We thought we knew what Michael Garcia expected. The Royals’ third baseman entered his third full season with his career WRC+ of 77, but due to his 17 OAA, he held the 3.4 War. This adds up like a story as old as time — or at least as old as Ke’Bryan Hayes, a kind, concentrating third baseman every day. This season, Garcia is blowing up this narrative.
Garcia became a shortstop, but Bobby Witt Jr. will lock in that position for the next decade or two, and he will soon be one of the best defensive third basemen in the game. As for the bat, well, he didn’t chase, he made a lot of contact and he hit the ball hard. He just couldn’t play it. A total of 303 batsmen have seen at least 1,000 sets between 2021 and 2024. Garcia’s 45.7% hard hit rate 60th among them, but his average starting angle is 6.2 degrees, ranking 285th. As a result, he ranked 293rd in the .344 percentage of playing. The package worked, especially after Garcia became one of the best basemen in the game in 2024, but it was hard to watch him without fixing a big thing he couldn’t seem to do.
Hayes is three years older than Garcia, but after spending a lot of time waiting for him to start lifting the ball, it may also be easy to tell Garcia’s offensive potential. High ground balls are not his only flaw. Not only does Garcia have a very low pursuit rate. He is one of the most passive players of any baseball. There was little fear of swinging, let alone somehow turning the ground ball into a home run, the pitcher would definitely hit the area, kicking out a name called strike, and preventing Garcia from turning all patience into a walk. Then it happened in 2025.
This season, Garcia lowered the ground ball rate by more than 5, from 49.5% to 44.3%. It was a huge drop, but because of his starting point so high, it still makes him a top three in the league. His barrel rate is still only in the 24th percentage point, but that’s enough. He had a career-high 12 home runs and increased his batting average to .468. He is one of nine qualified players with an average score of .300, while his 126 WRC+ is 56 points better than last season. Because he still didn’t chase, the pitcher made a more difficult decision. Garcia actually has even fewer swings this season – his 57.6% regional swing is ranked 145th out of 156 qualified bats – but suddenly, if you throw him on strike, he has the ability to make you regret it. So far, the pitcher has been picking the door A and hitting the strike zone. In fact, Garcia’s 52.1% regional rate is almost exactly the same as in the past two seasons, and his career-best walking and strikeout rate. If he continues to open this way, you have to imagine that the pitcher will eventually show him some respect.
In addition to reaching the minimum acceptable launch angle, Garcia also adds some real power. His 90-level exit speed was 105.5 mph, 104.6 and 104 in two seasons. His average bat speed rose from 70.8 mph in 2024 to 71.9 mph in 2025. This is usually not how things work. It is great to chase less, but a more passive approach often results in a more passive (read: weaker) swing. Often, hitting a ball in the air often means a steeper swing, resulting in a higher tide rate. So far, Garcia has avoided both pitfalls.
This is Garcia’s rolling ground ball rate throughout her career. Note that the dotted blue line is his career average, but as he has dropped a lot this season, I added a bright red line that shows his average level coming into the season.
It’s not only his ground ball speed that has been greatly reduced. Even during his time on the ground, he only hit the average of the previous ones. He has never surpassed it, and now he has played 125 games and 518 sets in the season. That’s a big sample. Of course, it looks like a brand new Garcia. His average launch angle increases across all three pitch types. In fact, there are quite a few individual courses of almost every kind, with substitutions and sliders exceptions.
Interestingly, Garcia’s swing doesn’t seem to be steeper. Statcast’s bat tracking metrics show that it is actually flatter than a degree in 2024. This makes us intentional. Garcia tends to play all year round and returns to his native Venezuela to compete in winter ball. However, due to the surgery, he had to take a break during the offseason to remove the bone Spurs from his right elbow. He recovered, spent more time in the weight room, and then remodeled the swing. Obviously, we shouldn’t trust every player who does spring training at his best in his life and with the new timing mechanism, but the extra bat speed will certainly make it easy to believe that Garcia either adds muscle or feels better after taking care of the elbow. As for his swing, MLB.com’s Anne Rogers got some great details in the February tweak:
The goal of the offseason is to figure out how to make a better connection.
“It’s more about controlling my body,” Garcia said. “Don’t go too far to get on the ball. Wait for the ball. That’s the adjustment I’m trying to make.”
Garcia added a small toe faucet this spring, which he has done before and thinks how many balls he fouled last year or how many balls he had to the right will help him with the timing. But his first priority is to focus his weight on his stance rather than dropping forward or hitting coach Alec Zumwalt likes to call it a “crash”. Ultimately, it hinders the batsman’s swing decision, among other things.
“For us, the crash is when you’re underfoot and everything is behind and you can’t stop,” Zumwalter said. “So you’re basically in ‘go’ mode, which is really hard to adjust. If you guessed it right, it looks good. Guessed wrongly, missed it. With Maikel, giving him so much blow ability is that he’s swinging so flat in the area, so he can shoot the ball late and then in turn.
“But we’ve talked about getting rid of the collapse. He has it. He feels he’s too heavy on his front foot and knows he needs to be more adjustable.
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“There are a lot of benefits out there,” said manager Matt Quatraro. “Stay on the fastball, I think it’s big for him.
Garcia does have less polluting courts and although they are still a weakness, he is much better with fastballs. But if you compare the 2024 and 2025 videos, you’ll find that despite his slightly open batting posture and he kicked that new toe tap from his leg, his actual swing doesn’t seem to be much different. His feet are spread far away, which is not necessarily what the people you desperately want to stay. But, as the quote above shows, avoiding a crash is not about encountering the ball more deeply, but rather finding a way to be on time and having a good swing on the ball. Garcia actually intercepted the ball in front.
We have no way of knowing the toe faucet and the emphasis on retreat are the reasons, but Garcia’s timing is indeed better. It’s a way to build more contact while also having to swing harder, but Garcia will work harder no matter how you cut the data. The pulling force encountered on the front ball increased his pull rate, which likely led to some of his launch angles growing – there was no obvious topic in all of Rogers Rogers’ quotes. The royals either don’t worry about that part of the puzzle, or they think they might take care of themselves if everything else could be planned.
We finally asked the million-dollar question: Can Garcia’s new discovery improve the sustainability of the ball? To answer this we need to look at how he works. With Garcia lifting the ball more than ever, you wish he would swing on a higher court, right? Wrong.
This is a little strange. Garcia always likes the ball and comes in, but he puts some eyes down and even focuses more on the inside. Usually, you won’t expect players to increase the ball by swinging on a lower court. This makes the next set of heat maps even stranger. This is Garcia’s contact rate. (I’ve removed the edges of the heat map – outside the route – because they distract, and he never waved them.)
Everything is red because Garcia is good at touching wherever he swings, but there are obvious changes here, which is contrary to the transfer of the heat map above. Even though Garcia swings inside and down more courts, he has less contact rates there, and more contacts on the plate. The lack of more low profile and the internal court may help him hit less ground balls. Because Garcia is very picky and because of his contacts, these transitions look more subtle than the hot map, but it’s strange to see him swing better in areas with fewer swings. OK, this is our last set of heat maps. I promise. This is Garcia’s launch angle.
We don’t need to hang up the details here. The point is that Garcia lifted the ball more frequently in almost every part of the strike zone. The exit speed heat map shows the same thing. When you combine all these different factors, you will find that Garcia hasn’t found a weird trick yet. He didn’t do one thing, and the pitcher could easily fight back. These numbers do not indicate a specific reason why he wielded or lifted the ball harder. He is just doing this. His average bat speed is higher in every type of pitch.
He is better at catching fastballs, which makes him more susceptible to speed, but it’s not a bad trade-off for a player who sees a lot of fastballs in the area and lays the courts underneath. It sounds a bit familiar, too. When Eric Longenhagen appointed Garcia as the most important prospect in the Royals in 2023, he wrote: “Garcia’s buildings provide him with excellent long-term athletic projection, and he may become even deeper into his 20s, which may allow him to be more competent, which may make his fastball forward tend to foul rather than foul rather than barrels.” This is starting to seem prescient. None of this means that Garcia will certainly stay that way forever, but it is very encouraging. It might be time for the pitcher to find a new way to attack him, but I’m not sure how they will do it. Despite the changes in the results, his swing and method were not that different. They are just working.
