Yordan Alvarez is one of baseball's most fearsome sluggers -- that's obvious. But the Astros star is more than that. Alvarez is the total package in the batter's box. There's literally nothing he's not good at.
This is a guy who has a chance to win the first hitting Triple Crown since Miguel Cabrera in 2012. How do we know? It's not just because of Alvarez's ridiculous numbers (he's batting .327 with 12 home runs and 27 RBIs right now), or because he was just named the American League Player of the Month for April, or because he's basically Barry Bonds in lefty-lefty matchups. It's because he excels at every single hitting skill we can measure.
So before tonight's marquee matchup against Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers, we want to take a second to appreciate just how complete of a hitter Alvarez is.
This is what Alvarez's Baseball Savant page looks like today:
The very obvious thing you will notice is: All of Alvarez's hitting stats are deep in the red.
You don't even need to know what all those stats mean. All you really need to know is: Red is good. A lot of red is great. ALL red is … only Alvarez.
We show 14 Statcast hitting stats front and center on our player pages. Alvarez is good at all 14 of them. He's above average by every hitting metric, and way above average by most of them, if not top of the league.
Looking at all that red on Alvarez's Baseball Savant page got us thinking: How rare is it for a hitter to be as good as him at every single thing?
It turns out, very rare. Last season, there was only one hitter who ranked in the 60th percentile of MLB or better in all 14 of those hitting categories. The year before that, same thing. Only one hitter.
You want to take a guess at who they were? One of them might surprise you. The other one definitely won't.
In 2025, that one hitter was Ben Rice. That's the more surprising name. But seeing what Rice is doing for the Yankees right now … maybe it's not such a surprise after all.
In 2024, the hitter was Juan Soto. That's the non-surprise. Soto is renowned for his elite blend of contact, power and plate discipline.
Now, Statcast's bat tracking stats -- represented by the bat speed and squared-up rate percentiles -- have only been around for a few seasons. If we go back before that, and look at just the other 12 hitting metrics, we can add some more hitters to the list of "really good at everything."
You get several MVPs, like Mike Trout and Cody Bellinger in 2019, and Mookie Betts in 2018. You get famously well-rounded hitters like Freddie Freeman in 2022 and Joey Votto in 2016. You get a Hall of Famer who was also a fearsome lefty slugger like Alvarez, David Ortiz in his final season in 2016.
The point of all this is to say, Alvarez fits right into a group like that. He is pretty clearly hitting at an MVP level in 2026.
Heck, Alvarez just put up one of the most well-rounded months of hitting that we've seen in the last decade.
Of all those Statcast stats where Alvarez is a standout, the headliner is xwOBA, which combines a hitter's quality of contact based on exit velocity and launch angle with his walks and strikeouts to give you one number measuring all-around offensive performance. It paints the most complete picture.
Alvarez's xwOBA right now is .510, which, first of all, ranks No. 1 in the Majors by a wide margin ahead of Mike Trout and the Yankees' star duo of Aaron Judge and Rice. An xwOBA in the .400s is elite (think of it like on-base percentage). An xwOBA in the .500s is … well, what's beyond elite? Super-elite?
And Alvarez just finished one of the best individual months of hitting in the entire Statcast era, which goes back to 2015.
Probably the most impressive part about Alvarez's first month was how he hit for so much power without striking out often. He finished April tied for the MLB lead with 12 home runs while somehow striking out just 9.8% of the time. Most hitters have some sort of power/contact tradeoff. Alvarez hit for power like Aaron Judge while making contact like Nico Hoerner.
That's almost unfair. Hitting is supposed to be too hard to do that. But that's Alvarez, uniquely good at everything.