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.
This is his 7th year in MLB. He has only hit above .260 one time, 2023 when he hit .271. He is a lifetime .250 hitter. I would take .250 right now from him. Because right now his offense is offensive, and not in a good way.
His launch angle that year with an almost identical exit velocity was 13.2 degrees. Most of his hits were singles and doubles that landed right in no mans land between the infield and outfield.
You’re probably right, I don’t have time to look into it much. Overall I doubt it makes much difference, but in the comparative stats where lots of hitters are in a very small band it could absolutely lower his percentiles. A 3% drop in exit velo, hard hit rate, etc could make his baseball savant page look weaker than it really is because so many players stats are in a small band.
Metrics or not, I am just looking at production. Hayes is now hitting .068. 3 hits in 44 AB. 3 singles. 0 XB hits. How is this sustainable for the Reds, no matter how good his glove is?
With another stellar 0-3 performance today, Hayes is now at .064. He has 3 hits in 47 AB. Of course today, no one on the Reds hit in a 3-0 loss to the Giants. Backup catcher Higgins had the Reds only hit. A shame to waste a good pitching performance by Chase Burns.
Yeah advanced metrics notwithstanding, Hayes is hitless in his last 5 games. 3 hits all season..pretty remarkable (in a bad way). You’d think he’d manage a grounder up the middle or through the hole between SS and 3B-man once in a while.
You mentioned advanced metrics, so I had a quick look. For the small sample size this season, Hayes is hitting basically twice as many fly balls and half as many ground balls as his career averages. And his hard hit rate is down significantly from his first couple of years in Pittsburgh. I haven’t watched the Reds play that much this year, but it looks like he’s trying to get more launch angle on the ball (all the rage in recent years) and failing miserably. That dude should watch nothing but Ichiro videos, hit the ball on the ground or up the middle as hard as he can, and use his speed to beat out hits. That would make him a serviceable hitter.
Sounds like good advice. That was kinda my take..if he is getting the bat on the ball most of the time (and it’s true that he rarely strikes out), if he starts hitting some hard grounders he can get some hits. (no matter how unlucky he may be).
And except when he hits into double plays, grounders can sometimes move a runner up and even knock someone in from 3rd base. If he has no power (evidently he doesn’t), and hits medium length fly balls most of the time, that serves no purpose.
If you didn’t watch yesterday’s game, there was a Hayes his that perfectly summarized his season to date. He hit a blooper over the infield, the OF ran in to make a stab at it, which froze the runner at first (Stephenson). The ball dropped in front of the outfielder, bounced right into his glove, Stephenson got a slow jump to second, and was thrown out for a force out that should have been a hit for Hayes. That guy is playing terribly, and also unlucky.
