Yordan Alvarez and the Replacement Level Bunch

Yordan Alvarez is one of the best hitters on the planet. From 2021-24, only Aaron Judge produced a higher wRC+ than Alvarez’s 165, and only five players surpassed his total of 136 home runs. During that time, the slugger helped the Astros to two pennants and a championship, furthering his legend with some dramatic postseason homers as well. Yet so far in 2025, Alvarez has struggled mightily. In fact, he closed April with a WAR below zero (-0.1) after posting 5.3 WAR last season.

Through 28 games, Alvarez is hitting .219/.316/.354, well shy of last year’s typically stellar .308/.392/.567. In fact, his 81-point drop in wRC+ is the fourth largest among players who took 300 plate appearances last year and have made at least 80 this season:

So what’s going on with Alvarez? He’s actually hitting the ball harder than he did last year or the year before, at least if we’re measuring only by average exit velocity — which isn’t a great way to go:

Alvarez’s raw exit velocity has increased, but more significantly, his barrel rate has dropped from the 92nd percentile to the 73rd, and his hard-hit rate from the 93rd to the 65th. While it’s early, we can put some stock in those numbers, as exit velocity stabilizes after about 40 batted ball events, barrel rate at 50 BBE, and hard-hit rate at 80 BBE.

Digging through Alvarez’s Statcast page, one thing that particularly stands out is that while his average launch angle and groundball and fly ball rates have hardly budged from last year, he’s gotten under 37% of his batted balls, hitting them at launch angles too high to be productive. That rate is 10th among all qualifiers, and it’s about 12 percentage points above both his career mark and the major league average.

Cherry-picking a few other Statcast details, while Alvarez has slugged .800 on middle-middle pitches, up from .679 last year, he’s swung at only 50% of them, down from 79% last year. Where he hit .314 and slugged .541 against four-seamers in 2024, he’s down to a .152 average and a .273 slugging percentage this year. His swing and chase rates are consistent with last year’s rates (which were a bit above his career norms), but his decision-marking appears to have taken a hit. Per Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric, which measures the quality of a hitter’s swing decisions, he’s dropped from the 95th percentile in 2023 and the 91st percentile last year to the 43rd percentile this year.

Alvarez isn’t one to take comfort in the Statcast metrics that suggest he’s generally on the right track. Via the Houston Chronicle’s Matt Kawahara:

When a reporter noted he is hitting the ball hard, Alvarez replied: “Outs.” He was asked if his swing feels good mechanically.

“I could tell you that it’s good, but if the results are not there, then it’s not good,” Alvarez said. “We’re just trying to figure it out right now.”

Elsewhere in the story, Alvarez dismissed manager Joe Espada’s opinion that he’s close to breaking out, saying, “Until the numbers go up, there’s nothing close.”

Alvarez is hardly the only player who’s mired below replacement level thus far. Among the 165 batting title qualifiers, 38 (23%) are at or below 0.0 WAR, and at the 80-PA threshold, the share rises to 26%. What follows here is a check-in on five others who are in a similar boat, four of whom are highlighted in the wRC+ table above. They’re good-to-great players off to bad starts; three of them joined Alvarez at last year’s All-Star Game, and three signed notable free agent contracts this past offseason, one of them for a nine-figure amount. For this, I limited my selection to players who produced at least 3.0 WAR in 300 plate appearances last year and have reached that 80-PA threshold; while I was pretty strict when it came to focusing on WAR marks below zero, I made one notable exception. Still, there are far more such players than I can cram into a single piece. I’ve listed the ones here in alphabetical order.

Willy Adames, Giants (71 wRC+, -0.4 WAR)

Adames had a career year at just the right time. In 2024, he set personal bests in homers (32), steals (21), and WAR (4.8) while nearly doing so in wRC+ (119) as well. Not only did his .251/.331/.462 slashline represent a significant step up from a subpar 2023 (.217/.310/.407, 94 wRC+), but he hit free agency at just the right time to pocket a seven-year, $182 million contract from the Giants.

So far, Adames’ move westward has not worked out well; his performance has been a net negative on a team that’s jumped out to a 19-12 start. He’s hit just .208/.292/.301, with a barrel rate that’s dropped from 12% to 8.9%. While his 88.6-mph average exit velo is on par with last year and his 43.3% hard-hit rate is a couple points better, his xSLG has dropped from .461 to .388 — still well ahead of his actual performance. Prior to joining the Giants, he had a massive reverse platoon split over the course of his career, with a 117 wRC+ against righties and a 91 against lefties; this year, he’s somehow hit .103/.163/.103 (-21 wRC+) in 43 PA against lefties, compared to .259/.351/.395 (113 wRC+) against righties.

Adames’ troubles extend to the field. The bottom already fell out of his defense last year, at least based on his drop from 12 FRV and 8 DRS in 2023 to 0 FRV and -16 DRS in ’24. This year, in just a month’s time, he’s already at -4 FRV and -7 DRS. I wouldn’t put much stock in such a small sample if it weren’t preceded by those concerning 2024 metrics, but I do wonder whether it’s simply been a matter of figuring out how to best fit alongside third baseman Matt Chapman, a five-time Gold Glove winner.

Alec Bohm, Phillies (45 wRC+, -0.4 WAR)

Though he’s never hit as well as he did during his 2020 rookie season (which was just 44 games long), Bohm has developed into a solid player for the Phillies, improving his defense from dreadful to average while providing above-average offensive production. Last year, he made his first All-Star team while setting career highs in WAR (3.5) and wRC+ (115), batting .280/.332/.448 with 15 homers.

Bohm’s off to a .221/.252/.274 start. Generally a very aggressive hitter with exceptional contact skills, he’s cut his swinging strike rate from 7.6% to 6%, but he’s striking out more often (17.6%, up from 14.2%) while walking just 2.6% of the time, about four points below his norm. His SEAGER has dropped from the 72nd percentile to the 29th, meaning that when he’s swinging, he’s not doing so on pitches where he can do the most damage.

Those decisions have translated into a failure to launch. Bohm’s groundball rate has increased from 46% to 50.5%, with his fly ball rate dropping by a similar amount; his average launch angle has decreased from 9.8 degrees to 5.4. So even though his 91.3 mph average exit velo, 8.6% barrel rate, and 49.5% hard-hit rate all represent improvements from last season, he’s collected just five extra-base hits and has yet to homer. That said, he’s also been at least somewhat unlucky, as he’s 124 points short of his .398 xSLG.

Gunnar Henderson, Orioles (91 wRC+, 0.1 WAR)

Technically, Henderson isn’t below replacement level, but it’s only been the past few days where he’s gotten his head above water. I chose to include him here because he had by far the highest 2024 WAR (8.0, fourth in the majors) of any player even in the neighborhood of zero WAR. He’s hitting .228/.268/.413, which is a big enough step down from last year’s .281/.364/.529 (155 wRC+) that he cracked the table above, but things could be even worse; a week ago, he was batting .203/.247/.377 (73 wRC+) before reeling off a six-game hitting streak, with three of his seven hits going for extra bases. Look out, Joe DiMaggio.

It’s worth remembering that Henderson missed nearly all of the Grapefruit League season due to an intercostal strain that he suffered on February 27. He began the regular season on the injured list and didn’t make his debut until April 4, the Orioles’ eighth game. Since being activated, he’s actually been scorching the ball — when he’s made contact. While he barreled just one ball out of the 26 he put into play during his first 10 games, he averaged 99.3 mph on those BBEs, with a 69.2% hard-hit rate; unfortunately, he also struck out in 37.2% of his 43 plate appearances during that span, suggesting he was a bit rusty. Currently, he’s up to a 95.7 mph average exit velo, which places him in the 99th percentile; his 56.9% hard-hit rate is in the 95th percentile, but his 9.2% barrel rate is in just the 53rd, down from the 76th percentile last year. Basically, he’s hitting too many grounders (50.8%, up four points from last year) and striking out too often (27.8%, up 5.7 points from last year) while walking just 5.2% of the time, a bit below half of last year’s rate. That said, he’s trending upwards in most of those areas; if there’s one player within this group I believe has already turned the corner, it’s him.

Joc Pederson, Rangers (12 wRC+, -0.8 WAR)

Pederson put in a potent season as a platoon DH for the Diamondbacks, hitting .275/.393/.515 with 23 homers, and setting career bests in OBP and wRC+ (151) while turning in 3.0 WAR. The Rangers signed him to a two-year, $37 million deal, hoping he could provide similar production, but he’s done just the opposite. After collecting his first hit as a Ranger in the team’s second game, he endured an epic 0-for-41 drought, offset by just three walks. He went three weeks between hits, finally ending the slide with a pinch-hit double off the A’s Mason Miller on April 23. On Sunday, he finally enjoyed his first multi-hit game of the season. Overall, he’s batting .108/.205/.176 through 84 plate appearances; among players with at least 80 PA, only Massey (11 wRC+) and Candelario (10 wRC+) have been worse.

Even during his streak, Pederson averaged 91.5 mph on his batted ball events, but he struck out 31% of the time, and 57.7% of those batted balls were grounders. Overall, his 51.9% groundball rate is over 11 points above his career norm, while his 5.5% barrel rate is about half his usual rate, and his 16.7% pulled air rate about four points below his career mark and 10 points below last year. He’s chasing less than usual (23.3%), but his SEAGER has dropped from the 83rd percentile to the 49th. He has shown signs of life lately, with five hits in his last 16 at-bats, three of them for extra bases (including the double off of Miller), but that slash line is gonna look pretty grim for a while.

Anthony Santander, Blue Jays (66 wRC+, -0.4 WAR)

Like Adames, Santander picked a fine time for a career year, as he set full-season bests in homers (44), WAR (3.3) and wRC+ (129), while hitting .235/.308/.506 for the Orioles and making his first All-Star team before becoming a free agent. He parlayed his performance into a five-year, $92.5 million deal with the Blue Jays, but it doesn’t appear that his offense made the move north. Even with a big three-run homer against the Red Sox on Wednesday night — just his fourth of the season — Santander is hitting just .175/.258/.316.

Like Bohm, Santander is having some trouble achieving liftoff. His groundball rate has spiked from 30.8% to 38.1%, and his average launch angle has fallen from 22.7 degrees to 15.2. His barrel rate has plummeted from 11.7% to 6%, and his xSLG has fallen from .445 to .327.

Santander has a reputation as a slow starter during his nine-year career, as he’s hit for just an 82 wRC+ in March and April, compared to a 111 wRC+ in the rest of the season. What particularly stands out as I dig through his numbers is a disconcerting trend when it comes to four-seamers. In 2023, he hit .263 and slugged .556 against them, but last year he dipped to a .196 AVG and .431 SLG, and this year to a .128 AVG and .231 SLG; his whiff rate on those pitches has increased from 21.5% to 34.1%. Meanwhile, he’s a combined 3-for-31 against changeups and sliders; he handled the former reasonably well last year but not the latter.

Again, there’s no shortage of other players I could have included within this gruesome tour through Small Sample Theater, including some of the other players in the wRC+ table above such as Diaz and Ortiz, both of whom at least play key defensive positions. The Rangers’ Marcus Semien, whom I checked in on last week, has hits in his last five games and has raised his wRC+ from 17 to 47 (.182/.258/.245) thanks in large part to the A’s pitching staff. For many of these players, it may be just a matter of fattening up their slashlines against some of the league’s weaker pitching staffs.