▶ TLDR
Ke'Bryan Hayes was the unluckiest hitter in baseball in early April, and those takes were directionally right. The expected-actual gap blew out to a league-worst 158 points by April 15, then started slowly closing, not because his hits started finding grass, but because his contact kept getting better. He restructured his swing this year to put the ball in the air, and the elevation is real. What didn't change is where he hits it. At his peak exit velocity, those new fly balls die at 380 feet to dead center field. The fix isn't a luck correction. It's a mechanical one.
If you're new to baseball: Modern stats estimate how often a batted ball would normally turn into a hit based on how hard and at what angle it was struck. Hayes is hitting the ball as hard and as well-angled as he ever has, but he keeps hitting it to right-center field, where outfielders camp. Until he learns to pull the ball, to hit it down the left-field line where the corner of the wall is closest for a right-handed hitter, he's going to keep watching home-run-distance contact land in gloves.
The short version: Hayes needs a mechanical adjustment, not a luck correction. He pulls only 18 percent of his air contact, well below the 25 percent league average and miles below the 35-percent-plus mark of true pull-air specialists. Either he learns to turn on inside pitches more aggressively, or he walks his launch angle back toward the 13-degree mark that worked for him in 2023. Without one of those changes, his ceiling is a useful 95–105 wRC+ regular with plus defense at third. With either one, he's a 110–120 wRC+ player, the version projections wanted.
If you manage a fantasy team: Watch and see. He isn't a buy and he isn't worth a roster spot until something changes mechanically. The number to watch isn't his BABIP, it's his hard-hit pull-air rate, currently 4.5 percent. Above 8 percent and he's the player the projections love. Below 6 percent and the early-April takes were a mirage.
On April 26, our guy Ke'Bryan Hayes squared up a fastball at 102.7 miles per hour off the bat and at a launch angle of 25 degrees. The ball traveled 386 feet to dead center field, where it was easily caught by the opposing center fielder.
That at-bat has been Hayes's season in miniature. Yes, he's hitting the ball harder than at any point in his career, elevating it more than he ever has before, and squaring it up at the highest rate of any qualified hitter in baseball. And yet he's batting only .150, slugging .243, and producing the second-worst weighted runs created of any hitter with 100 plate appearances in 2026. All told, the gap between what his swing should produce and what it has actually produced is the largest in the league.
You, Ke'Bryan, and everyone in between is wondering why.
In early April, it seemed like every fantasy site was running a variation of the same piece—"Ke'Bryan Hayes is the unluckiest hitter in baseball, but his underlying metrics say he should improve." They weren't wrong. He was hitting the ball extremely well, but none of them were falling for hits. And his BABIP and expected stats suggested he was due for a bounce back.
Since those articles came out, the gap between his expected and actual production has closed, but he's still surprisingly unlucky. It's not like he's lost at the plate—his strikeout rate is at a career best, his zone contact rate is up, and his discipline numbers are stable. So I started wondering if there was something more at play besides luck. Is he doing something different at the plate that we aren't seeing?
For those who don't know, Hayes broke into the league as the Pirates' top prospect in 2021. His hit and power tools always lagged behind his defense, but scouts believed he'd close that gap with time. He appeared to break out in 2023 when he slashed .271/.309/.453 and hit 15 home runs, but he hasn't hit above .235 since. His power has been even more disappointing as he's hit only 9 dingers in 2024 and 2025 combined.
For Reds fans, the question is whether the third baseman we got from Pittsburgh last season is the player his actual production says he is, or the player his expected production says he is. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, and it's closer to the actual production than I would've guessed before I started looking. Hayes is an amazing player and a fan favorite due to his coolness, grit, and glove. I want the Ke'Bryan Hayes Experience to work. But so did Pirates fans. But winning takes more than well wishes...
To set the table: when those early-April pieces ran, Hayes had about 30 plate appearances and a cumulative gap between his xwOBA and his actual wOBA of around 80 points. (A point of wOBA is roughly equivalent to a point of on-base percentage; an 80-point gap is the difference between an average regular and an All-Star.) That's a huge gap on a small sample, but expected and actual stats normally agree to within 20 or 30 points over a full season, and a gap of 80 in either direction usually closes inside six weeks.
By April 15, that 80-point gap had blown out to 158, the largest underperformance in baseball at that moment. Between April 6 and April 18, Hayes hit seven balls at 95 miles per hour or harder. None of them fell for hits. Every batted ball where he gave the pitcher his best swing landed in a glove. Then, in late April, the gap started closing—and the way it's closing is where the story gets interesting.
The instinct, when looking at a stat line as ugly as Hayes's, is to assume the hitter has completely fallen apart. No one can be this unlucky, so it has to be a skills issue. Right? RIGHT?!
Maybe, but let's look beyond the surface stats.
Hayes's strikeout rate this year is 16.7 percent, the lowest of his career. His contact rate inside the strike zone is 96 percent, which is genuinely elite. Furthermore, his launch angle has increased from 8.5 degrees last season (which is the angle of a sharp ground ball or a shallow line drive) to 17 degrees (which is the angle of a hard fly ball). Those are genuine improvements. So what gives?
A caveat before the diagnosis. We're working with 81 batted balls this year, 51 of them in the air, 23 in the high-EV/sweet-spot cluster. That's still a small sample. I wouldn't bet a season on any single number above. But every metric I've named so far points the same way: Hayes restructured his swing to elevate, but he's hitting the ball right at fielders.
What he didn't change is where he hits the ball. Hayes is swinging for more power, but he's still spraying the ball like a contact hitter. This would be fine if he was a natural power hitter, but it's a recipe for disaster since he ain't.
Let's dive into the numbers. Hayes pulls 18 percent of his air contact. League average is around 25 percent. Pull-air specialists (dudes who turn fly balls into home runs the easy way) run above 35 percent. Isaac Paredes, the canonical example, has lived above 40 percent for three years on a profile that is otherwise unremarkable. Hayes is in the bottom quartile of MLB hitters, and he was in the bottom quartile last year too. He's hitting more fly balls than he's ever hit, and more than half of them are going center and opposite field, which is the field where his non-elite exit velocity does the least work.
His max exit velocity this year is 106.6 miles per hour, which is the 17th percentile in baseball. That's not a power hitter's max EV. That's a contact hitter's max EV. Combine a contact hitter's peak EV with a fly-ball hitter's launch angle and a slap hitter's spray distribution, and what you get is a flyout factory.
Hayes has put 51 balls in the air this year, and his expected hits on those balls run around seventeen. His actual hits: twelve.
Take a look a the diagram below. This shows all of the balls he struck harder than 100.6 mph. Of those 9, two went for home runs, one for a double, five outs, and one was a reached-on-error (which doesn't count as a hit). The home runs went to fence-line corners (363 feet to opposite field, 366 feet to the pull side) at near-peak EV. Neither was a center-field shot. But everything else went to dead center for an easy out.
Where Hayes's air contact lands, 2026
| Distance from plate | Air balls | Avg EV | Outs | Hits | Home runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 300 ft | 27 | 84.8 mph | 19 | 8 | 0 |
| 300–360 ft | 14 | 95.0 mph | 13 | 1 | 0 |
| 360–390 ft | 9 | 100.6 mph | 6 | 3 | 2 |
| Over 390 ft | 1 | 103.1 mph | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Fly balls and line drives only. The Hits column includes home runs. Source: Baseball Savant.
There's a hitting-coach gospel that's been preached for the past decade: get the ball in the air. Ground balls are outs, fly balls are home runs. The advice isn't wrong as a generality. It's wrong for this specific physical profile. And that physical profile happens to be Ke'Bryan Hayes-shaped and plays third base for the Cincinnati Reds.
Elevation pays for hitters with elite max exit velocity who can clear walls anywhere on the field. It also pays for pull-heavy hitters whose air contact goes to the shortest part of the field. Hayes has neither. He has Steven Kwan's pull rate stapled to a fly-ball swing that produces the trajectories of neither a power hitter nor a contact hitter. The right move for a max-EV hitter is to elevate everywhere. The right move for a slap hitter like is to keep the ball low and use the BABIP gods. The wrong move for both is to elevate without pulling.
The good news is the BABIP correction is coming. The bad news is what it'll correct to unless he starts to pull the ball more. Hayes's xwOBA is .314, which lands right around league average. If he only produces to his x-stats for the rest of the year, the results project to something like .250/.310/.385 with 12 to 15 home runs. That's 2025 Alex Bohm with a lower batting average. That's where Hayes is heading even in the optimistic scenario. Useful regular with plus defense at third.
The path to more than that runs through pulling the ball in the air. Bohm pulled 30 percent of his contact in 2023 and produced a 104 wRC+. He increased his pull rate to 36 percent in 2024 and jumped to 113 wRC+. Same launch angle, same exit velocity profile, just more committed turn on inside pitches.
If Hayes can find five or six more pull-air points without sacrificing his contact rate (and his 99th-percentile squared-up rate says he might have the room) he goes from a 100 wRC+ ceiling to a 110–115 wRC+ ceiling. That's a real player. That's a months-long mechanical project, and 29-year-old hitters with stable approaches don't usually rebuild their hip rotation in May.
The other option is to walk it back. The 2023 version of Hayes (101 wRC+, 15 home runs, .271/.309/.453) ran a 13-degree launch angle, not 17. The line drives Hayes is hitting this year are real (his line-drive rate is 21.6 percent, a career high), but they're stapled to too much elevation, and a four-degree drop in launch angle would convert the shallow opposite-field flyouts into base hits. Lower ceiling than the pull-more path, higher floor. He has the muscle memory.
The third option is the one that usually happens. Nothing changes. The BABIP partially corrects, the team holds the swing, and the season ends with a 95 wRC+ third baseman who plays plus defense and gives the Reds about a 2-WAR season. That's a useful player. It's also a long way from the version of Hayes the buy-low writers were promising in April.
The number I'm watching is his hard-hit pull-air rate. Currently 4.5 percent of his contact. If it climbs past 8 percent and stays there over the next 100 plate appearances, Hayes is the version of himself the projections love, a 105 wRC+ regular with plus defense, useful, not a star. If it stays under 6 percent, he's the player his actual line says he is, and the unlucky takes were a mirage. His expected wOBA will keep people talking about "luck" for the rest of the season, but his hard-hit pull-air rate is the thing I'll be looking for.