Jake Meyers is making Astros fans eat their words with 2025 surge

Coming into the 2025 season, Houston Astros fans (and baseball fans in general) had a lot of reasons to doubt Jake Meyers' bat. During the previous three seasons, Meyers posted a .647 OPS and there was no real power to speak of. Though Meyers' glove was undeniably awesome, there were growing calls during the offseason for the Astros to find an outfielder who could actually hit and play above-average defense in center field. Well, Meyers is making his critics eat those words right now.

Meyers' hot-streak to being the season seemed like more of a novelty than a change that was actually going to stick. He had been good, but his track record overwhelmingly suggested that it wouldn't last and Meyers would eventually regress to being a glove-first outfielder who couldn't hit.

We are approaching the end of May and Meyers is still hitting. More than that, a look at the underlying reasons why Meyers is still hitting suggests that he may actually to be able to keep this up for the remainder of the season.

Astros outfielder Jake Meyers seems to have completely turned a corner at the plate

When a player like Meyers comes out of nowhere and outperforms his career norms, the first instinct is to look at his batting average on balls in play (BABIP) to see if he is just getting lucky when he does make contact. While his .357 BABIP is high, it doesn't rank in the top 15 in baseball, and given that he's relatively quick on the base paths, some good batted ball luck only accounts for a small portion of what Meyers is doing right now.

So what changed? The short answer is everything - but only incrementally. Trimming his strikeout rate to 16.5% versus the 22.8% mark he put up in 2024 and nearly 26% he had the year before has been a big help.

But it's more than that. Meyers is hitting the ball a bit harder, chasing pitches out of the zone a bit less, and is hitting more line drives. He is also pulling the ball less and instead working the ball up the middle more which is almost always going yield better results when you aren't a slugger.

Is Meyers going to maintain a 134 wRC+ — a full 25 points higher than he's ever posted — for the entire 2025 season? No, no he's not. It's just too much of an outlier to sustain. However, Meyers is clearly seeing the ball better and making much better swing decisions these days. If he can be a league-average to above-average hitter combined with his elite glove, a lot more people are going to come around to the idea that Houston needs to keep Meyers right where he is.

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