Rhys Hoskins Is Becoming The Slugger He Was Always Meant To Be

I remember what I was doing when I heard that the Brewers signed Rhys Hoskins to a two-year, $34 million deal. I was ordering a slice of pizza while on my way to play catch with a buddy at a local park. I had been bearish on the prospect of the Brewers spending big money (at least to them) on a slugger, but they proved me wrong, and I was so shocked I almost forgot to ask for extra pineapple on my pizza.

By now, the hype behind the signing has long since died down. Hoskins had the worst season of his career in nearly every category and managed an OPS+ of just 98, far below the expectations he had come in with. To his credit, he had just spent all of 2023 recovering from a torn ACL, and perhaps he needed more time to get back to playing baseball at a high level. Regardless of the cause, many were disappointed and felt that the team’s depth at first base was still a glaring weakness. If you want a deeper dive into what made his year so rough, check out Jack Stern’s analysis.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The most recent baseball we’ve seen from Rhys Hoskins has been in spring training, and boy, does it look and sound different. Over the 25 plate appearances he has had so far, he’s slashing .350/.480/1.100 for a wRC+ of 269. Five of his seven hits have been home runs, and these aren’t short porch shots to right field at Fenway Park. These are blasts, rockets, moonshots, missiles, whatever you call them.

Even the sound of these shots is pleasing to the ears and satisfying to the senses.

Yes, it’s spring training which means that it’s a small sample size where the level of competition isn’t quite the same as the regular season. It would be foolish to extrapolate an entire season’s worth of production based on this data but it should, at the very least, be an encouraging sign that he’s back to the Hoskins of old. Furthermore, the two home runs above were against Justin Steele and Tyler Anderson, not exactly your average Single-A prospects just trying to get some work in before returning to the minor league grind.

With an optimized Hoskins, the lost power from letting Willy Adames walk in free agency might not sting as much. There isn’t much room for him to hit more home runs than he did last year (26) as that’s typically about where he’s been throughout his career. However, he only put together 14 doubles, significantly lower than the ~30 he’s usually good for. 

All of this is quite a big “if.” There’s still time for his numbers to regress and even if they don’t, an 162-game season is a totally different environment than a short set of exhibition games. For reference, he also had a respectable .810 OPS during last year’s spring training with four homers and a double. Nonetheless, it’s seeming more and more like some rest and time in the lab was exactly what he needed to be the first baseman the team was promised a year ago.