Is Joey Meneses for real? He might be.

So far, Meneses is batting .320 with 12 homers, 29 RBI and a .922 on-base-plus-slugging-percentage in the first 49 games as a rookie with the Nationals. Since he was called up on Aug. 2 as a top-of-the-order bat after the Juan Soto trade, he’s fifth in MLB in hits.

Someday, Joey may illustrate one of baseball’s most heartwarming, rare but recurring storylines: the player who won’t quit, figures out how to hit in his late 20s and keeps belting until he’s 35 or even 40.

The Nats should grasp that one advantage of being awful — an MLB-worst 54-101 through Wednesday — is that you can give yourself a full chance to be lucky with a long shot like Meneses. Your top hitting prospects at corner positions in the minors are still infants. You can give Meneses all of 2023, or longer, to pan out. If he does, you win big — and do it cheaply.

Joey Meneses? Joey Meneses!

Consider: When they reached their 29th birthdays, ex-Nat Jayson Werth, Justin Turner, Raul Ibanez, Melvin Mora, Matt Stairs, Hank Sauer and Charlie Maxwell had only a paltry 87 MLB home runs, combined. After that date, they hit 1,530 more homers.

Nelson Cruz, a current Nat, hit 394 of his 459 homers after turning 30. Others with more than 75 percent of their homers after their age 29 season include David Ortiz, Andres Galarraga, José Bautista and Dante Bichette, who averaged 313 homers each.

Meneses, however, has a higher hurdle: age bias. For every year you don’t make a dent in the majors, your chances plummet. By 30, you’ve hit a brick wall. Modern analytics have documented this to the point of doctrine.

Proper perspective on Meneses’s task should give his new fans, like me, respect for how far he’s already come and what he’s overcome, no matter how his story ends.

How long has his road been? Meneses, who signed out of Mexico at 18, has played more games as a pro — 1,425, at all levels and in all countries — than the total number of MLB games in the careers of Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, Jackie Robinson and Buster Posey.

Joey played nine years of winter ball in Mexico for his hometown Tomateros de Culiacán. He’s played a “tomato” more often than Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie.”

How tough is it to overcome such a pedigree?

In my lifetime, there has been one career — one — which mirrored Meneses’s and ended up close to stardom: Sauer. By age 31, he had only seven career MLB homers. The next eight years, he reeled off seasons of 35, 31, 32, 30, 37, 19 and 41 homers. Could the Nats use that? At 35 in ‘52, Sauer was National League MVP.

One even more glorious exception proves the…