His “SMFB” bomb may have drawn eyeballs, but O’Hearn’s quality of contact is the bigger story.
Lately, if Ryan O’Hearn is making headlines for his “offense,” it’s more the offense caused by his expletive-laden outburst after hitting a three-run home run against the Yankees on Monday night (said clip was retweeted and watched by no fewer than 500,000 people before even the end of the game) than for his hot bat.
But really, we should be talking about O’Hearn’s hitting. Because this 1B/DH, owner of a .292 average, .920 OPS and five homers in 72 ABs, is, after Cedric Mullins, the Orioles’ most valuable position player right now and clocking in among baseball’s top 10% in quality of contact.
Recall that O’Hearn, a career .683 OPS hitter in five seasons with Kansas City, was found off the Royals’ scrap heap and signed by Baltimore as left-hitting infield depth in winter 2023. Called up in May 2023 with Ryan Mountcastle suffering spells of vertigo, he cemented himself as a dangerous middle-of-the-order bat with the best season of his career, hitting .289/.322/.480/.801 with 14 home runs and 60 RBI in 112 games and above-average 121 OPS+ of 121. O’Hearn also avoided the dreaded sophomore slump in 2024 with a .264/.334/.427/.761 line, plus a 122 OPS+. Though his power went down, his walks went up.
Flash forward to 2025, and O’Hearn is having not just a hot start, but his best career month at the dish period, with a career-high .401 WOBA, and red-hot Statcast rankings across lots of quality-of-contact categories.
For context, recall a story Jon Meoli ran in the Baltimore Banner last year on O’Hearn’s swing. One day in spring 2023, O’Hearn arrived at the ballpark and Orioles hitting coaches told him it was time for a change. “Why?” answered the first baseman with characteristic temper. “I’m hitting .260. I haven’t hit .260 in the big leagues in a long time. Why would we do anything to change it?”
The O’s hitting brain trust had anticipated—correctly—that, as O’Hearn found success at the plate, pitchers were going to attack him with more breaking balls. Using data and video breakdown, they showed the 1B that his horizontal bat position left him exposed to pitches lower in the zone. Over the course of 2023, O’Hearn complied with the assignment, changing his bat position to be more vertical while working on his lower body and posture to help him cover more of the plate.
Those changes helped save his career, and they’re still powering O’Hearn’s hitting. Here’s a 2018 O’Hearn, staring ineffectively at a called third strike. You can see the flatter bat position.
Here’s O’Hearn’s three-run bomb on Monday, coming off a sinker he times up beautifully. The bat is nearly vertical, and he uses his legs more.
This year, O’Hearn is hitting all pitch groups well, but especially breaking balls, the pitch that had almost killed his career. In April, he slugged .750 on them, his best of any pitch group.
What’s nice to see, too, is that this isn’t happening thanks to an inflated average. O’Hearn actually has had some bad batted-ball luck this season, with an ordinary .286 average on balls in play. But in terms of expected average, O’Hearn’s .318 mark is in the top 5% of hitters.
Not only that, O’Hearn is one of the hardest hitters in baseball. This is what helped him break out in 2023, when his 51.5% hard-hit rate and 91.9 mph exit velocity ranked in the Top 10% of hitters. After a slight dip in hard contact last season, O’Hearn is back, with a 52.5% hard-hit rate in the Top 10% and a 90.8 mph average exit velocity rate in the top third.
One more thing O’Hearn is doing well is not strike out often. This was a huge problem for him in his Kansas City years. As an unreliable power hitter, O’Hearn struck out 28% of his at-bats in 2021, for example. Over his last two seasons, O’Hearn has whiffed at career-low rates. His 13.4% K rate in April ranks in the Top 10% of hitters and would be a career high, albeit not totally unexpected, as he sustained a 14% rate over the whole 2024.
Basically, what we’re seeing from O’Hearn in 2025 is a combination of the power/better approach to breaking balls he busted out in 2023 plus the plate discipline he exhibited in 2024, when he walked at career-high rates and was one of MLB’s toughest hitters to strike out. Power, a high OBP, and a well-defined strike zone have helped to make O’Hearn a critical middle-of-the-order bat and the Orioles’ second-most valuable position player behind Cedric Mullins, despite his pedestrian defense.
On Monday night, the Yankees’ Will Warren had walked Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman to start the third inning before O’Hearn made him pay on a 2-2 hanger. As the ball sailed over the right-field scoreboard, the Baltimore dugout erupted in a way that it hadn’t in quite some time. The Orioles are going to need more of those life-giving blasts to salvage these season, and many more of them, hopefully, from Ryan O’Hearn.