Logan’s Runs Batted In

Early enough in the season, you’ll find some weird stats. This is a well-established fact of baseball in April. There’s even a song about it. As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, Kyle Tucker leads the league in position player WAR, with Aaron Judge third and Corbin Carroll fifth; if the leaderboard looked like that at the end of September, it’d probably be a mild surprise — a highly, highly lucrative one for Tucker — but nobody would write a book about how weird the 2025 season was or anything.

But Wilyer Abreu is second in WAR and Tyler Soderstrom is fourth. Both of them are promising young players, but nobody worth listening to had either one in the preseason MVP discussion.

In short, these things will shake out soon enough. There was an old saying to that effect: Baseball season hasn’t really started until Mike Trout leads the league in WAR.

But thanks to Statcast, we can get far enough up the causal chain that the small-sample wonkiness evens out more quickly. Any sufficiently fortunate hitter can fluke into going 4-for-4, or even hit .400 for a month, but you can’t fake 110+ mph exit velo. Again, as of Tuesday afternoon, the league leader in EV50 is Judge. Behind him are the usual suspects: Pete Alonso, Shohei Ohtani, Jorge Soler, James Wood, Kyle Schwarber — the collection of biceps you normally see at or near the top of the home run leaderboard.

To hit the ball hard is not enough, however. A hitter has to hit the ball hard and in the air — hence Baseball Savant’s barrels stat, which measures batted balls with an exit velo and launch speed sufficient to produce a batting average of .500 and a slugging percentage of 1.500.

Judge is second in barrels per batted ball event, and Alonso is second in barrels per plate appearance. The league leader in both: Angels catcher Logan O’Hoppe.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that O’Hoppe is hitting the ball hard. That’s what he does; insofar as there are questions about his game, they are more defensive than offensive. The 25-year-old from Long Island, who was drafted by the Phillies in the 23rd round in 2018 and sent to the Angels in the Brandon Marsh trade, is more of a line drive-slashing-mayhem guy than a light-tower-power guy.

In his career, O’Hoppe has hit nine batted balls at 110 mph or more, eight of them as a catcher, seven of those since the start of the 2024 season. Since the start of 2024, 31 catchers have even one 110 mph batted ball. Only four — Shea Langeliers, Salvador Perez, and the Brothers Contreras — have more than O’Hoppe.

But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that many. Jo Adell, the oft-injured Angels outfielder with a career 78 wRC+, had 13 batted balls last year alone that were hit harder than anything O’Hoppe’s put in play in his entire career.

Has O’Hoppe figured something out in 2025?

Well, through Monday (all stats from here on out are through Monday), O’Hoppe is rocking a HardHit% of 63.2%, which is 13th among qualified hitters. It’s not like O’Hoppe ever got cheated on his swings — his 20 home runs last year were a very good total for a catcher, but they came at a cost of 155 strikeouts — but he’s struck out in a third of his plate appearances so far this season.

Well, he’s swinging even harder this year.

Thanks to Baseball Savant’s new stance tracking numbers, we can see that he’s made adjustments since last season. O’Hoppe has made minute changes in where he stands, and he’s taken his stance from closed to slightly open. This bums me out a little; I hit with a closed stance as a kid because I wanted to be like Derek Jeter, so I root for any right-handed hitter who closes off his front side, from Giancarlo Stanton to Amir Khan from Backyard Baseball. (Just in case you were curious, it didn’t help. I was such a bad Little League hitter I’m sure The Captain would’ve disavowed me if he’d seen me hit.)

O’Hoppe’s foot placement is a bit curious, because even though he set up for an all-fields swing he was still pretty pull-happy last year: 44.5%, 32nd out of 129 qualified hitters.

Anyway: O’Hoppe started making this adjustment at the end of last year. Here’s a home run off Carlos Rodón from last May.

Notice the bat angle (call it 2 o’clock, maybe a quarter past) and the leg kick. He starts with his knees bent but doesn’t dip too much as he loads up.

Over the course of the season, he started dropping more and earlier, and reducing his leg kick to a toe tap. This is O’Hoppe’s last home run of the 2024 season. Apologies for the fade-in from a highlight of an Astros walk-off.

It’s a tank, bouncing just below the Occidental Petroleum sign at what was then Minute Maid Park. If O’Hoppe had gotten into that ball just a little bit more, you would’ve heard one of the best sounds in baseball: The resonant metallic BONG of a batted baseball hitting one of the Astros Community Partners billboards.

By this point, O’Hoppe’s setup was in two distinct acts: Starting upright, with the bat flat, and then dropping into a crouch during the pitcher’s windup, with the bat perking up to its original position during the load. In 2025, it looks like this.

I don’t know if O’Hoppe lost a little weight over the winter, or if he’s just wearing baggier pants this year. Probably the latter — the ’90s are back, after all. Anyway, he looks more relaxed while awaiting the pitch, and more engaged in his lower body while the ball is approaching the plate. Whether due to the change in swing mechanics or some other adjustment, he’s also letting the ball travel ever so slightly farther before he hits it.

Now about the barrels thing. We’re early enough in the season that O’Hoppe has put only 19 balls in play. Seven of them have been barrels, and five of those have gone for home runs.

All barrels are not created equal. Nor are all home runs. Here are O’Hoppe’s five homers this season; the last column is how many parks, out of 30, the ball would’ve gone out of.

Not to be uncharitable, but four of these are wallscrapers. O’Hoppe’s two barrels that ended up as outs were both routine fly balls, but at the warning track. A couple miles an hour more or less wind, and O’Hoppe could have seven home runs this year or one.

Which I guess is the rich man’s version of going 3-for-4 on Opening Day with a bunt and two Texas Leaguers. A very rich man’s version. If you had O’Hoppe leading the AL in home runs in your preseason predictions pool, it’s probably too early to start celebrating. But five home runs in seven games speaks for itself, to a large extent, and he is hitting the stuffing out of the baseball.

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