A star is born? Carson Benge rocks his way to 5-for-5 performance in Mets' win
The Mets' Carson Benge gestures towards the sky as he crosses home plate after hitting a solo home run against the San Diego Padres in the sixth inning of a game Sunday in San Diego. Credit: AP/Derrick Tuskan
SAN DIEGO — Carson Benge was strumming a guitar by his locker in the visitor’s clubhouse at Petco Park the other day — at first casually picking at the strings before eventually breaking out into an actual song.
He started playing only a few years ago, he said. At the time, he was injured, he was bored, and he picked up Guitar Hero. Now here’s the thing with that video game: It lets you pretend to be a rock star by hitting color-coded buttons to the rhythm of popular songs. Depending on what mode you’re in, it’s not a particularly easy game to master, and it does a decent job of emulating playing an actual instrument.
But if you’re going to spend all that time pretending to play guitar, well, wouldn’t it make sense to learn the real thing?
So Benge did, and from the sound of it, he’s pretty good.
Benge’s natural acuity shouldn’t shock you, not when you see how quickly he translates innate talent to tangible results.
In Sunday’s 7-3 win over the Padres, that meant going 5-for-5 with two RBIs and falling a double short of the cycle as the Mets took the series and ended this West Coast trip 3-3. He’s the first Mets rookie to go 5-for-5 since Pete Alonso did it in August 2019. Only three other Mets rookies have gone 5-for-5 with a homer — Alonso, Alex Ochoa and John Milner.
“Today was nice,” Benge said with an impish grin. “It’s nice to get two hits, let alone five, so being able to do that was pretty special. I got the ball and everything.” (He already had given it to his dad by then.)
It’s been quite a ride to get to this place: Benge didn’t strictly adhere to the formula meant to churn out major league baseball players. He didn’t hit the showcase circuit. He preferred to play with his high school team. And rather than focusing on optimization, he did pretty much everything on the field — both hitting and pitching before Tommy John surgery in 2022 solidified him as an outfielder.
That entire time, he was learning by doing, and that has helped catapult him to where he is now — from being drafted No. 19 overall in 2024 to becoming a starting outfielder with a major league club.
And you can forget about just pretending to be a rock star. He looks like the genuine article.
“I’m not surprised,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “We’ve seen the type of player and the talent [he has] and a lot of the things he can do on the baseball field. He’s finally settling, he’s comfortable, he’s playing his game, and we’re going to see a lot of games like that when he’s locked in.”
He led off Sunday’s game with a single and scored, singled in the third, singled to lead off the fifth and scored, hit a solo homer in the sixth and added an RBI triple in the eighth.
But it wasn’t always like this, and that’s part of the story, too.
“The one thing that makes him who he is is his ability to bounce back,” Mendoza said. “There were a couple of games, the past three games [where] it was 0-for, nothing to show for it, and he’s the same guy, and for me, that says a lot. He doesn’t panic.”
This is hardly the first time Mendoza has praised Benge’s ability to stay even-keeled. That quality saved him early on when he’d step up to the plate, look up at the mammoth Citi Field scoreboard and see that he was hitting, say, .136 on April 22. By then, the chatter already had started: Benge wasn’t ready. He needed to go back to Triple-A. You know the drill.
But he wasn’t fazed, and it turns out he was right not to be. In the 41 games since April 23, Benge is hitting .318 with six homers, 23 RBIs, four stolen bases and 27 runs scored.
To a lesser extent, Sunday’s performance echoed his early-season trajectory. Benge was 2-for-13 in his previous three games, including an 0-for-4 on Friday. But the steadiness continued, and offensive troubles don’t seem to affect his defense.
And then came the rest . . .
“Rockets pretty much everywhere,” Mendoza said of Sunday’s at-bats. “Using the middle of the field, staying short, staying on top of the baseball. The left-on-left homer [off Yuki Matsui], I mean, it’s just pretty incredible. It just good to see him continue to fight, continue to compete and just be himself and set the tone for us.”
Benge’s skill set and general mentality mean he’s always on the attack, Mendoza added. “He’s ready for the first pitch — first pitch of the game — and he gets his ‘A’ swing on it,” he said.
These days, he’s ready for the pitches that come after it, too.
“When he gets behind or [has] two strikes [on him], left-on-left, it doesn’t matter,” Mendoza said. “His ability to foul pitches off, his ability to stay in the fight . . . He’s a special, special player.”
Benge is incrementally proving that to be true. His time at play-acting at being a star is over. He’s on a real stage and on his way to becoming the real thing. And for the Mets, the tune couldn’t be sweeter.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
