In 2025, Matt McLain hit .220 and carried a 28.9 percent strikeout rate like an albatross on the shoulders of a cursed sailor. If you watched a lot of Cincinnati Reds baseball last year, you know what that looked like at the plate: a hitter with the tools to do damage, unable to find his footing through a full season.
This spring has been different. In 53 plate appearances, he's cut his strikeout rate to 11.3 percent and he's batting .542, the kind of number that makes Reds fans allow themselves to feel things again. The sample is small. The .542 won't survive contact with real pitching in a real season.
But some of it might. Is Matty Ice back? And which of these numbers should we actually believe?
The .543 BABIP
The fantasy market looked at McLain's .220 average and a wRC+ of 77 and moved on. His ADP heading into 2026 sits at 163.6, deep in the fourteenth round, priced like a speculative add you make when your roster already looks fine and you're hoping to get lucky. Most analysts who've tracked his career see the bounce-back case. The 2023 version of McLain was a real fantasy asset, and the labrum tear gives the 2025 numbers some cover. But even the optimists are filing him under "dart throw": a late-round gamble you take because the price is right and the upside is real, knowing full well it might not come together.
That's probably fair based on 2025 alone. What 163 ADP doesn't account for is the version of McLain who showed up in 2023: .290, 129 wRC+, 16 home runs in 89 games before a labrum tear took the rest of that season and all of 2024. His 2025 numbers read less like a baseline than like a guy who came back from surgery and tried to play a full year before his body was ready to let him.
Matt McLain's Career Arc
The spring AVG reflects a .543 BABIP, roughly half his balls in play have found holes, a rate that will normalize once the regular season starts. The spring wRC+ will normalize too.
His .542 spring average looks like the correction finally arriving. It isn't, exactly. His BABIP is .543: just over half his balls in play are falling for hits, against a major league average that runs around .300 over a full season. That's not a skill. That's March being March: infield alignments that haven't settled, pitchers stretched to 40 pitches on a Tuesday, defense that's organized but not sharp yet. A coin landing heads seven times in a row is still a coin.
The AVG and BABIP will come down. The question is what's underneath them.
K% and Batted Ball Shape
Most spring training numbers are noise. Not all of them. The ones worth trusting measure what a hitter does with his swing, not where the ball happens to land afterward.
Strikeout rate is one of those. You either make contact or you don't. You lay off the breaking ball at the bottom of the zone or you chase it. Those outcomes belong entirely to the hitter. The pitcher, the defense, the infield alignment have nothing to do with whether you barrel the ball or whiff it. Walk rate works the same way.
Batted ball shape carries the same signal. The angle of the swing at contact determines whether the ball climbs or dies. Drive through the center of the ball on a slight upward path and it gets airborne; skim underneath it and it goes into the dirt at the shortstop's feet. Ground ball rate and line drive rate are mechanical fingerprints. They don't care who's throwing.
Batted Ball Trajectories
The type of contact is set the moment the bat meets the ball, before the pitcher matters, before the defense matters. That's what makes batted ball shape a reliable signal even in spring training.
In 2025, McLain's strikeout rate was 28.9 percent and his line drive rate was 17.2 percent. He was missing too often, and when he made contact the ball went on the ground: 38.7 percent ground ball rate, an attack angle of 6.9 degrees where you want to be closer to 10 to 15. At the plate he looked exactly like that: controlled, compact, the quiet approach of a middle infielder coached to stay within himself his whole career. Lots of hard grounders dying before the outfield grass. Good swing, wrong direction.
The frustrating part is that his contact quality was fine. His exit velocity was 88.8 mph, his hard-hit rate was 40.6 percent, his barrel rate was 7.7 percent. A hitter who can hurt you when things go right. The contact quality was never the problem. His K% and batted ball shape were.
This spring, two of those numbers moved. His strikeout rate dropped to 11.3 percent. His line drive rate climbed to 30.95 percent. His walk rate held steady at 9.4 percent, and that matters: the strikeout drop didn't come from taking more pitches and waiting for walks. He's not gaming the count differently. He's making contact when he swings.
His ground ball rate fell from 38.7 percent to 30.95 percent. A 17-point drop in strikeout rate paired with a near-doubling of line drive rate describes a different approach, not a different talent level.
McLain's Strikeout Rate (K%)
Lower is better. A strikeout is a dead out: the ball never leaves the catcher's glove. McLain's spring K% is more than 17 points below his 2025 figure, and well below his 2023 breakout season too.
The Bat Speed Problem
The seven spring home runs won't hold. McLain's home run to fly ball rate is 43.75 percent right now. The major league average sits around 13 percent; the best power hitters in the game sustain 20 to 25 percent over a full season. The projection systems, which haven't had time to process whatever McLain changed this spring, have him at 15 home runs (Steamer) to 20 (OOPSY). Those are probably closer to reality than the spring pace.
But here's the number I keep coming back to. McLain's bat speed in 2025 was 69.7 mph. Freddie Freeman's was 69.9. Freeman is 36 years old and running on craft, experience, and a hip that probably isn't fully right. McLain is 26. Low bat speed in a young hitter is unusual, and it puts a real ceiling on power that no amount of hot spring at-bats can paper over.
The labrum history is what keeps this from being disqualifying. Players routinely need more than one full season after that kind of surgery before their strength is fully back. His barrel rate was 10.8 percent in 2023 before the tear. In 2025, it was 7.7 percent. Whether the shoulder has genuinely recovered this spring is the one thing the available data doesn't answer, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
The contact improvements look real. But getting to 30 home runs requires the bat speed to move alongside the contact rate, and we don't have spring bat tracking numbers to confirm it has.
At 163.6 ADP, the market has priced McLain on his 2025 earnings report: the .220 average, the 28.9 K%, the lost season before that. The spring K% and line drive rate are new guidance the market hasn't processed yet. Projection systems anchor on results. Spring batted ball data anchors on mechanics. When those two disagree, the mechanical numbers tend to win.
The number worth tracking in April isn't his batting average. It's his strikeout rate. In 2025, it was 28.9 percent. This spring, it's 11.3 percent. That won't hold exactly. But if McLain carries even half of that improvement into the regular season, the 2025 season stops being the right frame.
That gap is where his 2026 season lives.