The evidence is piling up.
Bryson Stott seemed primed for a breakout season following 2023. He had played the majority of his rookie year in 2022, but 2023 was his first full season in the Majors where he entered the year as essentially an everyday player. He played in 151 games in 2023 and led the Phillies with 4.3 WAR. Stott evolved into an elite fielding second baseman and his bat was more than adequate for the position, as he slashed .280/.329/.419 with 15 home runs. There were plenty of reasons to believe he could build off of this strong season heading into 2024.
Except that breakout never came. In fact, Stott regressed heavily, accumulating almost half the WAR (2.5) and seeing his slash line fall to .245/.315/.356. He regressed in almost every major category, but perhaps none worse than his numbers against left-handed pitching. After hitting .282 with a .730 OPS against same sided pitching in 2023, Stott hit just .223 with a .594 OPS against lefties in 2024. After the season, the Phillies and Stott revealed that he was dealing with an undisclosed elbow injured that he suffered in mid-May.
Once again, there was reason to believe that this time a healthy Stott would finally take another step forward. That belief looked well founded for the first month of 2025. Stott hit .297 with an .810 OPS while hitting leadoff in most of his appearances. He looked to have finally turned the corner and turned himself into one of the most complete second basemen in the league.
But Stott has once again regressed, this time even worse than he did in 2024. In 58 games since the start of May, Stott is slashing .204/.268/.284 across 233 plate appearances. His .553 OPS over that span is the fifth worst among all qualified hitters. Stott’s been even worse since the start of June, hitting .193 with a .545 OPS across 129 plate appearances in 34 games. This is all despite Stott seeing an uptick in pitches inside the zone this season, up to 54% from 50% in 2024. He’s seen pitches in the zone at a much higher rate than the MLB average of 48%, yet his hard-hit rate of 28.8% is among the worst in the league. Stott’s getting plenty of pitches to hit, he’s just not doing anything with them.
If you go back to the beginning of 2024 and take all of Stott’s numbers to the present day, he’s hitting .241 with a .658 OPS. That would be good for an 84 wRC+, meaning Stott is 16% below league average as a hitter across his last 232 games played and over 900 plate appearances. There are 86 MLB players that have logged at least 900 PAs since the start of 2024. Of those 86, Stott ranks dead last in OPS, OPS+, and slugging percentage.
Even if you bump the qualifier to include Stott’s strong 2023, he’s still 115th out of 129 players with at least 1,200 PAs over that span in OPS and 117th in OPS+. All of this evidence adds up to say that there is more reason to believe that Stott just isn’t a good Major League hitter than to say that he is at least an average one.
Now, Stott’s defense and position allow him some leeway here. Second base is not a position particularly well-known for offensive output and Stott is by every metric an elite defender. The Phillies don’t need him to be much more than a competent hitter in the bottom third of the lineup, but as you’ve seen so far this season, he hasn’t been able to do that outside of April. There’s a big difference between being a below average MLB hitter and a bad MLB hitter. Right now, Stott has been a bad MLB hitter in 2025.
The reasons to believe that Stott will ever be more than a below average hitter are dwindling. Yes, he’s 27-years-old and in his fourth MLB season. And yes, progress and development are rarely linear. But the further removed we are from Stott’s encouraging 2023, the more it starts to look like an outlier. In the rest of Stott’s career outside of that season, he owns a slash line of .238/.305/.351 with a .656 OPS.
Let’s close by taking a look at an excerpt from Baseball America’s Pre-Draft Scouting report of Stott from 2019:
Yet scouts left the summer with conflicting thoughts regarding Stott’s bat, as he showed good bat-to-ball skills but too often with a slap-heavy, low-impact swing. Questions have been raised about his potential offensive upside in spite of the numbers he had posted in the Mountain West Conference, but Stott quickly showed he was more than just a slap hitter early this spring.
Does that sound familiar?