MJ Melendez is at the biggest turning point in his career

From the moment a rookie steps onto a big league field for the first time, a clock starts ticking. That clock will eventually stop. Whether the time allotted is a slow burn or a flash fire is due to a variety of factors—skill, injury, timing, the whims of fate. Regardless, every player’s career ends at some point.

There are moments in time where the ticking clock feels more present than others, and I think that it should be obvious for MJ Melendez that the clock this season is louder than it’s ever been. Melendez is a Gen Z-er; he’s technologically savvy to navigate to his page on Fangraphs or Baseball-Reference and see his Wins Above Replacement at -0.8, and he’s smart enough to know that is not good.

The Royals know that’s not good, too, but they are running out of runway for getting Melendez’s potential off the ground. When your team is losing 100 games a year, you can spend plate appearances on a clearly talented homegrown player to try and figure it out. But when your team’s goal is to make the playoffs and said player is no longer making the league minimum salary, as Melendez is this starting this year? Well, at that point you start running out of options.

Armchair hitting coaches would argue that, hey, the team should just have Melendez revamp his swing and that’ll do it—as if it were that easy. MLB players are not video game avatars that can be swapped out with different swings at the drop of a baseball cap. Besides, fundamentally altering core mechanics does not always yield positive results, as players arrived at their swinging mechanics because they work for them.

Melendez has tried to alter his swinging mechanics before, too. After playing well for the first nine games of 2023, Melendez hit a horrific slump. Over his next 21 games, Melendez would hit .104/.178/.164 in 73 plate appearances. In the beginning of May, Melendez tried to alter his swing.

Early last week, during the first series of the Royals’ current homestand, MJ Melendez and Bobby Witt Jr. were in the batting cage with Royals hitting coaches taking swings using “heater balls” — which are softer than a baseball — off a machine emulating extreme rising fastballs.

Melendez was struggling with the drill and trying different stances to have better success.

“You’d think, ‘Well, the ball’s coming up, so let me stand up more,’” Melendez said. “But that wasn’t working. So I tried the opposite to see what happens. I started hitting it really good. I was like, ‘OK. That’s what it is. I found it.’”

Melendez bent his upper body slightly more toward the plate, and while it was a minuscule change, it was an effective one. The Royals outfielder found success in the cage that day and encouraging results on the field in the week since.

It worked, kind of, or maybe it didn’t. That depends on if you think putting up a .700 on base plus slugging from May 5 to the end of the year counts as success. To someone whose OPS had previously started with a five? Maybe. But a corner outfielder with shaky defense contributing that level of offense? Not so much.

Fast forward one year to 2024. The team had massively improved. Melendez’s journey, on the other hand, remained stagnant. Once again, MJ had a brilliant first 10 games of the season. Once again, he entered a deep slump, hitting .123/.177/.225 over his next 44 games. Once again, Melendez tried to modify his swing, working furiously to identify what was wrong. The Royals remained patient.

MJ Melendez has tinkered with his batting stance, with where his hands are, with his approach, you name it, during an unbelievably tough offensive stretch for the Royals’ left fielder. What he can do to turn things around has consumed his daily thoughts for quite some time.

“I’ve struggled a lot this season, but I feel like all the guys just pick me up every day. And it really helps. It’s easy to get down on yourself, and it’s a tough game. But that helps me keep going, knowing that they’ve got me.

“And the coaches, too. [Manager Matt Quatraro] having my back, him putting me in the lineup day in and day out shows the confidence that the team has in me. It gives me extra motivation. And hopefully I can turn things around. That’s kind of what goes into my mind every day, is that they have a lot of confidence in me, and I want to prove them right and do the little things that help us win games.”

Once again: it worked, kind of, or maybe it didn’t. Melendez slashed .237/.306/.456 from June 7 on, but his overall offensive output in 2024 was his worst yet, and he was on base only twice in 20 playoff PAs.

It was clear to everyone that Melendez’s swing mechanics weren’t cutting it. For his entire MLB career, Melendez has utilized a long and loopy swing with a wide open stance and a huge leg kick. When all those parts work in concert, he exhibits great power. But with such a complicated swing, the more common result is that Melendez’s swing is simply out of tune enough to result in dissonance more often than harmony. Over at Farm to Fountains, Preston Farr wrote last October that MJ needed to heavily rework his swing to find success.

It’s probably time to stop holding onto minor league home run crowns from three years ago and find changes that will make Melendez a successful big league hitter. Simplified mechanics would go a long way…The issues with Melendez aren’t in his ability. His power is excellent and his chase rate is right around league average. Great power with good enough swing decisions is a great place to start. None of that can matter enough without better timing, however.

And it was apparently clear to Melendez, too, that his swing wasn’t cutting it. Ostensibly hearing the metaphorical ticking of his big league clock, Melendez has been working on his swing and posted about it on Instagram.

This swing was evident in live batting practice a few weeks later. You can see in the right video below that Melendez looks more similar to his revamped swing than his trademark Rube Goldberg machine of a swing that he had been using for the past three years. It looks…good. It sounds good.

I won’t go too into Melendez’s swing because friend of Royals Review Craig Brown already did a great deep dive into the swing differences and how a new, more compact swing could help MJ. Craig also points out that the core building blocks of Melendez’s game—bat speed, hard hit rate, and average exit velocity—are all there.

What I think is most interesting here is the timing. With respect to Melendez’s swing tinkering over the past two years, he was simply doing that: tinkering, tweaking, refining. The offseason is the only time to do a total overhaul. To MJ’s credit, it sure looks like that’s what happened.

There is always a risk that such an overhaul doesn’t work, however. The assumption that Melendez and the Royals made here was that a more compact and simplified swing would maintain his power while improving contact rates and overall consistency. But what if it doesn’t? What if the swing change saps his power and doesn’t benefit the contact as much as it was hoped?

I do not think it is a coincidence that Melendez is taking this risk right now, because the risk/reward ratio finally tipped in his favor. Melendez’s 2025 salary is three and a half times more than it was last year, and it will only go up from there. Meanwhile, the Royals can’t afford to waste a full-time roster spot on someone whose overall value is so steeply in the red. If the Royals had gotten a significant free agent outfielder like they wanted to, Melendez might have lost his starting spot then and there.

So, as the clock ticks and gets louder in his ear, Melendez made a choice to risk it for the biscuit. If it works out, he will have likely bought years of playing time and will end up earning millions of dollars. If it doesn’t, well, the status quo wasn’t exactly going to be the kindest to him anyway.