Pete Crow-Armstrong and Mark Vientos do not belong in the same baseball conversation for very long. One is in the middle of a 2026 breakout that has him leading the league in multiple offensive categories and sitting as a favorite to win National League MVP. The other has spent the season continuing to slide, with the Mets still weighing what to do next.
And yet, there’s a strange little corner of Baseball-Reference where the two were linked by career numbers.
Before Crow-Armstrong’s 2026 production was folded into his similarity score, his career line lined up shockingly close with Vientos’. PCA entered the season with a lifetime .722 OPS.
Vientos was at .732. Crow-Armstrong had 41 home runs and 143 RBI; Vientos had 57 homers and 157 RBI.
Even the slash lines were nearly identical: .240/.285/.437 for Crow-Armstrong and .239/.294/.438 for Vientos.
That comparison says less about what the two players are now and more about where Crow-Armstrong was a year ago. In 2024, his first full season, he was more of a defense-and-speed player than a bat-first threat. He finished ninth and then followed in 2025 with more power, though he still hit under .250 and never got his OBP over .300.
That’s what makes 2026 so different. Crow-Armstrong’s bat has taken off, his lifetime OPS has jumped to .803, and the gap between him and Vientos has widened fast, with Vientos now sitting at .718.
Still, the old comparison helps explain why the Mets have not rushed to cut bait on Vientos. The team did try to move on from him in the offseason, but other roster decisions opened a path for him to keep getting playing time. That changes this winter, when his underperformance and defensive issues should force the Mets to make a harder call.
For Mets fans, the Crow-Armstrong reminder is one they’re going to keep hearing. The deal that sent him away for two months of Javier Baez and a year and a half of Trevor Williams is not fading from memory anytime soon.
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