Byron Buxton Deserves Better Than His Early Results

A couple of weeks isn’t enough time for the standings to mean much, but it is enough time for early narratives to start forming. When it comes to Byron Buxton, the early numbers describe a hitter who is searching for answers.

Through his first stretch of games, the production simply hasn’t been there. He snapped an 0-for-20 slide on Monday night, but entering Wednesday, he’s hitting just .158, with a .233 on-base percentage. His OPS (.496) is worse than all but two stretches of this length from 2025: one after he came off the injured list in mid-August, and another in mid-September, long after the season was lost. He's mired in a significant slump.

That doesn’t sound much like Byron Buxton. And in some ways, it hasn’t been. While the results have been rough, the underlying metrics tell a very different story about how he’s actually swung the bat to open the year. Start with the quality of contact. Buxton owns a hard hit rate of exactly 50%, meaning half of the balls he’s put in play have come off the bat at 95 miles per hour or harder. That's a strong number in any context, and typically the kind of mark you would expect from a hitter producing far better results.

Of course, exit velocity alone does not tell the full story. It doesn’t account for launch angle, and that’s where things start to get a bit more complicated. Buxton’s average launch angle sits at 32°, which is extremely high and helps explain the early struggles. An angle that high on average means a hitter is hitting too many routine fly balls or pop-ups, and that’s definitely been true for Buxton. Buxton has simply gotten too far under pitches, limiting the damage he’s capable of doing.

But even with that in mind, there are strong signs that luck has not been on his side. His barrel rate currently sits at 10.7%, which places him in the 66th percentile across Major League Baseball. A barrel is a batted ball that combines ideal exit velocity and launch angle, generally at least 98 MPH off the bat with a launch angle between 25° and 31°. That’s the type of contact most often associated with extra-base hits.

Buxton has recorded three barrels so far this season. He does not have a hit on any of them. That, alone, is a strong indicator that the results have not lined up with the process. When hitters are consistently producing that class of contact, the outcomes tend to follow. In Buxton’s case, they simply haven’t yet—although the nature of analyzing small samples like this is such that we can't quite say he's consistently barreling the ball, either. Because of who he is, the hard contact feels more like a signal, and the poor results feel like noise. It could turn out to be the other way around.

That’s where the bigger picture comes into focus. Buxton hasn’t been perfect at the plate. The elevated launch angle is something to watch, and there are adjustments he can make to turn more of those fly balls into line drives. His BABIP is just .214, but it's hard to label that as bad luck while he's hitting so many fly balls. As Twins fans learned the hard way over long years with Max Kepler, hitting it in the air at an extreme rate is good for power production but bad for BABIP. He can and will refine his process, to get back to hitting the ball on lower lines. He's catching the ball farther out in front of his body and getting around it more this year, despite a lower swing speed. It's no wonder he's producing some suboptimal flies.

This isn’t a case of a hitter who looks overmatched. It’s a hitter who’s hitting the ball hard, producing a solid rate of barrels, and maintaining a strong presence in the sweet spot, all while seeing very little to show for it in the box score. That combination usually doesn’t last very long, and indeed, even the numbers that corroborate the poor results hint at an opportunity to unlock big value with a relatively minor set of adjustments.

Over the course of a 162-game season, those underlying metrics have a way of winning out. Balls that are currently finding gloves will start to drop in; well-struck fly balls will begin to carry a bit farther (especially as the weather warms up); and line drives will start to split gaps instead of being caught. When that shift happens, the stat line can change in a hurry.

When he’s on, Buxton is one of the most exciting hitters in the game, capable of changing a lineup with both power and elite speed. That version of him didn’t just disappear overnight; the underlying data still shows the raw talent. Right now, the results have not matched the process. But over time, they usually do. It’s not a matter of if Buxton turns things around, but when.