Josh Naylor’s Miserable Start For Mariners Looks More Unlucky Than Concerning

We are not going to sit here and pretend Josh Naylor’s first couple weeks of the 2026 season have looked good. A .104 batting average gets everybody’s attention fast, especially when the lineup already feels like it is trying to push a car uphill. But this is where the conversation needs to calm down a little, because ugly results and bad process are not always the same thing. 

With Naylor right now, the numbers say those are two very different stories. Through 13 games, he is hitting just .104, but the underlying profile is nowhere near as alarming as that number makes it look. Statcast has his expected batting average at .230, which is more than 100 points higher than the real one, and his expected wOBA also sits miles above his actual production. 

Mariners Have Little Reason To Fear Josh Naylor’s Early Numbers

That is usually where we should start before declaring that something is broken. Naylor has five hits in 48 at-bats, which is brutal on the surface, but he also has four walks and only eight strikeouts in 52 plate appearances. That is not the statistical shape of a hitter getting completely eaten alive. 

The batted-ball data only makes that point louder. His barrel rate is actually up to 7.5 percent, right in line with his overall career mark, and his sweet-spot rate has jumped to 37.5 percent. Even more encouraging, his squared-up rate in the 89th percentile and his strikeout rate in the 81st percentile. This is a guy who is hitting into a nasty patch of early-season baseball nonsense. 

Now, there is one part of this that is fair to watch. His average exit velocity is down to 86.6 mph, below both his 2025 number and his career mark, so it’s not like every indicator is screaming that he is destroying baseballs. But even there, this still looks more like a hitter who has not fully synced up yet than one whose swing has fallen apart. He is getting the bat on the ball, he is squaring it up, and he is avoiding the kind of strikeout spiral that shows up when something is seriously wrong. 

It also does not help that Naylor has been trying to find rhythm inside a lineup where the big names have all been dragging a bit. Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodríguez, Josh Naylor, and Randy Arozarena entered the series against Texas with no home runs between them and a combined .137 average. It is a lot easier for a slow start to feel bigger when the hitters around you are not exactly creating chaos either. 

This doesn’t feel like the moment to start panicking about the contract or acting like the Mariners got the wrong version of Josh Naylor. The start has been miserable. Nobody needs to sugarcoat that. But miserable is not the same as concerning, and right now the advanced numbers keep pointing toward bad luck, not decline. If anything, this feels like one of those stretches that is going to look kind of silly in hindsight once a few more line drives start landing.