When Adolis Garcia came into camp after signing with the Phillies, the team had specific ideas on what they wanted him to work on in the hopes that he could recapture his past form. Garcia tweaked his batting stance and worked on improving his plate discipline to try and cut down on his high chase rate. So far, he has done exactly that, as his 28.1 % swing rate on pitches outside of the zone is the lowest it’s been since 2023, which was the best season of Garcia’s career and the last time he was an above
average hitter. He’s also cut down his overall swing rate to 43.4% from 52.2%, cut his whiff rate down to 12.9% from 14.6%, and his 83.7% rate of contact on pitches inside the zone is the best of his career. Through the first two months of 2026, he’s accomplished all of the goals he and the Phillies laid out for him this spring.
So why is he in the midst of the worst season of his career after a particularly brutal month of May where he hit .141 with a .447 OPS and 33 strikeouts in 24 games?
To attempt to understand that conundrum, we must first look at what made Garcia successful in the past. In that All-Star 2023 season, Garcia was one of the most aggressive hitters in baseball, swinging early and often as evidenced by his swing rate of 48.6%. He did not hit for a high average at just .245 overall, but his .508 slugging percentage was tenth best among all hitters with at least 600 plate appearances. Garcia still swung and chased at a high rate, but he did damage on the pitches he got to hit.
Fast forward to 2026, and Garcia’s .312 SLG is among the worst in baseball, and he has the worst barrel percentage of his career by half. His new swing and approach have resulted in the intended plate discipline improvements but have had unintended side effects.
Cutting back on his aggressiveness has limited Garcia’s ability to do damage on the increased amount of pitches he’s seen in the zone. Even in a poor 2025 season where Garcia had the worst SLG of his career to that point, his expected SLG of .427 was right around league average and his 11.6% barrel rate was above average. In 2026, those numbers are dramatically lower, with Garcia carrying a .350 xSLG and a 7.1% barrel rate that would both be his career worst for a full season. He’s especially struggling to catch up to fastballs, as his .284 actual SLG and .378 xSLG against heaters are both the worst marks of his career. He hasn’t been any better on breaking balls, with a .292 SLG and .294 xSLG that are also the worst of his career and a 39.4% whiff rate that is the second worst of his career.
Garcia is hitting more line drives at a career best 24.4% rate, but his flyball rate has plummeted ten percentage points to a career worst 36.2%. He’s also pulling the ball at a career worst rate of 37.8%, continuing a declining trend that started in 2024. His isolated power of .111 is another career worst mark and is over a 50-point dropoff from last season. Simply put, Garcia is not impacting the ball even close to the way he used to and has been worse at it than even his disappointing 2025 season.
Now, some of this can be contributed to the obvious factor: age. At 33-years-old coming off of two below average seasons, it’s quite likely that Garcia is in decline and will never reach his previous heights but rather will continue to get worse. But the steep drop from even his poor 2025 suggests that maybe something else is at play here. There’s not much to contribute to luck either, as Garcia’s .276 BABIP is only slightly below the league average of .287 so far.
Perhaps trying to change Garcia into a different hitter has made him worse than he already was in two disappointing seasons. A hitter trying to become more patient at the plate is not necessarily a bad thing, as it usually leads to more quality plate appearances. But that’s not the case for everybody. Some hitters thrive on being aggressive. Garcia is one of those hitters. By trying to cut back on that aggressiveness, Garcia and the Phillies have inadvertently taken away the few things he was still good at even in his worst years.
Maybe better results with the new approach will come eventually. It isn’t exactly “early” in the season anymore as we’ve passed the first unofficial checkpoint of Memorial Day, but there are still 106 games to go. That’s still plenty of time for something to click and everything to fall in place.
Or maybe the Phillies and Garcia need to accept that he is what he is at the plate and let him go back to leaning on his strengths, even if the result is another below average season. Because even below average is better than what Garcia is right now.
