What's behind Goldschmidt's unexpected rebound season?

By Mike Petriello | June 25, 2026

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Paul Goldschmidt is a potential future Hall of Famer, and he’s having a fantastic season for the Yankees. Nothing unusual about that, except that he spent the final four months of last season – at age 38, no less – looking like the end of the road had come.

Take it a step further: his 2026 rebound has come with the exact opposite of what you’d expect under the hood: He’s swinging slower, hitting the ball more softly, and chasing and whiffing more.

Those aren’t usually indicators of great performance, yet the performance has come. It’s confusing, to say the least. It demands investigation. It’s not just Goldschmidt’s stature as a seven-time All-Star and 2022 National League MVP; it’s that only three batters have more homers than his eight since Aaron Judge went down with a rib injury at the end of May. If hardly the only reason New York has stayed afloat without its three-time MVP, it’s certainly an unexpectedly important one.

How, then, did this happen? How did a player hit .226/.277/.333 over the final four months of 2025, largely cede first base time at Ben Rice and then languish on the free-agent market until February ... and then do this in in 2026?

Best OPS+ in 2026 (min. 200 PA, entering Thursday)

After two home runs against Tigers ace Tarik Skubal on Wednesday, Goldschmidt has raised his OPS nearly 200 points from last year. Only four hitters have done better, and two of them (Jordan Walker, Jac Caglianone) are breakout stars finding their footing after rough introductions to the bigs. They’re each at least 15 years younger.

That is, in all likelihood, a list of “eight All-Stars, one more who would be if he wasn’t injured, and also Paul Goldschmidt.” Were he to keep this up, it would be the best hitting season by a player 38 or older who wasn’t a full-time DH since the end of Barry Bonds’ career two decades ago.

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That’s probably not going to happen, for a number of reasons. But it’s happening right now, anyway. Whenever you see a hitter increasing his production by this much, you’re usually expecting to see one or more of the following factors.

It’s not any of those things, and it almost always is. Why, for example, is Pete Crow-Armstrong crushing the ball? He’s chasing less and swinging harder. Why is JJ Bleday having a breakout season for the Reds? Almost no one has added more hard-hit rate. Why is James Wood having an even better year than he did in 2025? He’s cut his ground ball rate massively.

We wouldn’t, obviously, have taken you this far down the road if we didn’t have something we could point to. We might start with the fact that he’s simply standing in a different spot in the batter’s box, though this is more of a “that’s different” than “that’s obviously good or bad,” as batters succeed in different ways.

Over the last two seasons, Goldschmidt has stood 25 inches deep in the box, defined as behind the front, flat edge, of home plate. That was slightly closer than the Major League average, which is 28 inches; he’s now moved up 5 inches in the box, making him one of the 10 closest batters to the pitcher. That, by definition, has allowed him to move his average point of contact a few inches further forward as well, though that’s not the same thing as “getting it out front more,” as the contact point has moved up exactly as much as his body has.

It has allowed him to pull the ball a little more, but Goldschmidt, for his part, insisted to the New York Daily News recently he wasn’t doing anything differently.

“I’m trying to just have good at-bats like I did last year. It’s not really too different in what I’m trying to do,” he told the outlet, also adding that he “[hasn’t] really made a conscious effort to do anything different from years past.”

Perhaps so, but moving up in the box doesn’t happen by accident, either. No, what’s really happening here comes down to these three things. The first one, we apologize, is confusing.

1) He’s become more of an all-or-nothing hitter.

When looking into Goldschmidt, we noticed something very odd. While his hard-hit rate – that’s percentage of batted balls over 95 mph of exit velocity – hasn’t changed much, what’s happening on the extremes very much has.

Try to wrap your head around this combination, because it’s tricky. Goldschmidt’s weak contact rate (this is under 65 mph of exit velocity) has skyrocketed, quadrupling from 2% to 8%, which is double the Major League average. At the same time, his barrel rate (the perfect combination of good exit velocity and ideal launch angles) has increased as well, going from last year’s roughly average 8% to this year’s strong 12%.

Ideally, you’d like to be roping line drives every time up, but that’s easier said than done – and one barreled baseball is far more valuable than one weakly-hit ball is damaging. It’s maybe not the tradeoff you’re seeking, but it’s one that’s working here.

2) He might be hunting 4-seam fastballs.

Last year, Goldschmidt was pretty good against four-seamers – no hitter would turn down a .313 average and .493 slugging against heaters, particularly at his age. This year? That’s up to .396 and 1.000, respectively, which is both top-10 in the sport and the best performance of his entire career. It’s a jarring change.

What’s perhaps happening here, to some extent, is finding the fastballs he can work with. Last year, that seemed to be up-and-in. This year, he’s moved a little more to looking on the outer half of the plate. Moving up, intentionally or not, would give you a different look at the pitch, and he's also apparently being more intentional about the right ones to go after.

3) The Yankees are putting him in position to succeed.

OK, it's hard to ignore this one.

That’s the largest platoon split in baseball, and to a somewhat less extreme extent, it’s been like this for him for years. On an extremely related note, here’s the percentage of Goldschmidt’s plate appearances that come against a lefty pitcher.

If that explains part of his success this year, it also explains why he’s likely to get less exposure when Judge and Giancarlo Stanton return – as infuriating as it might be for some fans to see a player having a fantastic year playing less.

“Look, he’s just a Hall of Fame player,” said Yankee skipper Aaron Boone after the two-homer game against Skubal. “Unbelievable hitter in his career. He’s in amazing shape. He’s incredibly prepared. And I think he just enjoys the game as much as you possibly can.”

He may very well be right. Any discussions of Cooperstown, though, will have to wait. Sixteen years into his career, Goldschmidt isn't quite done just yet.

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