The New Cody Bellinger Has Been Here for a While Now

NEW YORK — It’s hard to stay under the radar when you play at Yankee Stadium, but Cody Bellinger is giving it his best shot.

Splitting time between all three outfield positions, the 30-year-old Bellinger is quietly putting up the second-best season of his entire career. With 4.6 WAR entering play Wednesday, he ranks 18th among all position players. Drafted out of high school in 2013, Bellinger debuted with the Dodgers at age 21 in 2017 and immediately looked like a star. He took home Rookie of the Year honors with a four-win campaign, won the MVP in 2019, and then saw his career derailed by a fractured fibula and multiple shoulder dislocations. The Dodgers non-tendered him after he ran a combined 69 wRC+ in 2021 and 2022, and he signed a pillow contract with the Cubs for 2023. He got back on track with a 136 wRC+ and 4.4 WAR, signed a three-year deal to stay in Chicago, and then got traded to New York after he took a step back in 2024. That step back is starting to look like a blip.

This season, Bellinger been the most valuable Yankee not named Aaron Judge. His 129 wRC+ ranks fifth among the team’s regulars, and he’s tied with Austin Wells for the lead with nine fielding runs. Bellinger’s 28 home runs are his most since his 2019 MVP season.

He is having an interesting year at the plate. In some ways, he looks the same as he has for the past three seasons. Deserved Runs Created Plus, a Baseball Prospectus metric that measures deserved performance rather than actual results, had him at 106 in 2023 and 111 in his down 2024 campaign. This season, he’s at 108. In other words, DRC+ thinks Bellinger has performed at pretty much the same level for the past three seasons, despite the dip in his actual performance and his xwOBA last season. That’s the first big piece of news here. DRC+ thought Bellinger’s step back last year was undeserved, and the fact that he’s returned to his 2023 performance level makes that easier to believe. As Dan Szymborski wrote earlier this week, Bellinger has put himself in position to decline his 2026 option and look for a new deal. The idea that, under the hood, he’s been this good for three years in a row makes him that much more attractive a target if he ends up hitting the open market come November.

Even a cursory look at Bellinger’s stats will tell you that although he’s hitting extremely well, he’s a different player than he was before the shoulder injuries. He doesn’t hit the ball as hard. He sees more pitches in the zone because pitchers aren’t quite as scared of him, and he’s much more aggressive than he used to be. Platoon splits provide a great example. Early in his career, Bellinger had pretty standard platoon splits, running a 140 wRC+ against righties and a 124 wRC+ against lefties. In his bounce-back 2023 season, he started running severe reverse platoon splits and smashing lefties. He was more or less even in 2024, but now he’s back to smashing lefties again, as you can see from this slender table.

What is Bellinger doing differently against lefties this season? For starters, he’s been much more patient against them. Although his chase rate against righties has stayed roughly the same from 2024 to 2025, his chase rate against lefties has fallen from 37% all the way to 28%, and his swing rate on pitches in the zone has dropped by a small amount too. He’s gone from a minuscule 1.2% walk rate against lefties in 2024 to a more reasonable 7.4% this season. Asked about the change before Wednesday’s game, Bellinger said he wasn’t deliberately dialing back his aggressiveness: “I think it’s just a matter of where my swing is at right now, and the understanding of my swing and how I want to approach everything.”

It’s not just that Bellinger is swinging less. He’s swinging less against sweepers, specifically, which have always given him trouble, and he’s swinging more often at curveballs, which he’s always crushed and is now absolutely demolishing. Hitting coach James Rowson attributed this approach to Bellinger’s innate ability to recognize the movement patterns of pitches, synthesizing information like the pitcher’s mechanics and release point to decipher not just what pitch is coming, but also how much it is breaking and where it will cross the plate. “He is as good at recognizing shapes of pitches as anyone I’ve ever seen,” Rowson said before Tuesday’s game. Bellinger has always had this skill to some degree, but it seems to have improved over time as he’s seen more pitches at the big league level. He’s running a career-low 13% strikeout rate, both because he’s not chasing and because he’s making a ton more contact. Seeing Bellinger whiff less shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Take a look at his career contact rates.

Both lines dropped during his two years in the wilderness, but his contact rate on pitches in the zone has been trending upward for most of his career. This latest increase has coincided with Bellinger’s best hard-hit rate since 2020 and his highest 90th-percentile exit velocity since 2021. He’s more patient, he’s making more contact, and he’s hitting the ball harder than at any point since he first injured his shoulder. It sounds like he’s just making better swing decisions, focusing on the ones that he can do the most damage against, but it’s not quite that simple. Let’s look at where he’s traditionally done damage. The heat maps below show his slugging percentage per ball in play. I’ve combined the last two seasons so that we can compare them with this year. There’s a big difference.

Like many players, Bellinger was at his best against pitches right over the heart of the plate. His hot zone also extended toward the inner half. This season, he has a couple different hot zones. He’s still scorching those pitches over the middle, but now he’s also punishing pitches up and in, and he’s doing well on thigh-high pitches on the outside part of the plate, as well. He can rake against pitches thrown to these different locations because his swing is more adaptable than it was in previous seasons. “I think adjustability is like a superpower, right?” Bellinger said. “I can hit balls in different quadrants of the zone. I can shorten up, take my stroke — you learn that through success and failure. You just kind of build it, and I’m at a position now where my swing, my mind, I’m [in my] ninth year in the big leagues now. So before, I felt like I was just more out-athleticizing the game and there wasn’t much mental fortitude going on there. It was just, you know, be athletic and rip it.”

It’s no accident that Bellinger has developed an ability to hit that pitch on the outer half. He’s done so out of necessity. Take a look at the way pitchers have changed their approach against him.

Knowing that Bellinger loved the ball middle-in, they started attacking the outside part of the plate. Not only has he demonstrated that he can handle that pitch, but he’s even started to look for it. The heat maps below show his swing rates. He’s gone from focusing on the inner half to looking for the pitch up and out over the plate. “I think it’s just an idea of my swing and keeping my barrel in the zone as long as possible,” he said.

With opposing pitchers targeting the outside part of the plate and Bellinger obliging them by swinging at those offerings, you might expect him to be pulling the ball less often. He’s not. His 43.5% pull rate is his highest since 2022. Bellinger has long levers and a long swing (longer than 87% of all qualified players, according to Statcast), and he runs one of the league’s higher pull rates, both on inside pitches and those over the outer third. “He can do what he wants to do with that [outside] pitch,” Rowson said. Bellinger is aware that he pulls the ball when he’s going well, but he understands that setting out to pull the ball leads to bad results. “The second you start trying to pull, [it is] bad news, in my opinion,” he said during spring training. “Put my swing on the inside part of the baseball, and good things happen.” Before Wednesday’s game, he acknowledged that it’s not always that easy. “Especially here at Yankee Stadium, getting pull-happy is tempting,” he said, before explaining the benefit of staying inside the baseball. “[It] ultimately keeps your direction from not flying off to right field… If you’re thinking pull, your margin of error is so short in this game, especially with the velocity and everything going on.” The pull-by-not-trying-to-pull approach is working just fine. Bellinger is now putting more than a quarter of his batted balls in the air to the pull side, his highest mark since 2019.

I don’t mean to make it sound like what we’re seeing from Bellinger is entirely new to this year. Remember, as I said earlier, Bellinger’s DRC+ is basically unchanged over the past three seasons, and his wRC+ is still lower than it was in 2023, the first time the baseball world proclaimed that Belli was back. Yes, he can get the barrel to more parts of the zone now, and he’s making tons of contact and pulling the ball in the air more often, but he hasn’t suddenly reached a new peak. That said, these changes make it easier to believe that this version of Bellinger has staying power. He may not be in line for another MVP, but he is deserving of and likely will receive some down-ballot votes this year, and the underlying metrics are pointing in the right direction. It’s hard to argue against a player who’s making better swing decisions, whiffing less, and hitting the ball harder.

At this point, something may be nagging at you. If Bellinger’s offensive performance has only rebounded to its 2023 level, then why has he surpassed his 2023 production level? It’s the defense. For only the second time in his career, Bellinger is pretty much exclusively playing in the outfield, and he’s putting up some of the best defensive metrics of his career. The numbers below represent just his performance in the outfield. The numbers on the left are the totals, and on the right they’re prorated to a 150-game season.

Over the past few years, Bellinger’s fielding had trended down far enough that it was fair to wonder whether his time as an elite defensive outfielder was over. This season has put a stop to that. All sorts of factors are at play here. When asked about Bellinger’s defensive revival this year, Yankees third base and outfield coach Luis Rojas raised several factors. He mentioned that the team has worked with Bellinger on adding a hop to his pre-pitch routine in order to optimize his first step. He also talked about Bellinger’s competitiveness. “He challenges me all the time on plays that he gets in the outfield,” Rojas said. “[Bellinger] says, ‘Hey, what was the catch probability percentage on that one? I think I had a really bad first step.’” The Yankees have their own proprietary catch probability metric, and Bellinger is constantly pushing himself to beat those numbers.

Rojas also cited the change in venues as a possible reason for Bellinger’s improved outfield defense. Wrigley Field can be tough because of the wind, because of the hard brick wall festooned with ivy, and because of the sun balls that come with all those day games. Because balls tend to go for home runs there, Wrigley can also provide fewer chances for outfielders to show off their range. With Trent Grisham earning an everyday role in center field and Aaron Judge moving back to right, Bellinger has spent more time than ever in left this season, and Yankee Stadium’s left field is particularly spacious. Consequently, in 2025, Bellinger has seen 17 three-star chances, balls with a catch probability between 51% and 75%, compared to just six in 2024. For a player who grades out a bit better than the average outfielder in terms of both jump and sprint speed, that’s a whole lot more chances to rack up value. Some of that improvement has come from simply getting more opportunities to show what he can do.

In a way, Bellinger’s results at the plate and in the outfield follow a similar trend. He is seeking information from coaches and making real changes. You can see them both on the field and in the numbers. But it’s not 100% clear whether his true talent level has actually improved or whether things are just starting to break his way a bit more than they did last year. The adjustments at the plate don’t look fluky, and he’s on pace to put up the third 30-homer season of his career while striking out less often than 91% of the league’s batters. Maybe this is just who Bellinger is.