Kyle Manzardo, the struggling Cleveland Guardians slugger who has failed to replicate last year’s numbers to this point, could really increase the lineup’s ceiling if he starts hitting.
As of Monday afternoon, Manzardo is slashing a disappointing .116/.224/.186 in the young season, with a home run, two RBI, and a 28 wRC+, or 72 percent worse than the league average hitter.
Manzardo has been, statistically, one of the worst first basemen in baseball. Things, however, could start changing in the not-so-distant future.
Besides a couple of details, his Statcast profile has been strikingly similar to last year, when he hit 27 long balls and had a 113 wRC+. There is one change he needs to work on, though.
“The differential between [Kyle] Manzardo’s surface and expected numbers points to the quality of contact he has been making, but not always getting rewarded for. Entering Saturday, he ranked in the 90th percentile in average exit velocity (93.1 mph). One key could be Manzardo hitting the ball in the air more frequently. Entering Saturday, his ground-ball rate was 47.8 percent (up from 30.3 percent in 2025). His fly-ball rate was 21.7 percent (down from 35.3), and his line-drive rate was 21.7 percent (down from 24.4),” Stebbins wrote.
Hitting the ball in the ground so often is not exactly a recipe for success, no matter how hard you do it. Unless you are Chandler Simpson, you won’t regularly beat an infielder’s throw to first. And, in the specific case of Manzardo, he is one of the slowest players in the league, ranking in the fifth percentile in sprint speed.
He needs to recover the loft on his swing, and when that happens, we will all see the true Manzardo, the one who took the league by storm last year and became a middle-of-the-order star in Cleveland. This weekend, we saw a glimpse of what he can do.
Line drives and fly balls are the ideal type of contact for a slugger with raw power like Manzardo. His slow start might be a timing issue or a small mechanical flaw he needs to fix, but he is very much capable of doing so.
If he does, watch out. The Guardians need him healthy and locked in if they are going to make a deep postseason run again this year. He needs to be able to drive in Steven Kwan, Chase DeLauter, and Jose Ramirez when they get on base.
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