Fixing Kyle Manzardo | Covering the Corner

Guardians fans everywhere are frustated with Kyle Manzardo. Is there hope for things to change for the struggling Guardians’ first baseman?

After posting a 113 wRC+ and hitting 27 home runs in 2025, expectations for Kyle Manzardo were understandably high coming into 2026. So far, Manzo has come up short of those expectations, and he’s having a fairly disappointing season with a 90 wRC+ and 11 homers. Today, we’re asking the question: has Kyle Manzardo been figured out by the league, or is this just a young player going through the ups and downs that come with establishing himself at the MLB level?

I think this season is a little more complex than just “he’s been bad.” It’s been a hot and cold season for Manzardo thus far.

We can see here that after a very slow start, he had a blazing 6-7 week long stretch before cooling off again. So what’s changed?

We can see from this data that his approach data is generally stable or improving. Chase% spiked a bit during his hot streak, but Whiff% and K% are both moving down, which is good. BB% is up as well, with the most recent two sets of data both being above league average. Even with his slow start, the BB% was basically league average (8.9% in 2026). This is all a good sign. Nothing is skyrocketing or plummeting in any alarming way. So if his approach is still intact, the next question becomes whether he is doing enough damage when he makes contact.

One of the first things that stands out is the average exit velocity is pretty stable across the board. The first bucket of games is a bit lower, but not by a significant amount. The outlier here is how the Hard-Hit% and Barrel% have fluctuated so much with relatively stable exit velocity. We can also see his SqUpCon%* is going up, which is generally a good thing. The last number is his LASS%**, and we can see that it has swung pretty wildly as well. Getting fewer balls in the optimal 8-32 launch angle is consistent with a drop in Barrel%. So here it looks like we may have a piece of the puzzle, but launch angles have nothing to do with exit velocity. If we really dig into the weeds and look at the distribution of exit velocities in the three different stretches, we can see that he’s actually getting a lot more contact in the 90-94.9 mph range in the first and third bucket of games. He’s gone from 19.6% to 12.2% and then back up to 19.6%. Hard-Hit% measures the percentage of balls that have an exit velocity over 95 mph, and he is just missing that window a bit more now than he was during the hot streak. All these things combine to paint a picture of a hitter that’s just lost a touch of their precision. At the MLB level, the difference between driving the ball in the gap for extra bases and hitting a routine flyout can come down to a few millimeters of contact point on the bat and a few milliseconds of timing. Being just a tiny bit off can change everything.

Where does this leave us? Overall, the evidence doesn’t really point to a hitter that’s lost his ability to do damage to a pitch in the box. It’s more consistent with a hitter that’s just off in their precision, enough to drastically alter outcomes. It also doesn’t help that in this most recent stretch, he’s running a wOBA and xwOBA difference of -.076. While an xwOBA of .276 is still far below what you’d expect, at least some portion of these poor results can be attributed to luck. All those things considered, while there’s no guarantee he will snap back into form tomorrow, there’s also no reason to think any of this isn’t fixable. He just needs to get locked back in and find that tiny extra bit of precision in his swing that he had a solid grip on just a few short weeks ago.

*SqUpCon% (Squared Up Contact %) – How much exit velocity did you get as a share of how much exit velocity was possible, based on the swing speed and the speed of the pitch when the player made contact.

**LASS% (Launch Angle Sweet Spot %) – Percentage of batted balls with a launch angle between 8 and 32 degrees (These numbers are based on the range where most damaging contact resides)