There have been 250 big league hitters who have logged at least 650 plate appearances since the start of the 2024 season. Orlando Arcia, who somehow could not find a way to hit with the Colorado Rockies last season, ranks dead last among that group with a meager 62 wRC+ in that time.
Ranking just behind him in second to last over that time frame is resident Cincinnati Reds 3B Ke’Bryan Hayes, a player who not only was sought out by the club as a key cog at last season’s trade deadline, but was also brought in on a contract guaranteeing him at least $36 million through the 2030 season. So, he’s not just a short-term pillar of the roster assembled by the Cincinnati Reds, he’s on the books for the long haul, and will do so as an admittedly excellent defender who, by all accounts, completely lost the plot on how to hit.
That wouldn’t be so much of an issue if, say, he could move around the diamond with that excellent glovework. However, on a roster that’s been put together to be as flexible (and mobile) as possible defensively, Hayes sits as the long player on it who plays exclusively one position and one position only, doing so at a position that typically features players who also carry a big bat.
Whether or not the Reds thought they’d found something capable of being unlocked in Hayes’ offense was a question I had late last August, nearly a month after the Reds acquired Hayes (and his entire contract) from their NL Central rivals up the road in Pittsburgh. They had clearly seen plenty of the player now manning the hot corner on the regular, and it was enough to wonder whether there was some hitch, some toe-tap they thought might quickly unleash Hayes as a much more potent offensive force than he had been for quite some time.
That’s why you go and get a guy like Hayes, right? Even with his absurdly good defense (and the value that brings), you don’t just take on an entire contract like that unless you think there’s more there that the world hasn’t yet seen. Right?
Right?
Through almost four weeks, it looked as if there was at least a little bit of change. Hayes, a notorious ground-ball heavy hitter, had begun to put the ball in the air a bit more often, and his patience at the plate was improving significantly both with his chase rate and walk rate. However, by the time the 2025 season ended, much of that improvement had evaporated into the annals of ‘small sample size,’ and one defining characteristic of his batted ball data looked just the same as it always has.
He finished with a 48.1% grounder rate with the Reds after posting a 49.5% rate with the Pirates in the first half of 2025, a mark that’s very much in-line with the 50.6% rate he’s posted overall since the start of 2024 (good for the 10th highest among those 250 hitters with 650 PA). In other words, any tweak with his swing mechanics or approach was still producing a bunch of balls hit right into the dirt.
The oddity, though, is that his hard-hit rate (per Statcast) dipped from 45.3% with the Pirates in his 2025 work there down to just 35.7% with the Reds, with his soft-contact rate rising from 15.9% with the Bucs up to 23.3% in Cincinnati. His average exit velocity in Pittsburgh in 2025 had been 90.2 mph – very much in-line with his career mark of 90.5 mph – but that dipped down to a career worst 87.1 mph in his time with the Reds. His launch angle fell, too – down from 9.1 degrees to just 7.0 – while his barrel rate dipped almost a full percent, too.
That all came with a distinct spike in his walk rate, too. After walking at just a 4.6% clip in Pittsburgh in 2025 (and at a 6.9% rate for his career), Hayes walked in 10.1% of his trips to the plate with the Reds – a mark that would’ve been a career-best for a single season. He also saw his strikeout rate drop from 20.7% (and 20.4% for his career) down to 16.9% with the Reds, a mark that would also have been a career-best in a full single season. That all coincided with a nearly 4.0% drop in his swing rate, a rate that featured drops in both his in-zone and out of zone swing rates, too.
It’s enough to begin to assume that there is something brewing here with a new approach. Though it didn’t fully pan out in that short 178 PA sample with the Reds at the end of 2025, it does look like Hayes was working on being much more patient, swinging at fewer pitches, and perhaps not swinging so hard at even the pitches he did like. His .108 ISO was double that of his .054 mark in 2025 with Pittsburgh, and up significantly over the .058 ISO he posted in a full season with the Pirates in 2024, and all of this came with a .270 BABIP in a Reds uniform that would have been a career-worst mark for a single season for him.
We are going to get ample time to see if these tweaks can materialize in the form of just slightly below average offense from Hayes. His glove is going to keep him on the field for the bulk of the innings played by the Reds next year whether he hits better (or worse) than he did as a Pirate, and his contract is going to keep him on the roster even longer. And even if the power never comes, if this modified approach can result in him boosting his on-base percentage up from his career .308 mark to, say .325 and above, that’ll be a boon to a Reds offense that could use help anywhere it can get it.