Fresh off a two-home-run game, the former No. 1 overall pick is showing the signs of a true breakout season.
Finding something to be happy about amidst a 13-20 start to the season isn’t easy. The Orioles’ pitching ranks last or next to last in every major category. The team’s struggles against left-handed pitching are dragging the O’s offense south of mediocrity and closer and closer to overall ineptitude. And yet, on Sunday, Jackson Holliday reminded Birdland that you can still find positives among Baltimore’s putrid performances.
Even in a loss to the Royals, Holliday had somewhat of a coming-out party. The former No. 1 overall pick collected the first two-homer game of his major league career while going 3-4 and providing the fans with a bright spot against the backdrop of another dreary loss.
After a rookie season where he failed to hit above the Mendoza Line and struck out 36% of the time, Holliday had plenty to prove coming into the 2025 season. To start the year, it looked like more of the same from the 21-year-old. Through the O’s first 15 games of the season, Holliday was hitting .213 with a .570 OPS and 12 Ks.
However, what we’ve seen out of Holliday in his limited time is a willingness to learn and adjust. Perhaps it’s the “son of an MLB All-Star” in him, or just part of the player profile that led him to be drafted first overall in the first place. Either way, Holliday certainly doesn’t show anything Chris Davis-esque in approaching his struggles.
We first saw his ability to make adjustments last season when he ditched the leg-kick he featured through the minors in favor of a toe tap. In his first game putting the toe-tap into action, Holliday went 3-4 with a double.
Recently, MASN’s broadcast revealed that Matt Holliday spoke to his son about flattening out his swing. Once again, Jackson took no time implementing the adjustment and it’s contributed to a recent offensive tear. Over his last ten games, the younger Holliday is hitting .410 with a 1.114 OPS and only six Ks in 27 ABs (22.2% K%). The two-homer game was icing on top of a cake that Jackson has been putting together for a while.
Perhaps, given the overwhelming amount of talent, this sharp upward tick in his performance was inevitable. We saw the same adjustment period from Gunnar Henderson, who hit .224 over his first 75 games in the majors before turning into the .275 average, .850+ OPS, All-Star-level player we’ve come to know. The recent hot streak from Holliday could be him making his star turn after a 70+ game adjustment period.
The analytic numbers also speak to a maturing hitter who’s starting to figure out major league pitching. Even amidst his struggles as a rookie, Holliday showed an aptitude for not chasing balls outside the zone. His chase rate has dropped from a good 27.2% last year to a great 20.5% this season.
The difference with the 2025 version of Jackson Holliday is that he’s making much more contact when he does choose to swing. 2024 Holliday had a whiff rate of 34.1% and a Squared-Up% of 24.2%. So even though he wasn’t chasing bad pitches, he wasn’t exactly putting good wood on the good pitches.
2025 Holliday is a different story. His whiff rate has dropped down to 22.7% while his Squared-Up% has jumped all the way up to 29%. His contact on pitches in the zone is also up nine percent. After spending a lot of time as a rookie flailing at pitches in the zone, Holliday is now commanding the zone and the results are reflecting it.
Holliday is also becoming a true all-fields hitter. As you’d expect from a 20-year-old rookie, he was very pull-heavy in 2024, with 38.5% of his batted balls going to the pull side and only 25.4% to the opposite field. This year, he’s dropped his pull rate to 34% while going the other way on almost 29% of his batted balls. He is showing power to all fields as well, with two HRs down the line in right and two homers to left-center.
The ascension of Jackson Holliday can not only help distract Birdland from the woes that come with being baseball’s fourth-worst team, but it also lays the foundation for changes in this lineup that will happen sooner rather than later. Of the three prospects drafted by Mike Elias who ended up being the No.1 prospect in baseball (Holliday, Henderson and Adley Rutschman), Holliday showcased the best hit tool and most speed in his rise through the minors. It’s easy to imagine that Elias, when drafting Holliday, envisioned a lineup where one day he’d be hitting leadoff to set the table for Rutschman and Henderson.
The uncomfortable truth regarding Cedric Mullins, who once again finds himself as the Orioles’ leadoff hitter, is that this organization’s history suggests they won’t pay top dollar to keep his services beyond this season. And if the Orioles keep playing last-place baseball, they’re all but guaranteed to move Mullins in advance of this year’s trade deadline.
Holliday taking the next step would mean a ready-made replacement for Mullins’ role atop the lineup is already in-house. Given the way Elias runs this team, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he’d love to get to a point where the Orioles’ best lineup is made up of all players he acquired. Jackson Holliday making the same jump we saw from Jordan Westburg last year, or perhaps even a bigger jump, helps bring that dream closer to reality.
This being baseball, all the normal caveats of “small sample sizes” and “not getting too far ahead of ourselves” still apply here. After all, we saw Colton Cowser hit .303 with a 1.003 OPS over the first month of last season before the league figured out he couldn’t hit a changeup. As the rest of the league gets more tape on this improved Holliday, they’ll make adjustments. And yet, Jackson is showing us that perhaps he just continued to out-adjust the competition.