Not sure where you are seeing this. On baseball savant his bat speed and sprint speed are nearly identical to 2025.
TJ is a contact hitter who really succeeds when he is getting line drives. This year he’s missing a lot more pitches and swinging at more pitches out of the zone. When he does make contact he’s putting it on the ground 20% more than ever in his career. He started messing with his stance to a more upright one last year and went all in this year to compensate for ABS. I guess the theory is that his strike zone has effectively expanded because if he’s crouched down the umpire may be less likely to call a high pitch a strike but could be challenged and overturned by ABS because it’s based on standing height and not stance height. So now he has to be able to make contact with those higher pitches and adjusted his stance to do that. I don’t think it’s helping him and he should just go back to the old stance.
Also keep in mind that Friedl bunts so much that some of his stats are skewed, like his average exit velo and hard hit rate. Hopefully in a few weeks this will just have been looked at as a cold spell, because right now Reds’ outfielders are looking rough.
I’m not sure it skews it that much overall. In 2025 he had 473 batted balls, I believe 17 (3%) of those were bunt attempts (11 successful, 66.7% success rate).
Reds win 2-1 thanks to solo shots from Stewart and Speer., and good pitching.
Reds only had 3 hits, and Hayes went 0-3 to drop BA to .073. Friedl finally out of the lineup but didn’t really help. New call up Rece Hinds was also 0-3.
Not sure if Hayes made a swing adjustment that’s changed his results or if it’s just a weird stretch for him. His launch angle has more than tripled from a career average of 7.6 to 24.3. Which would be good if he had more bat speed, instead it’s just resulting in a lot of fly ball outs.
If he could make an adjusment to bring that angle down some and result in more flares and line drives he’d likely be closer to a .260-275 hitter.