Collette Calls: Doubling Down

All stats referenced are through games played on Sunday, May 18th

If you watch baseball long enough, you will see something you have never seen before. We have seen the Arizona Diamondbacks now lose three games in which they have scored at least 11 runs. We have seen Tanner Houck twice give up 11 earned runs in a start in which he faced 20 batters and pitched exactly 2.1 innings, becoming the only pitcher to repeat such a performance. However, the oddity I want to focus on this week is three particular players: Trent Grisham, Wilmer Flores and Logan O'Hoppe. Those three players have surprised most with a combined 32 homers, and surprised even more of us with their combined five doubles on the season. 

We have rarely seen players with that type of ratio over a full season of play. In fact, a StatHead search shows that those three are just three of 15 players who have hit at least five times as many home runs as doubles in a season: 

There are some very familiar names on that list, but note how only one of those players has as many as 100 games played in the season of this crazy accomplishment: Albert Pujols. The main driver behind Pujols' unusual season was that he moved slower than a car on the DC Beltway during rush hour traffic, and the same statement applies to Mark McGwire in 2001. However, there are some athletic types too. The most entertaining of them all may be Ryan Schimpf, whose 14 homers were more than half of his 26 hits that season as he was dropped from the San Diego roster a few days after his 14th homer because his .158/.284/.424 line wasn't something that could stay on a major-league roster. 

The larger point here is this type of imbalance in homers and doubles is so rarely done that we should look at the rest of the season for the trio of Grisham, Flores and O'Hoppe with a severely raised eyebrow. You could challenge friends with a friendly bet saying that none of these three guys will hit 20 homers by season's end, since that has been done just twice in recent history, with the third instance coming 68 years ago. 

BaseballSavant has a section of player profile page for Expected Home Runs so we can see that section broken down for each player. The table below shows how the data breaks down for each player:

It probably goes without saying, but the player with the best chance to get to 20 homers this season is not only the one with a head start, but the one with the best home park situation. Grisham has hit eight of his 12 homers off fastballs this eason, matching his homer total off fastballs for the entirety of 2024. Grisham has hit eight or more homers off fastballs in each of the past four seasons, but his overall numbers against fastballs the previous three seasons look nothing like they do this year:

What we are seeing is a much improved swing and miss rate on fastballs as well as how hard Grisham is hitting these fastballs. Chris Young and Mark DeRosa had a lengthy conversation on MLB Network last week that is well worth the time to watch:

A further look under the hood reveals that Grisham remains the same disciplined hitter he's always been, as his chase rate has been in the top 10th percentile over the past four seasons and is in the top first percentile this season. He has also turned what was a below-average whiff rate into one in the top 20th percentile this season. It's clear this isn't the same Grisham this year, and the league has not yet adjusted to this new version of him. The projection systems have Grisham hitting anywhere from 12 homers (OOPSY, RotoWire) to 17 (THE BAT X) the rest of the season, which would still be amazing considering his 12 homers in 139 plate appearances so far this season. It is clear if any one of these three hitters is to reach 20 homers by season's end, Grisham has the best chance, because he has made some systemic changes to his approach and swing that put him in the best situation to succeed. Not bad for a throw-in as part of the Juan Soto trade with the Padres. 

O'Hoppe has taken a different approach to his statistical improvement. The catcher is coming off a 20-homer campaign last season, but wasn't satisfied with that, so he's already halfway there through just one quarter of the 2025 season with a new aggressive approach, selling out for power at the cost of more strikeouts. It's not as if O'Hoppe was ever a disciplined contact hitter at the major-league level, but his walk rate and strikeout rate have now worsened in each of the past three seasons. He's not expanding his zone, but his contact within the zone has declined from 82.7 percent to 80.7 to 76.9 this season as he continues to hunt fastballs. O'Hoppe has hit .357 with seven homers off fastballs this season while hitting .159 with three homers off non-fastballs. 

If anything, O'Hoppe is tapping back into some things from his rookie season in 2023, as he's attempting to elevate the ball this season as he did in that one. His home run to flyball ratio was at 21.5 percent that season with a 0.78 GB/FB, while O'Hoppe is at 24.4 percent this season with a 0.80 GB/FB ratio. The difference between O'Hoppe and Grisham is the projection systems appear to be buying what O'Hoppe is selling, because his rest-of-season projections range from 16 on the low end (Steamer, OOPSY) to a cool 20 more from our own projections here. Fantasy managers drafted O'Hoppe for his power upside and were quite comfortable with his batting average risk, and nothing we have seen to date should change anyone's mind on that. It appears that O'Hoppe is going to exceed his preseason expectations, making it easy for fantasy managers to ride this journey out to its conclusion.

Flores is arguably the most improbable of the three hot starts, because he is in the toughest park of them all. He has hit 20-plus homers as recently as 2023, but that was the only time in his long career in which he's done so. Flores currently leads the league in RBI with 42, but his journey to 10 homers has been unique. His first three homers came on opening weekend, and he was at six homers by the conclusion of the second week of the season. He then went on a nine-game dry spell and then went on another 20-game dry spell before his three-homer game this past Friday. Flores has evenly split his homers between home and road, but his overall numbers have been anything but evenly split. Flores has crushed the ball to the tune of a .349/.407/.554 line at Oracle Park while hitting .167/.239/.345 anywhere else in the league. 

Flores's 17.2 percent HR/FB rate is his best since the 2020 season, but well above his 11.0 percent career rate. Flores has not increased his percentage of flyballs or of pulled flyballs. Despite that lack of change, Flores is striking out more frequently this season than last season as he looks to build his resume in the final year of his three-year contract. The home run improbabilty is doubled by Flores being on pace to drive in over 100 runs. The league has driven in 14.1 percent of its baserunners in 2025, but Flores is fourth in baseball for all players with at least 100 plate appearances, having driven in 24.6 percent of his baserunners. That trails only Jorge Polanco (29.0 percent), Teoscar Hernandez (28.0 percent) and Freddie Freeman (24.8 percent). Those three players are in more robust lineups than the one Flores is in, so the issue should be raised that Flores not only has an uphill climb to reach 20 homers this season, but also to best his career-high 72 RBI total from 2022. Needless to say, the time to market Flores's overall numbers is now, because his curriculum vitae is the weakest of the three players discussed here for future success.