Keibert Ruiz is one the absolute best players in baseball at putting bat on ball - he’s in the 96th percentile for avoiding whiffs, and the 97th percentile at avoiding strikeouts. He’s also one of the least productive hitters in the game, with a Batting Run Value in the 7th percentile. What on earth is going on?
The Data
A quick note before we survey the data - I made all of the charts below using MLB’s awesome Statcast data, which continues to expand and now has incredibly rich data on batters’ swings, hit quality, and more. Here’s a Custom Leaderboard that I used to feed the many analyses below, and here is Keibert Ruiz’s individual Statcast page for reference.
The Findings
Ruiz Swings Slowly, Which Results in Slow Hits
Immediately we see why Ruiz has such good whiff and strikeout avoidance - he swings really slowly!! In the same vein as a pure contact hitter like Luis Arraez, Ruiz seems to have made a conscious decision to optimize for bathead control at the expense of swing speed, which brings control but significantly limits the exit velocity he is able to generate.
The point about exit velocity is crucial, because research has shown how strongly linked it is to good outcomes. MLB has a great chart which illustrates this point on their hard-hit rate explainer page:
The Quality of Balls in Play is Poor
While Keibert seems to have made a conscious decision to favor contact over power, it’s not like he’s spraying line drives over the yard either. A breakdown of the kind of balls he is putting in play shows that tends to favor pulled ground balls, which is probably the least productive type of batted ball, besides pop-outs.
There are some more complicated definitions of hit quality in Baseball Savant and Statcast as well - these echo our earlier conclusion that the quality of contact that Keibert is producing is low.
Ruiz Has Regressed Since His Promising 2023 Season
In 2023, Ruiz had a.717 OPS and hit 18 HR - really promising stuff from your franchise catcher. In 2024 that regressed to a .619 OPS with 13 HR, and in 2025 he’s slid even further to a .588 OPS and 2 HR (pacing for 5ish).
Tracing his batter ball quality over time seems to provide some indications of why: it looks like he tried to lift the ball more in 2024, which was not successful and primarily resulted in a surge of popups. To ameliorate that, Ruiz lowered his launch angle for 2025 and has been hitting a ton of balls on the ground.
Chasing Out of the Zone
All of Keibert’s batted ball issues are compounded by his approach at the plate. He tends to chase pitches out of the zone, and since he is so good at making contact, he is often able to put those balls into play… but we know those hits are unlikely to do damage. Furthermore, his desire to hit and not draw walks means that he is ignoring a very stable source of offense production and also not forcing opposing pitchers to work hard to get an out.
In Summary
As an armchair analyst, the fixes for Ruiz’s approach seem clear:
- Chase Less: this prevents bad contact and can augment his production with a meaningful number of walks, which are valuable. As a catcher, there is no excuse for Ruiz swinging at so many pitches clearly out of the strike zone
- Swing Harder: improving exit velocity by a few points will make a big difference and is worth the decrease in contact rate; since this is Ruiz’s special, his strikeout rate may not even decline that much
- Raise the Launch Angle: the most cost-effective improvement Ruiz can make in changing the kind of contact he is making is to hit fewer ground balls. I recognize Ruiz is no Kyle Schwarber and has no desire to swing like Schwarber, which is fine - but clearly, he would have a much better OPS if he hit more fly balls and fewer grounders to second base
I sincerely hope the Nationals’ coaching staff is having this conversation with Keibert every day, and that he will eventually figure it out, as he seems like a great teammate and competitor. Unfortunately, it’s getting more and more difficult to imagine him being able to change his ways - for his sake, and the Nats’ sake, I hope he can.