Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- A high-profile Mets free agent is struggling to produce at the plate despite a smooth transition to a new position.
- Advanced metrics show the hitter is making contact too late and at awkward angles, turning potential line-to-line hits into routine outs.
- The issue appears fixable, as the player’s raw tools remain intact, suggesting a rebound is possible once his timing aligns.
If you asked fans at the time to imagine a world in which the New York Mets might come to regret handing Bo Bichette a three-year, $126 million contract, the answers would've focused entirely on his defense — that the move from shortstop to third base just wouldn't take, and the team would be forced to turn him into an overqualified DH. The idea that Bichette would hit was taken for granted; Bichette had always hit, one of the more consistent hitters in baseball from the moment he broke into the Majors back in 2019.
Until now, apparently. While Bichette's transition to the hot corner has gone surprisingly well, no one much cares, because the bat that earned him that nine-figure deal in the first place has all but disappeared. He's slashing a miserable .236/.273/.313 through his first 35 games, numbers that loom even larger as the Mets remain mired in the NL East basement. With Juan Soto and now Francisco Lindor battling injury, New York needed Bichette to be the top-of-the-order menace they thought they were buying. Instead, he's been a weight around this offense's neck.
Which begs the question: Why? How does such a reliable hitter go into the tank seemingly overnight? Did the Mets miss something in their offseason evaluation, or has he suddenly fallen off a cliff? As is always the case with these things, the answer is complicated. But a look under the hood reveals one pretty obvious culprit — and at least some reason to believe a turnaround is coming.
What's gone wrong for Bo Bichette — and why a rebound might be closer than you think
Bichette's profile has always been unique: He's one of the most aggressive hitters in baseball, but he's made it work his entire career because of his downright freaky ability to barrel a ball up no matter where it's pitched. That approach might limit his power upside — rather than trying to get a pitch he can pull in the air, he's simply trying to hit something hard somewhere, even if that means a ground ball the other way — but it also resulted in consistently high averages and lots of line drives into the gap.
On the surface, 2026 tells pretty much the same story. Bichette's expected batting average is .287, good for the 85th percentile of all qualified hitters. He's still swinging a lot and making contact a lot. And his average exit velocity and hard-hit rate are both right in line with his (very good) career norms; he clearly hasn't forgotten how to get the barrel to the ball. You might be tempted to look at his .281 batting average on balls in play so far — a number well below his career average of .336 (and last year's mark of .342) — and just chalk his slow start up to bad luck.
Unfortunately, it's not so simple. There's a chance Bichette might have taken his uber-aggressive approach a bit too far, even for him.
Bichette in 2026 | Bichette in 2025 | MLB average | |
|---|---|---|---|
Ground ball rate | 57.8% | 47.4% | 44.2% |
Pull air rate | 5.2% | 13.2% | 16.8% |
Chase rate | 40.7% | 35.2% | 28.5% |
Launch angle | 4.7 | 8.2 | 12.5 |
Even by his own extreme standards, Bichette is leaning way into a contact-over-everything approach so far this year. He's chasing and hitting ground balls more than he ever has, and he's pulling the ball in the air less frequently than he ever has. Even for a hitter like Bichette, who lives on hitting balls where they're pitched and spraying to all fields, it's tough to make a consistent living like that. It leaves you vulnerable to batted-ball luck, to grounders finding gloves instead of grass.
The good news is that it doesn't seem like this is actually a skill issue. On the contrary, Bichette's bat speed and exit velos suggest that he's physically the same guy who lit up the league to the tune of an .840 OPS last season — you know, the guy Mets fans thought they were getting atop their lineup. Instead, Bichette's problem might be one of timing.
Attack angle | Attack direction | Ideal attack angle rate | |
|---|---|---|---|
2026 | 1 degree | 5 degrees opposite field | 25% |
2025 | 4 degrees | 1 degree opposite field | 31.9% |
Thanks to Statcast's new bat tracking technology, we can measure exactly where in a batter's swing they're making contact — and which direction their bat is facing when they do. And almost literally no hitter has been as behind in both areas as Bichette has this season: He ranks second to last in attack angle and dead last in ideal attack angle rate. What does that mean in English? Bichette's bat is catching the ball later, and at a more downward angle, than almost literally any other hitter in the Majors.
It doesn't matter how solid your contact is if said contact is so consistently suboptimal, beating the ball into the ground to the opposite field. Bichette will never rank highly in either stat — again, he's not trying to lift the ball in the air to the pull side — but his numbers are noticeably off where they were last season. That's the difference between hitting a line drive into the alley or hitting a grounder to second base.
The good news here, though, is that timing can be fixed. It's not like Bichette no longer has some of the quickest hands in the game, or that he's forgotten how to hit. He's just a little bit off right now, and when your profile is as much an outlier as his is, there's less margin for error. But there's no reason to think he won't get his timing synced up eventually, and when he does, he'll look a lot like the guy we're used to seeing.
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