There are two things you need to know right off the top: (A) Hope springs eternal, and (B) I’m a Matt McLain fan. Admittedly, I wasn’t completely sold on Cincinnati’s young infielder until a couple of years ago; I have to admit this, since my words have been printed in both digital and physical pixels, and I can’t escape them. But despite the injury issues, I came into this season completely sold.
McLain’s swing has always looked like it was drawn up in a UCLA biomechanics lab: short and explosive. (I assume UCLA has a biomechanics lab; I went to a public school on the other side of the country, so don’t quote me on this. Also, is this what happens in a biomechanics lab? I don’t really know.)
Anyway, in 2023, McLain’s first summer in the big leagues, that swing produced a slash line of .290/.357/.507 to go along with 16 homers and a sense around Cincinnati that the next great Reds middle infielder had finally arrived. Then baseball smacked us right in the face, as it tends to do: a wrecked shoulder, a year on the shelf, and 500‑plus days of analysis and anticipation.
And now here we are in early May 2025, and the numbers next to McLain’s name in the newspaper look like they were typed with a typewriter ribbon that dried out back in 1967 (when people still looked up statistics in a newspaper): .160 batting average, a .282 on-base percentage, and a .290 slugging percentage. That’s an OPS nearly .300 points shy of his dazzling rookie year. Is it time to be worried?
After the first five glorious games of this season, things were looking pretty good for McLain. He went 0‑for‑5 on Opening Day, but followed with six hits in 15 ABs with three homers and a double the rest of the week, good for a stout .300/.364/.800 slash line. Then came the crash: an oblique hamstring twinge, a quick IL stop, the return to the lineup, and a chilly .130/.264/.169 performance since returning. McLain has collected just 10 hits since April 5, including the 0‑for‑3 performance in Monday’s loss in Atlanta. Not great!
If you had told me before the season that McLain would be hitting .160 a month into the campaign, I’m not sure I would have believed you. There’s no question that he hasn’t looked anything like the player we saw in 2023. But context is everything. McLain missed an entire season after undergoing shoulder surgery! For a kid with just 89 big league games under his belt coming into the season, that might as well have been a century. Even healthy veterans returning from year‑long injuries—think Buster Posey in 2012 or Ronald Acuña Jr. in 2022—often look mortal for a month or three before the curtain lifts and the old fireworks resume.
McLain’s own evidence supports the theory. Before the brief hamstring hiccup early in the season, he was barreling baseballs at a 93rd‑percentile clip, his hard‑hit rate sat in the 87th percentile, and his walk rate had leapt from 7.7 percent as a rookie to nearly 14 percent. Sure, the sample size was tiny, but those are not the peripherals of a lost soul. They’re the signposts of a hitter whose engine remains powerful even while the spark plugs misfire. Or so I want to believe.
And I want to believe it because the Reds desperately need the 2023 version of McLain. Cincinnati’s offense so far has been inconsistent at best. Manager Terry Francona, who has forgotten more baseball than most of us will ever learn, offered McLain a mental vacation in Colorado last week, sliding Gavin Lux to second and bumping Spencer Steer up to the two‑hole. Asked why, Tito shrugged as if he’s seen hundreds of slumps bloom and wilt, which he has: “Just let him catch up a little bit. … He’s a (expletive) good player. He’s just having a tough time.” Translation: It’s May, not September.
I’m choosing not to be too concerned, at least not just yet. McLain was a first‑round pick twice: Arizona drafted him out of high school in 2018 before he opted for college, while the Reds nabbed him 17th overall three years later out of UCLA. Players don’t tend to get that kind of rep unless scouts drool over something innate: bat speed, strike‑zone command, whatever.
But it’s not just a scouting reputation. We saw it all come together in 2023. Those skills haven’t vanished, but McLain is having to re-learn and re-adjust after missing a full season of education against big league pitching.
Plus, if you’re looking to be optimistic, you can dive beneath the frost‑thin batting average and notice the things McLain can actually control:
- Exit velocity is higher than in 2023 and above league average; his shoulder apparently is intact.
- Chase rate is 79th percentile, an improvement on his rookie season, which suggests he’s not expanding the zone as badly as slump narratives suggest.
- Walk rate is almost twice as high as we saw in McLain’s rookie year. Selectivity is trending in the right direction.
What’s crushing him is a .207 BABIP that’s lower than a limbo stick at a kid’s birthday party, to use a ridiculous metaphor. I choose to believe that that number is simply noise. Unless physics suddenly hates Matt McLain, that luck is going to even out.
One of the things I simply love about baseball is the redemption arc, the moment when struggle meets perseverance and the game hands out another thin slice of joy. My bet is we’ll get that redemption arc soon. At some point, McLain will time a first‑pitch heater, the bat will crack, and we’ll all feel the same jolt we felt on May 15, 2023, when the kid hustled into second with a double in his major league debut.
Listen, Matt McLain can hit. He has always hit. He crushed in college, he crushed in Chattanooga and Louisville, and he crushed big‑league pitching in his rookie campaign before his shoulder betrayed him. Slumps end. Luck changes. Talent abides, as The Dude says. Or something like that.
In this time of my life, I choose to save the panic for September. May is for patience. The evenings are getting warmer, the Redlegs are in second place, and I’m just going to be optimistic. The beautiful swing of Matt McLain hasn’t gone anywhere—it’s just getting loose again. I choose to believe Terry Francona: McLain is a (expletive) good player.
Chad Dotson helms Reds coverage at Cincinnati Magazine and is co-author of “The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the Cincinnati Reds,” revised, updated, and available in bookstores now. His newsletter about Cincinnati sports can be found at chaddotson.com.
Facebook Comments