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Try it freeMark Vientos didn’t mince words.
He didn’t stray from the belief that he was close.
He still felt the same way about his swing — a good feeling — even though the third baseman hit just .145 through his first 17 games, and his number of home runs remained at zero …
… Until his first at-bat Thursday night.
Vientos thought his drought would end at some point soon. “Just a matter of time,” he told The Post succinctly before the Mets’ 4-1 win over the Cardinals at Citi Field.
That “matter of time” turned out to be about four hours later.
He sliced a four-seam fastball 338 feet and tucked it just inside the right-field foul pole to start the second inning, encountering a bit of validation in his 1-for-4 night as quality swings and contact finally led to something on the other side of the fence.
“It’s a good feeling, for sure,” Vientos said.
The numbers had been glaring, given what Vientos orchestrated in his first taste of the postseason last October — five homers across 13 games.
His 2025 stats were jarring, given he homered 27 times in 111 regular-season games in 2024, too.
Would one homer lift a weight off his shoulders? “Maybe,” he said before the game.
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Would managing to get the first one lead to others following soon after? “I would hope so,” Vientos added.
He has generated plenty of hard contact, as 11 of the balls he has put in play have left his bat with an exit velocity of at least 100 mph.
Twenty-six of his 51 balls in play have featured an exit velocity of at least 93 mph.
But entering Thursday, Vientos carried a .188 batting average on balls in play — which marked the lowest of his career, down from .324 last year, and the 17th-lowest number in the majors.
The hits, and specifically the homers, just hadn’t followed.
So everything cobbled together to create a stark difference to the moments Vientos produced in October, when he homered twice in the Mets’ Game 2 loss to the Phillies in the NLDS then three times in the NLCS against the Dodgers.
The postseason became the laboratory for his breakout, his leap into stardom, his stage to produce in the biggest moments.
And perhaps Thursday, as he rounded the bases in the second inning and pumped his fist, marked a turning point back toward that.
“It’s just a matter of time for him,” said Francisco Lindor, who acknowledged Vientos “100 percent” needed that homer. “He’s gotta stay the course. Keep grinding, keeping his head down and at the end of the year, he’s gonna hopefully hit his 30, 40 home runs.”