The terrifying numbers behind Yordan Alvarez's historic 2026 season

Something is happening with Yordan Alvarez right under our noses. But unless we stop and look, we might forget to smell the roses.

Excuse the poetic introduction, or my flowery way of telling you that guys, holy moly, right now, Yordan Alvarez has the highest xwOBA ever. By ever, I mean in the Statcast era (since 2015), when we first started tracking this stuff. I find it hard to believe that Barry Bonds would not have had some ridiculous xwOBA record like he has every other hitting record, but we can't say for sure. So Alvarez is, for our purposes, the highest we’ve ever seen.

Yordan Alvarez is having one of the best hitting seasons ever

Because I use this stat a lot in my work, now would be a good time to fully explain it: xwOBA is a hitting performance indicator that is only about contact quality — it does not matter if the ball is caught in the infield, fouled off into the seats, hits the center fielder in the nose or lands on the freeway. xwOBA simply calculates the actual quality of the contact a hitter is creating between their launch angle and exit velocity, as well as sprint speed for certain events. It’s quite the predictive little number; if you sort all hitters since 2015 by xwOBA, it reads like a who’s who of the best seasons in the last decade: 2024 Aaron Judge, 2020 Juan Soto, 2023 Ronald Acuña, you get it. At the tippy top of all of them, though? None other than 2026 Yordan Alvarez.

Alvarez has always been among the best hitters on earth. His 2022 season saw him post an OPS over 1.000 and hit .306 with 37 home runs. Save for last year, when he was dogged by injuries, Alvarez has been money in the bank from the DH slot throughout his career.

But 2026 is something else. Something quite else. His xwOBA is up 24 points even from his bazooka 2022 campaign, itself the 10th-best mark in the Statcast era. He leads James Wood, second in xwOBA this season, by a preposterous 60 points; for reference, the difference between Alvarez and Wood is the same as the difference between Wood and No. 33 Jordan Walker. You have to click “next page” on FanGraphs to even see that.

Pitchers seem to have abandoned their 2024 approach — to poor results

So what the heck is going on here? Alvarez is obliterating baseballs to an extent we have literally never seen, even for generational hitters like him. And while it’s true that hitters sometimes just get better, I think I’ve found a likely explanation for this spike in contact quality and production. (In case you were worried that it was just speculative contact quality, Alvarez is slashing .322/.435/.634 and is on pace for 50 home runs.) Pitchers have to stop throwing down the middle.

While pitchers aren’t actually throwing Alvarez appreciably more strikes, for some inexplicable reason the strikes they are throwing are going right down the middle. You want charts, I got charts. First and foremost, behold the Yordan Alvarez heatmap of all pitches thrown to him in 2024, his last healthy season (courtesy of FanGraphs):

As you can see, in 2024 pitches tended to be low and inside on Alvarez, a left-handed hitter. That’s probably not a bad approach when you’re trying to limit the number of balls getting sent to Mercury. Seems like a good adjustment after his heatmap looked like this in 2022, the season he destroyed every ball thrown his way:

All reasonable stuff. But check this out: Apparently thinking they were in the clear since Alvarez hadn’t been healthy in a year, opposing pitchers have been throwing him this in 2026.

So yeah, wouldn’t necessarily recommend going middle-middle on Alvarez, who proved in 2022 he would send those pitches to the shadow realm. And that has borne out in his other Statcast metrics; the main difference between 2024 and 2026 is how much he’s sweet-spotting the ball, probably a function of getting a bunch of fastballs down the middle. And he’s cranking those pitches, producing 12 runs above average on four seamers. His leveraged run value for pitches down the middle is the highest it’s ever been, even higher than 2022. One more set of heatmaps for the road, this time Alvarez’s contact quality by plate location in 2024 and 2026. See if you can spot the difference. 

The thing about Alvarez that makes him impossible to deal with is that he’s among highest contact-rate power hitters in the history of baseball. Since we started tracking fancy things like zone-contact rate in 2002 (the percent of pitches in the strike zone that a hitter makes contact with), only a handful of hitters have hit 30+ home runs while achieving a 90+ percent zone-contact rate. Alvarez, meanwhile:

I’m taking some liberty there with just declaring that Alvarez, who has hit 25 home runs in exactly 81 games so far this season, will get to 50, but anywhere close to that gets him in 2009 Albert Pujols range or better, one of the best slugging seasons ever. With super high contact rates, we’re usually talking about the Steven Kwans of the world, not the Aaron Judges. Alvarez is getting the best of both worlds. 

You can't throw middle-middle against Alvarez

There are many more charts with which to prove this, but rather than inundate the rest of this piece with scatter plots I’ll just tell you that every power metric we have, when charted with zone-contact rate, produces “2026 Yordan Alvarez” as an outlier. Hitters simply do not create this kind of pop while also taking a high-contact approach.

There’s obviously no “solution” to Alvarez for pitchers; one does not put up a 1.069 OPS because pitchers don’t respect you. He also has tremendous plate discipline and walks at an excellent clip. But opponents have to stop throwing right down the pipe, since Alvarez is annihilating those ill-advised pitches on a level we have never seen before. So let’s maybe stop trying to sneak things by him. He’s not amused. 

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