Back in 2023 Matt McLain burst into the big leagues in the middle of May. Over the next four-and-a-half months he hit .290/.357/.507 with16 home runs in 89 games. An oblique injury would cost him the final month of the season, but he still finished 5th in the National League Rookie of the Year voting. A shoulder injury in spring training in 2024 led to surgery and he would miss the entire season. Last season when he returned from the injury things just didn’t go well at the plate for him as he had an OPS of .643 in 147 games. That was a drop of 221 points of OPS from his 2023 season.
This spring there has not been a player that has hit better in baseball than Matt McLain has thus far. He’s hitting .647 with four home runs, a double, three walks, and just one strikeout in 20 plate appearances. He’s slugging 1.12 and his OPS is 2.112. It’s almost like he’s out there facing off against the local high school pitcher with how well he’s hitting.
The question that everyone is curious about is whether Matt McLain is back? What exactly “back” is may be different for everyone, but generally speaking it’s going to be back to being an above-average big league hitter.
There’s a lot going on that we need to address. First is that many players who undergo shoulder surgery take time to truly recover and return to form, but also worth noting that some guys just don’t return to form. The general consensus, though, is that it takes about a year to get back to “normal” after you actually get back on the field. Second is that Matt McLain is bigger and stronger than he was last year or in 2023. Third is that he’s using a different bat this year than he has in the past, one that is somehow both lighter and longer. And fourth is that spring training numbers can lie to us for a million different reasons and almost always don’t predict much of anything in the regular season that will follow.
Addressing that last point first, we need to understand that almost is in that sentence for a reason. The stats themselves aren’t all that valuable, but what is and can be is the change in a skillset. It’s usually a lot easier to see from a pitcher because if a guy shows up throwing harder than ever or has a new pitch that you can look at and see is a quality offering and they are now dominating – even in spring training – that could be and likely is somewhat predictive of what could be coming to a regular season near you.
For hitters it’s tougher to “see” because you just don’t get the same type of feedback in most cases. While MLB began to give the public stuff last season like bat speed, they are not publishing that during spring training. Someone with an increase in bat speed could have a new, better skillset that’s worth noting. That’s not here with McLain. But we do know that there are changes to pay attention to with his strength and the change in the bat he’s using.
We could just take that information and then look at his numbers and say “yeah, he’s back!”, but that would be lazy and not backed up by a whole lot.
The numbers themselves suggest that McLain is hitting the ball hard. The guy is slugging 1.412 for crying out loud (and the baseballs he’s hit are definitely crying). Here’s the interesting thing, though – he’s not really hitting the ball harder than he was last spring. The sample size is very small for both years, but his EV50 (the exit velocity on the top half of his batted balls) last spring was 104.9 MPH and this spring it’s 104.7 MPH. He had 35 batted balls worth of data last spring and had 13 balls hit over 100 MPH with two topped 112 MPH. This spring he’s had 16 batted balls and six have been 100 MPH or higher, but only one over 108 MPH and it topped out at 109.2.
One of the bigger differences in the results of his hardest hit baseballs between the two springs is that last year only one of his six hardest hit balls was in the air and it was just a line drive with a 12° launch angle. This spring he’s hit two groundballs out of his six hardest hit balls and the other four were between 23° and 28° and all four of them left the ballpark and went at least 380 feet.
Is that a sample size issue? Is it a swing change? Is it simply that his shoulder is feeling “normal” again and it’s allowing him to do something a little different, more athletically? That’s a lot tougher to determine.
There, however, has been a very big difference between spring training 2025 and 2026 for Matt McLain. In 2025 he struck out 17 times and had just two walks in 57 plate appearances. This spring he’s already walked more than that in just six games, and he’s also struck out just once. He struck out last spring in 13 of his 18 games played.
There’s a giant discrepancy in the level of pitchers guys face in spring training. Sometimes you are facing a Tarik Skubal in the 1st inning and then the next time you come to the plate in the same game you will be seeing a guy who spent last year pitching in Single-A. That’s a pretty big difference, and it also ignores that maybe a guy is also working specifically on a pitch that day and that’s more of the focus than it would be in the regular season where he’s trying to get you out rather than trying to get his work in so he’s ready to do that when the games matter.
Baseball Reference has a stat that they call Opponent Quality for spring training. What they do is give your opponent (in this case, the pitcher that a hitter is facing at the time) a rating between 1 to 10. If the player was in the big leagues the previous year that’s a 10. Guys who were in Triple-A are an 8, Double-A a 7, High-A is a 5, Single-A is a 4, and then rookie level is a 1 or 1.5 depending on which level that happens to be. All of that is then averaged together to give you an Opponent Quality rating.
This spring Matt McLain’s Opponent Quality is 7.8. Among the Reds hitters, only Will Benson and Noelvi Marte have faced higher quality pitchers. So while he’s certainly faced guys that aren’t big leaguers, he’s not exactly been facing off against a bunch of 21-year-old dudes who pitched in A-ball last year, either.
We also need to account for the Cactus League being a hitting paradise, too. The dry air makes it tough for pitchers to get a good grip on the ball, which generally speaking means their stuff is a little bit flatter than it would be otherwise. Teams in the league are hitting .278/.366/.468 as a whole (this does not include games against the World Baseball Classic teams). The ERA for the Cactus League is currently sitting at 5.86 and seven teams are above 6.00.
There are some reasons to think that maybe Matt McLain is back. The amount of contact he’s making, especially compared to last spring, is worth noting. His adding strength probably isn’t going to hurt at all.
But there’s also reasons to be skeptical a bit, too. The sample size is small and he could just be on a heater through six games. The league he’s playing in plays like peak Coors Field and just about everyone is hitting well (though not quite as well as he is). And of course, spring training pitching isn’t regular season pitching for all of the reasons mentioned above.
We probably won’t know which version of Matt McLain that the Cincinnati Reds are going to get for a while. There are some reasons to think the version they get could be pretty good. But there’s a few reasons to remain cautiously optimistic, too. For now he’s healthy and crushing the ball and that’s a lot better than the alternatives.