a notoriously difficult park for left-hand hitters like Benge to hit in. In 18 home games this season, Benge is hitting .308 with a .917 OPS, by far the highest of any of Brooklyn’s lefties.
He was drafted on the back of his all-around hitting profile, with great bat-to-ball skills and above-average power potential, but also because there was maybe some more untapped potential sitting there.
Benge was a finalist for the 2024 John Olerud Two-Way Player of the Year Award, given to the top two-way player in college baseball. He hit .335 with a 1.109 OPS and 18 home runs for the Oklahoma State Cowboys in 2024, but was also one of their most effective pitchers.
He mainly (but not always) worked out of the bullpen, appearing in 18 games as a pitcher and posting a 3.16 ERA in 37 innings. He struck out 44 batters and walked just 11, throwing a mid-90s fastball along with a slider and changeup.
He ultimately lost out on the award named after the Mets’ first baseman from 1997-1999, as it went to Jac Caglianone, the eventual No. 6 pick in the 2024 draft. But Benge was a legitimately good pitcher, and interesting enough as a pitching prospect for the Mets to at least leave the door open on him continuing to pitch and for Benge to publicly state that he wanted a shot to pitch immediately following the draft.
The door didn’t stay open long, with Benge revealing less than two weeks later that he would give up pitching professionally, but he was a talented enough pitcher for it to at least be a discussion.
Benge said he likes pitching and misses it, but it wasn’t difficult for him to give it up.
“I love pitching, but if they say they like me better as a hitter, who am I to say no?” Benge said.
This is the first time in his baseball career that 100% of Benge’s effort and practice will go into hitting, and his manager said he is already seeing the results.
“It’s doing wonders,” Gómez said. “He’s able to get to know himself and figure things out on his own because he’s going out there every single day. So, those little tweaks that you make when you’re fully committed to hitting, now, he said we’ll make it.”
Gómez said he’s even seen the effects on his defense and baserunning. He said Benge has gotten more aggressive on the basepaths and is in a really good spot defensively. An outfielder, Benge has played mostly center field for the Cyclones but has more than a handful of games in both corner spots. More time to work on his defense now that he’s no longer pitching will only increase his odds of being able to stick in center.
Nolan McLean, his teammate at Oklahoma State and current teammate in the video game Rocket League (think soccer but with RC cars), has taken off this season for the Mets in Double-A and Triple-A in his first year focusing solely on pitching.
Benge appears to be doing the same, just as a hitter.
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