Only Wade Boggs and Joe DiMaggio had more hits than Jeff McNeil ’s 170 in their first 500 at-bats. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. — In a roadside joint a long way from where the New York Mets tried again to herd their season toward something presentable, their leadoff hitter, Jeff McNeil, appeared simultaneously on three cellphone screens. He was in a batter’s box in Philadelphia that afternoon, set low into his back leg, the bat laid near his left ear.

Their boy. It could only be their boy.

“Home run,” his mom said.

“Home run?” his dad responded. “Home run.”

“Yep,” his brother said. “Shoulda had one yesterday.”

“Dead center, looked to me,” his dad said.

“No, it was left-center,” his brother said.

“Looked like something offspeed,” his dad said.

“I mean, he was an inch away yesterday,” his brother said.

“Curveball,” his dad said.

“You’re welcome,” his brother said, smiling. “You’re welcome. I’ve thrown him a lot of hangers, so …”

“Kinda surreal,” his dad said.

“It’s pretty cool,” his mom said.

Jeff McNeil is from down the road, in the town of Nipomo, which is famous for, among other things, Jocko’s, a rustic steakhouse where Jeff McNeil waits hours for a table like everybody else. Nipomo also is home to the golf club — Monarch Dunes — that this winter counted among its cart boys the future National League All-Star for the Mets. It was an unpaid position, as McNeil took in trade lunch and a few rounds of golf. He was, by accounts, mildly disappointed not to win the Christmas party raffle. It was a nice TV.

The baseball in Nipomo looks like the baseball anywhere, hot and dusty and earnest and ultimately a way to kill time before adulthood, though there was that one season when the high school team had two future professional ballplayers, both by the name of McNeil, one a pitcher with a heavy fastball and the other a shortstop with the most dog-gone knack for putting a bat on a ball around here since Robin Ventura.

Today that McNeil — Jeff — leads Major League Baseball in batting, is a .340 hitter over 500 major league at-bats (only Wade Boggs and Joe DiMaggio had more hits than McNeil’s 170 in their first 500 at-bats) and is wholly content with the basic swing mechanics that were good enough at a place called Batty’s, in a backyard Wiffle Ball duel against his brother, on summer ball fields and at Long Beach State and in Cape Cod and wherever big ol’ smug pitchers tried to throw fastballs past narrow-shouldered and fungo-slim guys who wouldn’t have it.

View photos Ryan and Jeff McNeil hang at Citi Field. (Courtesy of the McNeil family) More

He also has hit 10 home runs across those 500 at-bats, which is about right for a 6-foot-1, 190-pound guy in plenty of eras other than this one. But Jeff McNeil has always hit. Always. He has always deplored strikeouts, which, again, is a standard from another time and place. He still remembers the umpire who rung him up in a Little League game when he was 12, because it was his first strikeout in four years. And also because the umpire was Jim McCann, who is Chicago White Sox catcher James McCann’s father.

“In Little League, I could count on one hand the amount of times I struck out in a year,” Jeff said this week. “It was always about putting the ball in play, getting on base. I guess I haven’t really changed my game a lot.”

He laughed a little, the way you do when admitting that what was an experiment became a habit, then an obsession, then a life’s course.

Steve McNeil and his son were regulars at Batty’s Batting Cage, where a token would get you 20 cuts. The guy behind the counter would give the McNeils a deal on 25 tokens. Steve would stack the tokens on the metal box with the switches and lights, close the chain-link door, sit on the bench behind the cage, open his book and see what the latest James Patterson story was all about.

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