As the Cincinnati Reds continue their epic quest to somehow land free agent slugger Kyle Schwarber in free agency, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the Disney-ness of the storyline. He’s from the area,
he’s the perfect lineup fit, he’s what will put the Reds over the top for the first time in generation(s), yadda yadda yadda.
Sure, that’d be wonderful. We also know what ownership group we’re dealing with here, and the reality is that Schwarber makes every team look that much better – including many with much more willingness to spend. So, we’re going to continue to try to find ways to improve this Reds ball club beyond just the Schwarberverse, pinpointing players who may be (or tangibly are) available who could fit that bill.
Today, that’s free agent 1B/OF Ryan O’Hearn.
2025 at a glance
Ryan O’Hearn entered free agency off the best year of his career. Congrats!
The surface stats for the left-handed hitter are excellent – .281/.366/.437 (.803 OPS), 17 HR 63 RBI, 58/109 K/BB in 544 PA split between the Baltimore Orioles and San Diego Padres. That was good for a 127 wRC+ and .349 wOBA, the latter mark tied with Jazz Chisholm and Brent Rooker and sitting just behind Francisco Lindor (.350), Josh Naylor (.351), and Trea Turner (.352). Elly De La Cruz and TJ Friedl tied for the Reds team lead in wOBA at just .333, for reference.
For his work, O’Hearn was valued at 3.0 fWAR/2.4 bWAR.
For his career, he’s a .252/.321/.421 hitter with a .330 wOBA in nearly 2500 career PA, and he’ll turn 33 years old in July of 2026.
The Goods
A former 8th round pick of the Kansas City Royals, O’Hearn spent parts of five years in the bigs in KC in the cavernous hell that is Kauffman Stadium. As nearly every left-handed hitter who’s ever called that park can attest to (see: MJ Melendez), it’s absolute hell on LHH, with Statcast’s Park Factors rating it between the absolute worst and fifth-worst park for them in terms of dingers for the entirety of the 2017-2022 window O’Hearn spent there.
Once O’Hearn was purchased off waivers by the Baltimore Orioles, though, his career began to turn around. While O’Hearn is far from just a pure power guy, moving to Camden Yards as his home park (which ranked 3rd in HR park factor for LHH for homers in 2025 just behind Great American Ball Park, for instance) seemed to help unlock his swing, and in the 1223 PA he logged with the O’s across 2022-2025 he upped his performance to .277/.342/.454 (.796 OPS).
Baltimore dealt him to the San Diego Padres alongside Ramon Laureano at the 2025 trade deadline as the Friars geared up for their playoff run, and San Diego continued to trust O’Hearn at each of of the positions that defined his versatility prior to joining them.
He’s versatile, with the ability to play both corner OF spots (121 G in the OF in his big league career) as well as play 1B (385 G). And while he’s mostly been platooned and protecte against LHP for the bulk of his career, he actually logged 109 PA against southpaws during the 2025 season and hit better against them (.832 OPS) than he did against RHP (.795 OPS).
The Oddities
Pinning down exactly what O’Hearn is and can be going forward is a bit of a nightmare, honestly. Not because I expect his production the moment he takes the plate in 2026 to be a nightmare, it’s just that his year to year stats are perhaps as all-over-the-place as any ‘regular’ I can recall.
Take his walk-rate, for instance. Dating back to his debut with KC in 2018, these are his annual marks:
- 2018: 11.8%
- 2019: 10.5%
- 2020: 13.6%
- 2021: 5.1%
- 2022: 5.5%
- 2023: 4.1%
- 2024: 9.3%
- 2025: 10.7%
His strikeout rate takes just as big of a ride:
- 2018: 26.5%
- 2019: 26.8%
- 2020: 28.0%
- 2021: 28.0%
- 2022: 24.1%
- 2023: 22.3%
- 2024: 14.0%
- 2025: 20.0%
They were great! Then they fell off a cliff, kept falling, and cratered…only to climb right back up to being quite good again! Was that maturation? Changing franchises and finding one that stuck with him? Pure luck? Age? Injury? All of the above?!
O’Hearn spoke to the Breaking Bats Podcast a couple of years ago after landing in Baltimore about the evolution of his swing, and that’s a pretty good indicator of how it’s improved over the course of his career through multiple organizations.
Still, that’s a two-year old conversation, and his numbers have continued to fly all over the place since the start of the 2023 season, too!
Here’s another interesting anomaly – the 2025 season, inarguably his best start to finish in the big leagues, featured his lowest rate of hard-hit balls! FanGraphs lists him with just 29.5% hard-hit – down from 34.0% in 2024 and down all the way from 42.4% in 2019 – though his pull-rate of just 35.8% also ranks as a career low. In other words, he began using the middle of the field a lot more – perhaps that’s why his numbers vs. LHP became so much better – in lieu of simply selling out for pull power more often than not.
In 2023, for instance, Statcast ranked him in the 94% percentile for hard-hit%, his average exit velocity of 91.9 mph ranking in the 89th percentile. That came with a walk-rate ranked in just the 2nd percentile! By 2025, his average exit velocity had dipped to the 42nd percentile (89.4 mph) and his hard-hit rate fell to the 46th, but his launch-angle sweet spot rate spiked to the 85th percentile – and his walk rate jumped to the 76th!
In other words, the entire evolution of his swing that he detailed in the video above has already been re-evolved in an entire other iteration. What’s clear, though, is that this is an incredibly adaptive hitter at the plate who has found ways to get ahead of how he plans to be pitched, and he’s been better for it as he’s aged even though it’s hard to pencil him in for precisely one same thing over and over again.
The Skinny
O’Hearn will turn 33 next summer, and that’s hardly a spring chicken. That’s also a couple of months younger than Schwarber, however, and Statcast still grades both his range and sprint speed as at least a little bit better average (even if his throwing arm has never been good). So, we’re talking a guy who could very conceivably get reps in LF, at 1B, and at DH while swinging from the left-side of the plate in 2026, something that would seemingly dovetail well with a) the Reds persistent desire for positional versatility and b) the presence of right-handed batters like Sal Stewart and Spencer Steer who can also rotate through those positions in various ways.
Both DRS and OAA tend to appreciate his work at 1B more than in the outfield corners, and that’s perhaps the only knock on his free agent candidacy here – not because that alone is a big problem, per se, it’s just that Spencer Steer’s grades are pretty much the exact same. In other words, it would be more ‘ideal’ if O’Hearn had positive grades in the OF and lesser at 1B, since those and Steer’s would dovetail perfectly. Alas!
MLB Trade Rumors ranked O’Hearn as the #30 overall free agent this winter, and predicted he’d land a 2-year, $26 million contract for his work so far. So as you crunch the numbers of fitting Schwarber fresh off 56 dongs onto the tightly-wound Cincinnati payroll, keep that in mind as an alternative for the inevitable presser where the Reds tell you how hard they tried to sign Kyle before he landed elsewhere.
