Orioles second baseman has increased SLG% by 132 points from April to May

On Matt Holliday’s MLB.com player page, you can learn that he made seven All-Star teams across his 15-year career. Perhaps, we’ll soon find, he deserves some partial credit for an eighth.

That’s because Jackson Holliday, Matt’s 21-year-old son, Baltimore’s second baseman, looks like he might be on the path to the Midsummer Classic. Depending on how the fans vote, he might even be in Atlanta in July as a starter.

A year ago, when Jackson was the highly touted top prospect in the land, promoted to the Majors at just 20 years of age, that wouldn’t be a terribly surprising statement. But after being optioned back to the Minors just two weeks later, and then hitting a mere .189/.255/.311 for the year after returning later on, and then starting 2025 slowly as well – a .167/.239/.310 line through 13 games – “All-Star” wasn’t exactly the phrase we were thinking. It was, premature as this clearly was, “potentially a bust,” given the hype.

But Holliday got two hits on April 23 in Washington, and finished the month with at least one hit in seven of eight games, and he’s been so good in the month-plus since – .297/.345/.459 in 29 games – that he’s been a top-50 hitter, with production over the last month similar to Bobby Witt Jr. and Julio Rodríguez.

If not quite long enough to say The Breakout Is Here, it’s at least a whole lot more encouraging than what we’d been seeing before.

So what’s changed? Let’s start with what happened before that April 23 game against the Nationals, a 4-3 Washington win in which Holliday reached base three times.

As MLB.com’s Jake Rill reported, Matt spoke to his son before the game and noted changes in Jackson’s setup, pointing out that he’d been much more vertical and upright in his stance late last season – and Jackson did hit .389/.522/.444 over the final two weeks – as compared to early in 2025.

“I did mention to him, ‘Hey, it looks to me like you’re a little bit around the ball,’” Matt said, additionally sending Jackson video from the final week of 2024 and adding: “This is when you were really, really good last year.”

In the final days of 2024, Jackson had experimented with removing a larger leg kick and using a smaller toe tap instead, inspired somewhat by watching Shohei Ohtani, according to a published report.

“When he initially started this move of more of the toe tap and away from the leg kick, his hands were a little further away from him, and I think gave him a little more space to maneuver, and so, we talked about that,” Matt said. “I think it’s been a good adjustment, and it’s keeping his bat, I think, in the strike zone a little bit longer, and I think it’s keeping his front side on the ball a little bit better.”

“I think that’s sort of the result of having a little bit more vertical bat and his hands just a little bit further away from his body so that he has a little more space to get inside the ball.”

That’s a lot of hitter-speak, but we can pick it apart a little — especially the bit about “keeping his bat … in the strike zone a little bit longer.” It’s something you hear batters talk about all the time, though if taken too literally, it’s counterintuitive, as it might imply that slower swings are desirable, which we know is generally not the case.

Keeping the bat in the strike zone longer isn’t really about being slower. What it really means, in practice, is staying on plane with the pitch longer – matching the pitch’s angle, essentially – which we can use some new Statcast tools to explain further.

The shape of Holliday’s swing, his swing path, hasn’t really changed. What has changed is his timing, and how he’s meeting the ball. Attack angle is telling you the vertical direction the bat is traveling at contact — or at the closest point to contact — with 10° being the average, and attack direction is telling you the horizontal equivalent, with 0° being neutral.

Ideal attack angle, then, is letting you know how often a hitter’s swing is in that high-value attack angle zone between 5° and 20°, which is getting more on plane with a downward pitch.

The takeaway you’re going to want to have here is this: If attack direction is telling you the horizontal angle of the bat at contact, then through April 22, no hitter in the game had a more opposite-field-angled swing than Holliday did. No one!

That doesn’t always have to be a bad thing, if you’re a low-powered contact hitter trying to go the opposite way.

But in Holliday’s case, it’s almost certainly more about just being late — which can be backed up by the fact that on pitches 95 mph or faster, he had a swing-and-miss rate twice as high (25%) before that day in Washington as he’s had since (13%).