What can Reds expect from Matt McLain in 2026?

It was a good season for the Reds in 2025, on balance. Hunter Greene replicated his excellent 2024 andcemented himself one of the game’s top young starters, Andrew Abbott enjoyed a career-year that saw him make his first trip to the All-Star game, and despite winning just 83 games the club managed to squeak into the postseason for the first time in a full season since 2013.

With all that being said, however, there’s clear flaws with the team as presently constructed and it’s not at all hard to see where team needs to improve if they hope to return to the playoffs next year for another bite at the apple. The Cincinnati offense disappointed across the board this season, with even star shortstop Elly De La Cruz hitting 11 fewer extra-base hits and swiping 30 fewers bases than last year despite similar on-base numbers.

In a season where virtually every piece of the club’s offense nucleus fell short of expectations, it seems a bit unfair to single out any one player. Even so, the struggles second baseman Matt McLain faced stand out among the crowd. McLain was one of the most exciting young players in baseball as recently as 2023, when his sensational 89-game rookie season earned him a fifth-place finish in NL Rookie of the Year voting that year. Unfortunately, he missed the entire 2024 season due to injuries and in some regards looked like a shell of his former self this season.

That’s not to say he regressed across the board. McLain’s 28.9% strikeout rate this season was a near perfect match for the 28.5% clip he struck out at back in 2023. His 9.5% walk rate was actually a substantial improvement over the 7.7% rate he posted in his rookie campaign. His defense was also phenomenal as he finished the year with +6 Fielding Run Value, a figure bested by just eight qualified middle infielders in baseball this year. That’s a substantial step up from the +1 FRV McLain offered in his rookie campaign.

Those are all positive (or, in the case of McLain’s strikeout rate, at least neutral) signs relative to 2023. It’s also where the good times come to an end, however. McLain’s power was down substantially by just about every metric this past year. After slugging 16 homers in 89 games as a rookie, he hit 15 across 147 games this year. His doubles also dropped from 23 to 18, while his triples actually dropped from four all the way down to zero. Hitting ten fewer extra-base hits in 174 more plate appearances is a drop in power output that’s nothing short of alarming, and McLain’s paltry .124 ISO put him in the bottom 20 among qualified hitters this year. His barrel rate dropped more than three points from 2023, and his hard-hit rate has dropped nearly two.

That falls short of even some notoriously contact-oriented hitters like Jung Hoo Lee and Jacob Wilson. While those players (not to mention hitters with even less power like Luis Arraez and Nico Hoerner) get away with that minimal power output thanks to elite bat-to-ball skills, but McLain’s lack of improvement in the strikeout department leaves him unable to emulate that brand of hitting. Barring a massive drop in strikeout rate next year, McLain will need to recapture some of that power if he’s going to improve over this year’s paltry 77 wRC+, much less approach the 129 wRC+ he posted in his rookie season.

Just how feasible is that? It’s hard to believe that he’ll get back to that level he flashed in 2023 entirely, because that was buoyed in no small part by a .385 BABIP. A BABIP of .350 is typically viewed as around the upper limit of the sustainable year-to-year range, and McLain’s .292 BABIP this year falls firmly into that more sustainable range. It’s possible it ticks back up in the future, but reversing that more than 90-point drop appears to be little more than a pipe dream. Getting back above league average, however, seems to be a far more reasonable ask, and one that could turn McLain into a key piece of Cincinnati’s core once again.

He’ll need to adjust his approach a bit if he’s going to get there. McLain’s hard-hit rate was only marginally lower than his rookie season in 2025, but he lost more than a quarter of his barrels on a rate basis this season. Some of that can surely be attributed to a stark drop in line drives. While McLain’s grounder rate stayed stagnant at 38.7% between this year and 2023, his line drive rate dropped from 24.2% clip as a rookie to just 17.2% this year. To put those numbers in context, his line drive rate this year ranked 132nd among 145 qualified hitters, while his 2023 rate would’ve ranked eighth this year among that same group.

Getting back to a more line drive oriented approach could help McLain both recoup some of those lost extra-base hits, and it would also help with his steeply declining BABIP. McLain hit 44.2% of his batted balls in the air this year, a top-30 clip in the majors. That works well for hitters like Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber who have the power to slug 40+ homers on an annual basis, but it’s a lot less effective recipe for success for someone with McLain’s profile. He pulled the ball less often than all but 23 of the league’s qualified hitters this year, leaving him with a lot of fly outs and pop ups but little production to show for it.

If McLain can lower his launch angle a bit next year, he could get back to hitting the sweet spot more often than he did this year. That was the secret ingredient that made McLain so effective in 2023, as his 39.6% sweet spot rate ranked in the 94th percentile among all MLB hitters. That dropped to just 34.0% this year, which placed him in the 43rd percentile. The good news for McLain and the Reds is that a change in approach is far easier to correct than a step back in underlying skills, and McLain’s discipline, defense, speed and bat speed all seem to be either right where they were in his rookie year or even better. That makes it relatively easy to imagine him re-emerging as a core piece of a Reds lineup that will need to generate a lot more offense this year if they want to build on their cameo in the playoffs this season.