Ryan Garcia
After signing a five-year $162.5 million deal to stay with the New York Yankees, the spotlight on Cody Bellinger would be even greater as he’s being paid to be a legitimate star.
Last season he provided ~5 WAR value to the team, but the consensus among projection systems was that he would end up being worse than what we saw in 2025.
There was solid reasoning behind this; the industry belief was that his unique offensive profile was a perfect fit for Yankee Stadium but that he could struggle as he ages and loses even more of the underwhelming raw power he had.
Bellinger might have found a way to get even better however; the former MVP has seemed to turn back the clock and find his eye at the plate again, creating the kind of player who could consistently get down-ballot MVP votes.
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Cody Bellinger Could Be Even Better in Second Act With Yankees
Overindexing is a common phenomenon we see this time of year, and I’m not above falling victim to the early-season hot streak or cold spell that ends up being nothing more than a footnote in local baseball lore.
That being said, metrics such as Chase% begin to stabilize around this point in the season, and Cody Bellinger has seen massive changes to his frequency of swings out of zone in the early going.
Bellinger became an aggressive hitter who was capable of leveraging his athleticism to make solid contact on pitches out of zone, but this still left him vulnerable to bad chases in situations where a pitcher otherwise would have walked him.
His 30.1% Chase% in 2025 was in the 36th Percentile, but the Yankees still believed it worthwhile to give him a massive five-year contract to retain his services, and they’ve looked rather wise to do so in the early part of this deal.
Cody Bellinger has seriously cut down on his chases, and that often comes with concessions in terms of power output as a hitter has to track the ball for longer in order to make better swing decisions, resulting in less pulled contact.
What’s odd is that this has been the exact opposite outcome for Bellinger, who is mirroring his pull rates and point of contact from 2025 while actually generating higher exit velocities.
His 90th Percentile Exit Velocity is up nearly 2 MPH while his Average Exit Velocity is up by over a full MPH on the season, and that’s with a sample of some horrendously cold weather that slowed down bat speeds team-wide.
This is not the first or only time that Bellinger has had a 35-game stretch where everything has seemingly clicked for him, so it’s too soon to conclude that he’s going to sustain all of these gains for the entire season.
Last year from April 29th to June 11th, he had a similar plate discipline profile with excellent impact metrics after looking utterly atrocious to start the season, so we’ll have to see how Bellinger stabilizes in the coming weeks.
If the Yankees get a ~10% walk rate from Cody Bellinger in 2026, which is right in between where his 2025 and 2026 walk rates are at, then he could end up producing a 130-135 wRC+.
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