While all the focus and spotlights of this particular Cincinnati Reds offseason are pointed firmly at Middletown slugger Kyle Schwarber, it’s still a pertinent exercise to dig through the nuts and bolts
of the rest of the roster in search of ways this team’s offense can find improvement in 2026.
That digging, for me, keeps leading back to Will Benson.
Yes, we’re talking about the same Will Benson – the guy who hit just .226/.273/.435 in 253 PA last year. The same guy who was a strong-side platoon option who almost never faced lefties (and struggled terribly against them when he did). The same guy who posted just an 88 OPS+ on the season and who will already turn 28 years of age during 2026.
Still, I can’t help but look at several different metrics that tracked Will’s work during the 2025 season and not begin to wonder if the new hitting philosophy and coaching from Chris Valaika & Co. that tweaked the life out of so many other Reds bats last year might have actually begun to pay off for Benson along the way. Keep in mind, of course, that this wasn’t the first time Valaika had worked with Benson, as the former was the hitting coach for the Cleveland Guardians during the 2022 season when Benson cracked the big leagues up north for the first time.
As a pure baseline, you’ll also recall just how electric Benson was during his 2023 mini-breakout season. He hit an astounding .275/.365/.498 in 329 PA (128 OPS+), numbers that ran up to .297/.389/.549 when isolated to only his work against RHP. Paired with his athleticism (19 steals) and ability to play competent defense all across the outfield, the former 1st round pick firmly looked the part of a key cog of an outfield rotation going forward, though when the inflated BABIP came back to earth – it was an unsustainable .391 overall in 2023 and .422 against RHP – his numbers cratered in 2024 (.187/.274/.376 in 388 PA).
Those flukishly high BABIP numbers are gone and will not return. The baseball gods simply do not allow for that to happen twice to the same player over the course of their career, nor should they. But what if I told you that the same Benson who swatted lasers all over the place in 2023 behind that crazy high BABIP actually hit the ball much harder more often in 2025…yet posted an almost comically low .255 BABIP?
Benson, per FanGraphs’ Statcast, posted a hard hit rate of 42.2% during the 2023 season, barreling balls at 10.3% of the time with an average exit velocity of 90.2 mph. Despite the relative competence of those, his actual average (.275) far outpaced his expected average (.230 xBA), his slugging (.498) far outpaced his expected slugging (.398 xSLG), and his wOBA (.369) was miles ahead of his expected wOBA (.321 wOBA).
His 2025 season, at least by his batted ball metrics, was even better than 2023.
He raised his average exit velocity all the way up to 92.4 mph, posted a max exit velocity nearly three and a half mph higher than his highest 2023 mark, and lifted his overall hard hit rate up to 53.8% – tied with Byron Buxton for 15th best in all of baseball among the 309 hitters who had at least 250 PA last year. That ranked him just higher than Corey Seager (53.6%), Matt Olson (53.2%) and even Ronald Acuña Jr. (52.5%), among a lot of very talented others.
Benson lifted his barrel rate up to 15.4% in the process, a number that ranked him 23rd on that list of 309 big leaguers in 2025. Acuña Jr. (15.7%) and the likes of Mike Trout and George Springer (15.8%) ranked just ahead of him, for the record. As a result, each of Benson’s expected stats – xBA, xSLG, and xwOBA – all ended up markedly higher than his actual stats during the 2025 season, with each of those beginning to look almost as rosy as the actual stats he put up during his BABIP-fueled 2023 season.
Actual 2023: .275 AVG, .498 SLG, .369 wOBA
Expected 2025: .264 xBA, .495 xSLG, .346 xwOBA
Along the way, Benson also pretty obviously tweaked his approach at the plate. He cut down his strikeout rate from the 31.3% it was in 2023 (and the bloated 39.7% it was during his terrible 2024), getting it to a much more manageable 26.5% in 2025. That came with a significant reduction in his walk rate – down to 6.3% from 12.2% during 2023, but that dovetailed with a decision to swing more often (his in-zone z-swing% jumped from 65.7% in 2023 all the way up to 74.8% last year). His overall swing % spiked from 42.7% in 2023 and 47.5% in 2024 all the way to 52.8% in 2025, all with a rise in the rate of pitches he saw in the strike zone spiking to 54.7% in 2025 from just 50.3% in 2023.
That’s a long-winded way of saying it seems he recognized he was being thrown more strikes than he once did (perhaps due to his reputation of being patient) and began attacking more pitches because of it. The batted-ball results changed significantly because of this, too, with his pull rate up to 43.2% in 2025 (from 35.7% in 2023) and his up-the-middle rate down to 33.7% (from a high of 44.9% in 2023).
Ball it all up, and that’s a hitter who pretty clearly looks like they realized they were getting enough strikes to attack, and began attacking. And when they did, they were trying to pull the ball, in doing so making better contact with the best part of the bat more than they’d ever done before. The end results weren’t there, no, but the overall concept began to take form while the short right field porch in Great American Ball Park began to look closer and closer by the swing.
That wasn’t lost on Valaika and manager Terry Francona, who’ve known Benson well since their Cleveland days. The Reds straight up cut Benson’s competition for playing time in Jake Fraley, turning over the role of ‘left-handed hitting outfielder next to TJ Friedl and Noelvi Marte’ to Benson almost full-time for the final two months of the 2025 playoff push, and Benson responded by hitting .276/.313/.552 over his final 32 games (64 PA), his BABIP in that time still just .273.
If the approach stays the same and the opportunities increase in 2026, there’s a lot suggesting that the Reds should expect significantly more actual production from Benson should they give him a good chunk of work against RHP in a corner outfield spot. To get that from a first-year arbitration guy making just $1.7 million (as they try to save funds everywhere they can to sign Schwarber) would be a boon, and perhaps enough to make you wonder if Spencer Steer – who’ll be making some $4.5 million – really needs regular time in LF if Schwarber (/fingers crossed) and Sal Stewart have 1B/DH taken care of. Finding a short-side platoon guy for Benson sure sounds like it could be even cheaper, after all.
