For a week in May, Luis Matos was the greatest player on the planet…and for the rest of season, he was pretty bad.
Generations from now young Giants fans — eager to understand what they could only piece together from fragments found on ancient Twitter feeds — will approach us wizened faithful who were alive for the 2024 season and ask: What was it like when the Matos Meteor hit?
Hopefully, I’ll have answers decades from now, because six months on, I’m still not quite sure. In all the strangeness of this past season, the rapid rise and rapid decline of Luis Matos sticks as a real fever dream of a week.
A National League Player of the Week, to be exact — an honor bestowed on a Giants player not since Brandon Belt in 2018. It was a comet from the cosmos, a spectacle of offense, of defensive flair that all felt impossible at the time given the circumstances.
An unsettled feeling weighed in my gut at the time: Michael Conforto was out with a touchy hamstring, Austin Slater a concussion, and Jung Hoo Lee had just collided with Oracle’s wall in center, ending his season. Outfield options were dropping like flies, and in the dark trenches of that dearth, here was Matos — excelling, thriving, providing… seemingly out of nowhere. He had an intriguing 2023, and bulked up and got people excited during Spring Training, but having missed the initial big league roster, Matos was hitting just .217 with 3 homers and 17 RBI over 31 games in Sacramento. The situation was desperate — the Giants just needed bodies…and what they ended up getting neared the celestial.
It all started with a 3-run homer off some guy named Yoshinobu Yamamoto against some team called the LaLaLand Boogers.
It doesn’t take much baseball know-how to know how freaky it was that Matos hit that specific ball into the left field bleachers. Look at the shape of that curveball. It’s weird and all loopy and elevated and not in a good low-in-the-zone-but-still-in-the-zone elevated, but more of in an uncomfortable-i’ll-pass-on-this-one elevated. At the apex of its arc, the baseball was shoulder-high, a height that warrants more of a defensive approach than the Herculean hack Matos loosed. Opponents would end the year hitting .214 and slugging .371 off that breaking ball. Only one other Yamamoto curve was hit out of the park in the entire season. And did I mention this was the first pitch of the at-bat? The first pitch Matos had ever seen from Yamamoto? The first pitch Matos had seen from a Major Leaguer in a month and a half? What kind of freak does that?
WELCOME BACK, LUIS MATOS!
He crushes a go-ahead homer off Yoshinobu Yamamoto in just his 2nd game back in the bigs! pic.twitter.com/CiqXbafIu8
— Just Baseball (@JustBB_Media) May 14, 2024
The big bang, heralding the start of the brief but joyous era. He’d collect two hits and another RBI the next day, then knock in one more the day after that while taking a homer away from Teoscar Hernandez and taking on the centerfield wall five days after it claimed Lee’s shoulder and season.
Play No. 65 of 2024: Luis Matos takes a homer away with an insane catch! pic.twitter.com/FbQgnB54gs
— MLB (@MLB) December 2, 2024
On May 17th against the Rockies, Matos collected 3 hits, two of them left the bat slower than 70 MPH. None of his exit velocities that night eclipse 90 MPH yet were still good for 5 runs batted-in, his fourth consecutive game with a hit and an RBI. The next day, he outdid himself with 6 RBIs on another 3-hit day. A 3-run homer in the 1st off Ty Blach drew him level with George “High Pockets” Kelly as the only Giant since the RBI became an official stat in 1920 with 14 runs batted-in over his first six games (with a plate appearance). Qualifiers be damned, to draw level with High Pockets, then pass the son-of-a-gun with a double in his next at-bat, is impressive darn-tootin’.
He also took on the wall again…and won.
But just as it was becoming unbelievable Matos became believable again.
He put up an o-fer in the finale of the Colorado series. Fans had to wait days for his next RBI. He maintained a somewhat decent average through June but the impressive increase in power — the one we had hoped would couple with his elite contact skills in the offseason — dwindled. After his double off Ty Blach, he didn’t bag an extra base hit until June 26th in Chicago.
From May 12th to May 18th, Matos slashed .455/ .455/ .864 with a .409 ISO and 267 wRC+. His O-Swing percentage (Fangraphs’ Chase %) was at 19.4%, plate-discipline that if stretched over the course of the season would’ve put him on par with Juan Soto. His contact rate on swings was a near perfect 97.1%.
Post NL Player of the Week award: .177/ .208/ .266 with .089 ISO and 29 wRC+ (130 PA).
The contact rate fell back to a typical Matos mean (85.3%), but the problem was that his chase-rate doubled to 39.6%. What was he chasing? Lightning, the proverbial flash in the pan, that fateful week in mid-May — the pursuit led to more and more desperate hacks as the season wore on.
The batted ball profile stayed the same between those two extremes in a lot of ways. He still pulled the ball about half-the-time, his average exit velocity stayed around 87 MPH, the quality of contact (according to Fangraphs) remaining roughly 25-50-25 Soft-Med-Hard — the biggest difference showed in his GB/FB ratio which swelled from 0.33 to 0.95.
Matos wasn’t hitting the ball with the optimal launch angle, something he excelled in 2023. His 38.6% Launch Angle Sweet Spot-% was one of the best in the Majors last season, and it plummeted to 29.1%.
Great contact skills and poor plate discipline is a bad combination, and it’s clear his slump was driven by a high success rate of putting the ball in play, just after poor swing decisions. Trying to to focus more on his pull-side was a necessary adjustment to boost power, one that was clearly successful when staying in the zone and offering at pitches he could drive, but when pitches started dropping below the knees, or breaking off the plate away, looking to pull the ball became a recipe for a routine grounder to short.
The glove quickly faded with the bat too. I had hopes of Matos improving as a defender — and he did, nominally, if you count jumping from a -5 OAA in ‘23 to -4 in ‘24. He certainly had his moments of injury-defying, hat-flying flair in the outfield, and then he had moments that were well…the opposite of that. Bad jumps, poor routes, miscommunications…
Heliot Ramos and Luis Matos let a ball drop right between them for a leadoff double at the wall, and now Ohtani comes to the plate.
Two center fielders who didn’t want to call each other off. Brutal.
pic.twitter.com/fx4AvXiQeD— SF Giants Update (@Giants__Update) July 23, 2024
There’s a lot of room for growth at the corners, and maybe he’ll find some significant playing time as a platoon with Yaz — but we can be certain that he’s not a center fielder. The Giants figured that out last year, then through a series of unfortunate events, they had to figure that out all over again this year.
Even with the major fall-off, that peak gave a taste of what life could be like with Matos. He has proved he can excite, but can he maintain and sustain? The Big Leagues ain’t all about setting franchise records — I’m sure if “High Pockets” Kelly were here today, he’d agree.
One of the dying flares of light as the sun set on the Matos Epoch came with his walk-off sacrifice fly on May 29th. No small feat considering the Giants’ situational hitting struggles.
It’s easy to get a little trigger-happy on the breakout predictions after Ramos’s and Fitzgerald’s year, but there is no guarantee that something like that will happen again. It’d be nice though, and if I were to predict another for 2025, Matos feels like a prime candidate. 400 plate appearances before his 23rd birthday, along with innate contact skills and an unruly athleticism, is a pretty solid foundation. Yes, the overall numbers dropped to unsightly depths, but I think he made some intriguing adjustments that were undermined in the long-run by an eagerness to replicate the un-replicable. Remember he’s a couple years younger than Ramos, four months younger than Marco Luciano. Time is still very much on Matos’s side to tinker and find the balance in his approach between discipline and aggressiveness, and the sweet spot in his swing between contact and drive.