After a breakout 2023, his quality of contact and strikeout and walk rates are even better this season.
Poor Ryan O’Hearn. The only one of the Orioles offensive standouts to get on the short list for the All-Star Game, and not get to make the trip. He’s one of this team’s most valuable players, and gets no spotlight at all.
Then again, considering that two years ago, O’Hearn was preparing himself for the possibility that his career was over, I have a feeling he’s doing alright.
Last year, he had a breakout season, batting .289/.322/.480/.801 with 14 home runs and 60 RBI in 112 games. It came out of nowhere. With a career .683 OPS in five seasons with Kansas City, he’d been DFA’d by the Royals and picked up on waivers by the O’s on a “prove it” deal as left-hitting infield depth. After starting the season in Triple-A, he was called up on May 9, 2023, started to get extended playing time with Ryan Mountcastle suffering spells of vertigo, and now he’s cemented himself as part of a first-base platoon that provides danger in the middle of the order.
Entering this season, O’Hearn knew that, as a previously-unknown commodity, it was important he didn’t fall victim to a sophomore slump. So far, despite getting zero attention, he’s continuing to produce in the middle of the lineup, and out-hitting himself in many categories.
Two things O’Hearn is doing especially well are one, walking more and two, hitting breaking balls. Start with the second, which has been career-making.
About a month ago, Jon Meoli of the Baltimore Banner ran a story on the Orioles changing O’Hearn’s swing. Last May, O’Hearn arrived at the ballpark one day and the hitting coaches told him it was time for a change. “Why?” he asked. “I’m hitting .260. I haven’t hit .260 in the big leagues in a long time. This is the best it’s gone. Why would we do anything to change it?”
For the Orioles’ “hitting brain trust,” here was a chance to use data and video breakdown to show a player what holes opposing pitchers were attacking. The change came down to O’Hearn’s hand placement and how he held his bat. Early in 2023, O’Hearn’s bat was close to horizontal as he awaited a pitch. That allowed him to hit fastballs well, but it left little time to adjust for pitches lower in the zone.
“Breaking balls gave him a really tough time,” hitting coach Ryan Fuller told Meoli. “We said, ‘If we start with your bat a little bit more vertical, it’s going to be a little easier to scoop those balls when they’re in the zone at the bottom.’” O’Hearn also was given the assignment to work on his lower body and posture to help him cover more of the plate.
O’Hearn points to this home run he hit on May 20, 2023, off Blue Jays closer Jordan Romano, as the moment when he realized something had taken clicked. “I had that confidence that this really was working,” he said.
The data supports it. Before May 31, 2023, which Meoli identifies as the first time O’Hearn was holding his bat at a steeper angle in-game, O’Hearn was a career .180 hitter on breaking/offspeed pitches with a .342 slugging percentage. After that date, he’d hit .256 and slug .465 off them the rest of the season.
This year, O’Hearn has continued to improve: he’s hitting .288 off breaking balls and slugging .500.
“Now, when you look at his performance against pitch types, he’s hitting breaking balls really well and fastballs,” Fuller told the Banner. “That’s what we want our guys to be able to do.”
O’Hearn had one other goal entering this season. “One emphasis for me, I’d like to walk more,” he told MASN. “If I’m swinging earlier in the count, I’d like it to be for damage. I don’t want to make early-count outs. I’d like to see more pitches and work more walks.”
So far, so good on that, too. O’Hearn’s walk rate of 4.1% in ’23 was about one of the only statistical weaknesses in his hitting profile, way down in the bottom 2% of hitters. This year he’s doubled it, walking 8.5% of the time, which ranks in the 55th percentile. It’s a huge jump.
With that, or because of it, he’s cut down on his swing-and-miss and strikeout rates while enjoying some of the best expected stats of anyone in the game, thanks to consistent hard elevated contact. O’Hearn has chopped his K% in half from last season, from 22.3% to 10%, and his expected average and slugging are in the 94th and 95th percentile, respectively.
More generally, it’s nice to look at O’Hearn’s MLB Statcast Percentile Rankings chart to see how, impressively, he’s continued to build, even improve on, his breakout ’23.
He’s cut his whiff and chase rates down, turning himself into one of the toughest hitters in the game to strike out while maintaining a superb quality of contact. In fact, in expected average and slugging, he’s one of the Top 20 hitters in MLB right now.
It’ll be nice to see if these trends continue, and if O’Hearn’s hard-hit rates can make his actual stats even glitzier to match his expected ones.
In any case, with a year-and-a-half of data to work with, it looks, to the immense credit of Ryan O’Hearn and Orioles hitting coaches, like a once stalled-out career has been jumpstarted. This is amazing news, not just for a hitter who gets little spotlight even on his team, but also for O’s fans, who get to remember that they have a hard-hitting, tough-to-strikeout, hard-on-righties bat in the middle of the lineup right after Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman.
It’s been over a year since Orioles coaches tinkered with O’Hearn’s swing, and in that time, he’s become been one of the most productive hitters in baseball. For the guy on a “prove it” deal with this team last winter, it looks like he’s proven it.