Luis Matos is too intriguing to ignore

Spring brings optimism, but optimism is dangerous where young players are concerned.

Luis Matos is becoming a complicated figure.

What do we make of his stellar offseason in which he won the Rookie of the Year Award in the Venezuelan Winter League fromhitting .300/.345/.536 with 10 HR and 41 RBI in 55 games? That’s hardly evidence of a player who has figured it out and is ready to be a superstar in the major leagues. And yet, it’s quite a recovery!

That winter league season follows a paltry .213/.237/.347 in 45 games with the San Francisco Giants in 2024. But even within that poor line — 40% worse than the league average batting line (yikes!!!) — he won the NL Player of the Week Award after driving in 16 in his first 7 games — an historic feat! A high contact hitting prospect came up and hit! Still, after winning that award, he hit .177/.208/.266 over his next 130 plate appearances.

I’m not asking for the real Luis Matos to please stand up, I’m simply observing the chaotic nature of player development. If Matos winds up turning into a dude — and by that I mean, more than a 4th or 5th outfielder — it won’t have been the result of steady progress. That’s fine. I’m mentioning this because it makes grasping at his trends silly. He’s no different from most prospects in that regard — and for our purposes, let’s still consider him one.

Which brings us to the early days of Spring Training. Now, you might be shouting at your screen, “Bryan, you breathlessly stupid waste of life, whatever you’re about to say is spectacularly wrong — Spring Training stats only count when I say they do!” and I acknowledge that perspective. Nothing good came out of making judgments based on a microscopic sample size in the Cactus League.

But, still… what if Matos kept the contact rate and increased the damage on that contact?

Yesterday on FanGraphs, Ben Clemens wrote about the possibility of Astros catcher Yainer Diaz having a breakout hitting season. I wanted to see if Matos specifically would fare well using the metrics Clemens used to suggest Diaz’s 2025.

Reader, he does not.

Diaz (the Astros’ catcher) crushes pitches down the middle in such a way that it puts him in the top 5 of MLB hitters by Run Value (+22), trailing only Aaron Judge (+41), Shohei Ohtani (+36), Brent Rooker (+24), and Marcell Ozuna (+23). Matos registered a -6 in 2024.

Awful.

And as you’re no doubt aware, his entire Statcast hitting profile from 2024 is bad, save for his contact skills:

No, the key to the breakout will have to come from that contact skill. Matos was 25th in MLB (min 150 PA) in contact rate in 2024 (86.4%), and the list around him is good company:

Mookie Betts, 86.0%
Luis Matos, 86.4%
Jose Ramirez, 86.4%
Yandy Diaz, 87.5%
Wilmer Flores, 88.1%

Now, I’m skipping around, hiding some lower value players: Nic Loftin, Miguel Andjuar, Alex Verdugo, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Willie Calhoun — but this is what’s making Matos so interesting and complicated. Adding power to contact is easier said than done, and there’s really nothing that he’s done to suggest that he might become more selective. He just turned 23 and still has plenty of time to learn the value of selectivity. Right now, he’s still building off the knowledge that he’s gotten to where he’s at because he can make contact with a pitch thrown virtually anywhere. Still, the numbers are intriguing enough to consider that while he might not become a star, he’s unlikely to become a total bust.

THEN AGAIN — see? Complicated — as friend of the site and Giants minor league guru Roger Munter noted to Kerry Crowley in their latest KROG Podcast episode, Matos’s defense seems to have declined considerably. He is a contact hitter in an increasingly corner outfielder’s body, and that’s not a great sign. On the other hand, if he winds up evolving — de-evolving? — into a Wilmer Flores-type… maybe there’s something there?

Flores has been a reliably mid-to-high 80s contact rate guy for his career, and as bad as last season one thanks to knee problems, the year was his best hitting season ever. Notably, Flores has raked in Venezuelan winter ball, too.

But this has been a long windup to say that the Giants have had a lot of players graduate from prospect status, which makes it look like they have a dearth of young talent. Instead, they have someone like Luis Matos, who still has the potential to surprise and develop into a good — possibly even great player — and as Spring Training gets going, this feeling has moved out of the theoretical. He’s already starting to shine.