The rub: Salvy has been the unluckiest hitter in MLB this season.

wOBA is a comprehensive and very accurate measure of a player's hitting. xwOBA is a measure of how well a player should be hitting based on how they're actually hitting the ball (velo, launch angle, etc) instead of in-game outcomes.

The second chart (Royals team xwOBA) should be a major influence in how the lineup is set. Optimally, you want the best expected outcomes to get the most plate appearances. In other words, Salvy should absolutely be in the top half of the order.

In conclusion: Salvy is hitting the ball about as well as he ever has in his career. His expected BA is .291, and his expected SLG is .517. Those are both elite numbers for his position. This strongly suggests that Salvy will see some significant positive regression this season.

Related: Isbel, Waters, and Garcia will likely regress. And trade for Soto in your fantasy leagues.

12 comments

  1. Unfortunately, we live in the real world and not a xwoba fantasy world.

  2. If Salvy’s jersey said Massey, Renfroe or Melendez we’d be running him out of town!

  3. he very often underperforms  his underline numbers this isn’t exactly new 

  5. I’ve been in his corner all year, and have been using the “unluckiest hitter in baseball” as a defense for him, but there comes a point when we have to face reality. Until his luck changes, he just doesn’t have a reason to be batting clean up.

  6. I also think everyone is forgetting a unwritten rule of baseball. Regardless of how Salvy Is Currently playing he has earned this spot over the years.

    Veteran Players in the MLB are given more leeway. It’s always been that way and always will be

  7. You have to face reality and give any player special and look at the stats for what they are, not the name associated with them

  8. Salvy is also probably the slowest player in baseball, that doesn’t help. He had one grounder yesterday that turned to a double play. I think anyone else on the team would have made it safely to first on that play.

  10. Here’s the problem with using these expected stats with Salvy: They assume that an average player would reach base on balls hit within certain parameters. But he is so slow that he’s getting out (or worse, GIDP) on balls that average players would reach base on. I’m not sure I buy the notion that he’ll eventually progress to the mean when the regression is due to something that is never going to get better. I love Salvy but Father Time is undefeated and Q is going to have to act accordingly by reducing his playing time and moving him down the order when he does play.

  11. Like other posters have implied, Salvy is turning into Billy Butler 2.0: a slow guy who hits hard ground balls. His average launch angle has dropped from 19° last season to 15.4°, contributing to him being one of 15 players with 8+ GIDP so far (Juan Soto has suffered a similar decline (-3.8°) and has surpassed (11) his GIDP total from last season (10)).

  12. I haven’t checked into this for the other players but I will also note that Salvy’s one of the players whose flyball % has gone down from 2024 to 2025 while this team is hitting more flyballs

    both Salvy and the team are hitting low percentages of flyballs for home runs though

Leave a Reply