Matt Rudick, Photo by Rick Nelson
If you look at many New York Mets top prospect lists, you will not find Double-A Binghamton Rumble Ponies outfielder Matt Rudick on many of them. However, the 24-year-old left-handed hitter may be among the most productive players in the Mets system over the first two months.
So far this season, Rudick has a slash line of .316/.459/.522 with 41 hits, 10 doubles, 7 home runs, 25 RBIs, and he has more walks (30) than strikeouts (23). His OPS is an astounding 1.011. His 41 hits are six more than any other player on the team (Brandon Mcllwain is second with 35).
May, in particular, has been a strong month for Rudick. If you look at the Eastern League as a whole, he has the third best on-base percentage of any player (.459). In addition, he has the seventh-highest OPS, his 23 hits are tied for eighth in the league, the 11th best batting average, and the 13th-best slugging percentage.
As our own Michael Mayer tweeted last week, some of Rudick’s advanced numbers put him as one of the better hitters in all of minor league baseball:
The top minor league hitters this season by wRC+ (150 PA min,)
224 Jackson Holliday – BAL
199 Austin Gauthier – LAD
192 Matt McLain – CIN
189 Henry Davis – PIT
188 Matt Rudick – NYM
186 Junior Caminero TBR— Mike Mayer (@mikemayer22) May 25, 2023
On May 25, Rudick’s hitting coach Darin Everson was a guest on the Rumble Ponies Pregame Show with Jacob Wilkins and he talked about how with Rudick being healthy, a lot of the good things he was doing previously are showing up:
We had a great talk in spring training about his injury history. When he was healthy enough to play in the past, he did a lot of things right. He didn’t chase, he didn’t swing and miss in the zone. A lot of the metrics that you look at you go man, he’s got a lot of things going. Really work on the approach. Then, just understanding how good he can be. I think he’s done a good job of building as we has gone up.
Some of the things that Everson talked about in that interview was that Rudick has made a small change to where his bat enters the strike zone and it has helped his landing on the swing. Plus, Everson said he was pulling the ball more (39.4% of the time according to FanGraphs).
It’s early in the season, but Rudick had done a good job of cutting down on hitting ground balls and is driving the ball more in the air. According to FanGraphs, his line drive percentage has risen from 19.6% with High-A Brooklyn last year to 22.4% this year. and his ground ball rate has gone down from 39.2% to 29.9%.
When he is at the top of the order, Rudick is doing a good job at putting together good at-bats. His pitches per plate appearance is at 4.1 and he has a .303 BABIP (.287 last year with Brooklyn). Plus, the walk rate is at 18% on the season.
On his performance this season, Rudick said, “I’m happy with it right now. I was just trying to create something as consistent as possible. With my approach I’m taking this year and the confidence that I have this year, it’s awesome and it shows that I can play at this level, play at a high level, go out every day, take it one at-bat at a time, and just play baseball.”
Through the first two months of the year, Rudick has been one of the fun surprises of the season and it will be fun to see if he can turn that success into maybe a promotion to Syracuse at some point later in the year.
