Breaking Down Reds Outfielder Austin Hays' Recent Struggles

The Cincinnati Reds had a cleanup hitter they had trust in. He had come up with some big extra-base hits and RBIs early on, but has really cooled off as of late. Just how worried should we be about Austin Hays?

He’s been on a heck of a slump recently. Even with the hit on Sunday, Hays has three hits in his last eight games. While that itself is bad, you can even expand on that in a couple of ways.

Hays has hit .220 in his last 30 games. That’s not a huge sample size, but that’s also not a small sample size. During that time, he has just five extra-base hits (three homers, two doubles) and just 14 RBI.

So what do we make of that? Is that who Hays is? What does the rest of his season look like?

With the broken timeline that has been 2025 for Hays due to a couple of injured list stints, he has been a tale of two halves. With the 30 game sample in mind, his other 38 games were nice.

He had 19 extra-base hits in that time with 30 RBI and a .281 batting average. So that definitely points to the most recent group of games being a slump, but how different is it from his career?

His career slugging percentage is .433, which is still 10 points lower than his 2025 slugging percentage. It looks as if this slump is more of a course correction to where Hays has been for the first seven seasons of his career.

I expect it to level out soon, but I do not believe that it jumps back to where he was early on. As is true with literally every player who has ever picked up a bat, the true Hays lies somewhere in between the heater we saw him on early and the slump he’s currently mired in.