Nearly a decade ago, Max Muncy was – along with Justin Turner and Chris Taylor – one of the faces of the other side of how the Dodgers continually contend for a championship, year after year. It’s not just the willingness to play at the top of the salary scale, though it’s obviously that as well. It’s also about how they have repeatedly found hidden gems that other teams couldn’t get the most out of, and turned them into starters or stars.
Now in his ninth season with the team, Muncy is somehow the longest-tenured Dodger, a title he inherited when Clayton Kershaw retired last winter. By the end of the year, he’s likely to be fifth on the team’s all-time home run list, including the Brooklyn years – and along with Hall of Famer Duke Snider, who did it five times, he’s one of just two Dodgers ever with four or more seasons of 35 or more homers. Not bad for a player who first found his way to Los Angeles when he failed to make the A’s roster in 2017, then spent his entire age-26 season in the Minors before getting a chance with the Dodgers in 2018 when Turner got injured.
It is, no matter what else happens, a great baseball story. But as Muncy’s 36th birthday looms later this summer, he’s off to one of the best starts of his career. With a 169 OPS+, he’s been baseball’s eighth-best hitter so far. He’s not just a Dodgers organizational success story, though he’s also that; he’s still one of the top hitters in the game, just as he’s been (when healthy) for most of the last nine seasons.
All of which leads to the question at hand: because of how many international megastars and future Hall of Famers he shares a roster with, because he’s maybe the 12th-most famous member of his own team, because he was a bargain bin pickup and not a highly touted free agent target, because he keeps on doing the same thing year-in and year-out, is it possible that after all this time, Muncy is simply underrated?
After all, consider this: Over the last calendar year: Muncy is the fourth-best hitter in baseball, with a 164 wRC+, among those with a minimum 400 plate appearances. (wRC+ is a very similar stat to OPS+, where 100 is set to ‘average.’) You’re going to know the only players ahead of him.
Best hitters in MLB, by wRC+, last 365 days
- 193 // Aaron Judge
- 170 // Shohei Ohtani
- 167 // Nick Kurtz
- 164 // Muncy <–
- 164 // Juan Soto
- 159 // George Springer
- 150 // Cal Raleigh
- 150 // Kyle Schwarber
- 149 // Yandy Díaz
- 147 // Ronald Acuña Jr.
- 146 // Ben Rice
- 146 // Matt Olson
It’s a who's-who of baseball’s best hitters, and if you’re noticing “hey, Muncy is actually hitting as well as Juan Soto over the last year?” then it’s even more similar than you think.
As of Thursday morning, looking at the last calendar year, check out this comparison:
- Muncy has a .271/.395/.565 line, good for a .960 OPS
- Soto’s line is .271/.402/.550, making for a .952 OPS
Muncy has walked 16% of the time, and struck out 19%; Soto, 18% and 19%. Muncy’s hard-hit rate is 53%, while Soto’s is 55%.
No one’s confusing a valuable late-bloomer with a player destined for Cooperstown since he was a teenager, obviously. That said, you also don’t have to work that hard to show how similar they’ve been over the last 12 months.
We use the “over the last year” framing in part because Muncy did indeed get off to a slow start to 2025, but because we’re also nearing the one-year anniversary of one of last year’s most quietly notable Dodger moments: When he started wearing glasses.
On Apr. 30 of last season, Muncy wore glasses for the first time in a game, then immediately broke what was a career-long streak of 105 plate appearances without a home run by taking Miami’s Cal Quantrill deep. From that point on (and around time missed with knee and oblique injuries), he was a top-5 hitter for the remainder of 2025, at least among those with as many plate appearances as he had. He’s been excellent to start 2026, too.
It was a very tidy story, because “see ball better, hit ball better” is a headline that plays. It’s also probably not exactly true, or at least isn’t primarily what happened. That homer, after all, was followed by another homer-free streak, this time of 10 games, during which Muncy hit only .182/.325/.242 (.567) before heating up in mid-May.
As detailed in the Los Angeles Times, what really happened was that offseason swing changes, intended to give him back his ability to hit high fastballs, took a few weeks to feel comfortable, and the glasses were a welcomed but likely secondary aspect. That makes sense the more you think about it; after all, it’s not like Muncy hadn’t previously been one of the best hitters in the game for years.
But whether it was the glasses, the swing change, or both, something really has changed for the better. You can see it in the hard-hit rate, which in 2025 and ‘26 has made a marked jump over anything he’d shown before.
You can really see it when it comes to fastballs, too, and that’s what the swing changes were intended to improve. Since the start of 2025, only Judge and Kyle Schwarber have a better slugging percentage than Muncy on four-seamers and sinkers. Two years ago, Muncy’s hard-hit rate against fastballs was 48%; this year, it’s 66% – which is fifth behind Oneil Cruz, James Wood, Rice, and Fernando Tatis Jr.
Muncy has been around for so long that he once shared lineups with Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, and Chase Utley, long-ago Dodgers of what’s now a bygone era. He now shares lineups with Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Andy Pages, and Dalton Rushing, the present and presumed future of Dodger baseball. Given the extension he signed through 2027, and the club option the team has for 2028, it’s possible that he might share some lineups with near-term prospects like Josue De Paula, Zyhir Hope, or James Tibbs III, too.
Muncy won’t be in the Hall of Fame like Freeman or Mookie Betts; he won’t be an international sensation like Ohtani. But however this era of Dodger baseball gets remembered, Muncy is going to be a pretty big piece of it, too. That’s not just because of what he’s done. It’s because of what he’s still doing – which is crushing baseballs.