Joey Gallo, Texas Rangers
The first four players highlighted here landed in the first four spots of the hard-hit rate leaderboards at the time of this writing. Gallo finds himself a little lower, but still among the top 15 with a 58.3% hard-hit rate.
His current hard-hit rate isn’t outrageous — he posted rates of 46.4% and 48.5% in 2017 and 2018. What does jump out, though, is his ground-ball rate. That number was sitting at 50.0% heading into Wednesday’s games, along with having a 33.3% fly-ball rate.
Based on Gallo’s recent performances, those numbers are the complete opposite of what they normally have been by the time Game 162 is in the books. For someone as dependent on fly balls as him, it’s not shocking to see he’s only collected two extra-base hits (one double, one homer) after about one week of play.
The strikeouts will likely start coming in bunches, but so will the homers. After all, this is a guy who’s racked up consecutive campaigns of 40-plus homers entering this year.
About Matt Musico
Matt Musico currently manages Chin Music Baseball and contributes to The Sports Daily. His past work has been featured at numberFire, Yahoo! Sports and Bleacher Report. He’s also written a book and created an online class about how to get started as a sports blogger. You can sign up for his email newsletter here.
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