Joey Gallo Stares Down Oblivion

In his prime — and it was not a long prime — nobody hit a majestic home run like Joey Gallo. It was something about the violence of the swing, the loopy lefty uppercut, the two-handed follow-through, and the way he’d stand up straight right after contact, a confirmation that the baseball was indeed crushed.

Those high arcing blasts powered one of the more bizarre careers of his generation. In the heart of the Three True Outcomes era, he was its emperor, threatening to lead the league in either walk rate, strikeout rate, or home runs in any given year.

Sadly, time passes. Those with prominent residences on Gallo Island now fear foreclosure proceedings. The big slugger has fallen on hard times; last week, he signed a minor league contract with the Chicago White Sox. A non-guaranteed deal with the team that just set the major league record for losses carries some pretty clear subtext. Gallo is hanging off the cliffside of his career, one finger latched to a jagged rock.

It all feels too soon. He’s just 31 years old, a normal and cool age that is in no way old. As Tom Tango’s research shows, bat speed generally starts to decline right at this point, not years before. But even at his best, Gallo lived at the extremes. In his magical 2019 half-season, which unfortunately was cut short by a broken hamate bone, he posted a .635 xwOBA on contact. Across 2,865 player seasons in the Statcast era, only 2017 Aaron Judge topped that figure.

At his apex, nobody — save for one of the greatest hitters of all-time — crushed the baseball like Joey Gallo. He paired that supreme power with some of the lowest chase rates in the league, giving him enough on-base juice to offset the batting averages that made boomers want to gauge out their eyes. That excellent plate discipline allowed him to hunt mistakes in the middle of the plate, mostly fastballs and hanging sliders. His swing was geared for these middle-middle meatballs, and his 70-grade batting eye allowed him to lay off most pitches on the black. Yes, when he got into a two-strike count and was compelled to swing, he most likely was going to come up empty. But he forced pitchers to battle.

Over the last handful of years, though, the other extreme in Gallo’s game eclipsed his prodigious power. Remember those 2,865 player seasons? Two of Gallo’s seasons rank first and second across the decade in the percentage of all swings resulting in whiffs. That decade-leading 44.3% whiff rate came in the 2023 season, when he still managed, I must note, to run an above-average wRC+.

In retrospect, it all started to go downhill after that infamous July 2021 trade to the Yankees. Gallo was coming off perhaps his finest month as a big leaguer, striking out “just” 25.3% of the time, walking nearly as frequently as he struck out, and mashing 10 homers. Painfully, he hit just .160 following the trade, and despite his 16.2% walk rate and usual home run pace, his anemic batting average turned him into a villain with the Yankees. After another dismal half-season, the Yankees shipped him off to the Dodgers; things didn’t get much better in Los Angeles, where he ran strikeout rates that dipped into the 40s for the first time.

Gallo hit free agency for the first time after that 2022 season, and since then teams have made increasingly small bets on his ability to return to his prime form. It started with the Twins in 2023, who paid him $11 million for a single year’s services. Next up were the Nationals, who handed out a $5 million deal, and he turned in his worst season yet. So now here we are, with Gallo at the bleakest end of the baseball universe.

It isn’t hard to see how things ended up like this. Gallo is a big guy who swings hard, and the bills have come due for his high-impact style of play. Over the last two seasons, he battled a sprained shoulder, a strained oblique, a foot contusion, and two separate hamstring strains, the second of which forced him out of action for nearly two months. He even came down with a case of pink eye. His body appears to be breaking down rapidly, and you can almost see the effects of this as he sets up in the box, constantly shifting and readjusting like he’s in the middle seat on a Spirit flight.

Perhaps as a result of all this discomfort, Gallo’s carrying tool is showing signs of erosion. In the second half of 2023, his average bat speed of 73.9 mph ranked in the 84th percentile of hitters. That 2023 mark is the first bat speed data available to the public, and one can imagine that at his peak, Gallo could swing a few miles per hour harder than that, ranking among the likes of Giancarlo Stanton and Kyle Schwarber as one of the fastest swingers in the league.

Gallo’s bat slowed even further in 2024. His average bat speed dipped 1.5 mph, dropping him into the fat part of the bell curve, only a tick above the major league average of 71.3 mph. His once-excellent plate discipline now looks more like passiveness. White Sox manager Will Venable says Gallo will primarily play first base. He is definitively an aging slugger, and his career depends on whether he can revive his famous power skills.

It’s possible that some of Gallo’s bat speed decrease was intentional; in 2023, only Trey Cabbage squared up fewer balls, and that mark improved slightly in 2024. But it’s Joey Gallo. If you have him on your team, you don’t want him trading off power for contact because he’s never going to make enough contact for that to matter. You want him swinging out of his shoes, walloping tanks into the stratosphere.

As my editor Matt Martell pointed out, the White Sox have an institutional history of old slugger resuscitation attempts. There were the ill-fated midseason acquisitions of Manny Ramirez and Ken Griffey Jr., a deal for post-peak Andruw Jones, even the four-year deal they handed out to Gallo’s evolutionary predecessor, Adam Dunn. All these guys landed on the South Side hoping to recapture the magic one last time.

Unlike those other players, though, there are no guarantees that Gallo makes the team, especially because Miguel Vargas is out of minor league options. But let’s just dream for a minute that Gallo took up yoga or any of the other offseason workout routines that prompt players to boast that they’re in the best shape of their lives. Picture this: a .190 average, a 35% strikeout rate, 30 home runs, a permanent spot in the middle of the order against right-handed pitchers. Gallo is one of the strangest and most spectacular players I’ve ever seen. I’m crossing my fingers he gets one last go.

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