Maikel Garcia and swing decisions
How good can Maikel Garcia be? So far, he has been much better because he is being more selective.
Maikel Garcia has been productive this season to a level that we have not really seen, and in the last week or so has been on a truly epic heater. Over that last six games he is hitting .500, but going back to even the middle of April his numbers have been extremely impressive. Since the 15th of April, Garcia has a .354/.440/.523 slash line. That is way more than anyone would expect from him, and he probably won’t hit that the rest of the season, but the general process looks good and repeatable. There are a lot of highlights like this for Garcia now:
That first home run on Sunday was elevated and on the inner third. The second was up and over the middle of the plate. Garcia seems to be hunting for those types of pitches, and it is really paying off.
If you think about what pitches to hit, the basic idea is to swing at pitches you can do damage on and ignore ones where you cannot. I think Maikel Garcia is showing why that simple-sounding approach is effective, even if executing such a plan when a ball is whizzing at you at 100mph might be significantly more difficult. Take a look at his heat maps for 2025 so far:
The left map shows where he is doing damage by calculating runs above average per 100 plate appearances. There are some sample size issues this early, so I cross-referenced it with his map from last year as well, though I won’t show that for simplicity’s sake. He wants the ball in and preferably elevated, though he did some damage on low and in last season too.
Now, take a look at his swing rates. His highest swing rates are in the 70%+ range and are mostly overlapping his best RAA/100 squares, except for a few that are that are more in the middle of the zone. His RAA numbers are not as good there because the league as a whole does more damage in middle-middle, so high swing rates there are still good. Garcia is ignoring pitches that are down and away a lot, even ones in the zone, and that has been helping him a lot. Last season he still swung at middle up a lot, but not so much in those up and in pitches that he is really handling right now. He also had a higher Swing% at pitches in the bottom third of the zone and down and away in 2024. Not offering at those pitches is making a big difference in several ways.
Maikel’s overall swing rate is only down slightly at 40.7% versus his career rate of 42.7%. That reduced swinging is spread across in and out of zone as I was just describing, but it has meant more swings on pitches he can handle and fewer on pitches he cannot. Focusing on pitches inside has increased his pull rate from around 33% the last two years to nearly 40% and increased his hard hit rate by nearly 10% from 2024. He is hitting the ball to left field with authority a lot more often instead of pushing it to right field. Waiting for elevated pitches is also increasing his launch angle in a good way.
Last year Garcia hit the ball on the ground 49.3% while the league rate was 42.2%. This year he is only hitting it on the ground 39.4% and that 10% difference is evenly split across fly balls and line drives. If you pull the ball more often and hit the ball in the air more often, then you usually get better results. Maikel is doing it what you want a hitter to do.
All of the positivity is warranted on Garcia, but I do want to caution anyone thinking he will continue at the current level. His BABIP and expected stats say that he is going to fall back a little from where he is at now, but I was not expecting Maikel to have a 146 wRC+ across a full season ever, so that is not a bad thing. The .351 BABIP is not ridiculous, but it is unlikely that he can maintain it. If you combine that with his xAVG and xSLG being 38 and 95 points below their current rate, respectively, then you should think he will be more in the slightly above league average area than the 30th best hitter in baseball, which is what that wRC+ was last year.
I think what we are seeing from Maikel Garcia is real, in that he is better at hitting than he had been up to this point in his career. He now looks like an elite defensive third baseman who can be 5 to 15% better than league average at the plate, and that is a very valuable player. It would translate to 3 or 4 WAR, so All-Star or least least near that level. His process has really improved, albeit for only a little over a month, so don’t bet your house on it, but I really do think he has found something that will last.
All of this is in addition to a player who already was above the 90th percentile in chase rate and contact last season. Good swing decisions plus good contact tend to be a winning formula in baseball.