Now that the 2025 MLB regular season has come and gone, and MLB betting interest is about to peak in the playoffs, we at Rotowire.com wanted to see which hitters had the least luck this year. With that in mind, we used BaseballSavant.com to find the MLB hitters who have been the unluckiest during the 2025 MLB season. The 3 categories included to average out the rankings were:
- Expected Batting Average minus Actual Batting Average
- Expected Slugging % minus Actual Slugging %
- Expected Weighted On-Base % minus Actual Weighted On-Base %
Here are the top 15:
Unluckiest Hitters of The 2025 MLB Season
Rank | Player | Team | Average Ranking |
T1 | Kansas City Royals | 3.0 | |
T1 | Los Angeles Dodgers | 3.0 | |
T3 | New York Mets | 4.7 | |
T3 | New York Yankees | 4.7 | |
5 | Los Angeles Angels | 8.0 | |
6 | Luis Garcia Jr. | Washington Nationals | 9.3 |
T7 | Texas Rangers | 10.3 | |
T7 | Chicago Cubs | 10.3 | |
9 | Miami Marlins | 10.7 | |
10 | Washington Nationals | 13.0 | |
11 | Luis Robert Jr. | Chicago White Sox | 13.7 |
12 | Milwaukee Brewers | 14.3 | |
13 | Toronto Blue Jays | 15.7 | |
14 | Pittsburgh Pirates | 18.7 | |
15 | Detroit Tigers | 19.0 |
*Players need 350 plate appearances to be included
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Who Were The Least Lucky Hitters in The Majors?
This year's "winners" of the Unluckiest Hitter in the Show are nine-time All-Star catcher Salvador Perez of the Kansas City Royals and Michael Conforto of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Both players had matching rankings of 3.0 according to our metrics, obtained from BaseballSavant.com stats.
In Perez's case, 2025 was one of the weakest he has put up to date, with 0.4 WAR in 155 games, according to Baseball-Reference.com. That matched his career low, set in 2023. Perez hit his usual high volume of home runs (30), but posted an OPS+ that was 22 points lower (100, versus 122) than last season. Perez also had the second-lowest batting average of his 14-year MLB career, at .236, down 35 points year-over-year. His OBP (.284, versus .330) and OPS (.729, versus .786) were both down by quite a bit from 2024.
Conforto, the 10th year veteran, struggled mightily during his first season with the Dodgers. He had career lows across the board, with minus-0.7 WAR (per Baseball-Reference.com), along with an average below the Mendoza Line (.199) and an OPS+ of 79 (down from 115 in 2024).
Those two players ranked above bad-luck players such as Juan Soto of the New York Mets and Ben Rice of the crosstown Yankees, who both managed to finish with scores of 4.7 apiece in our metrics. Jo Adell of the Los Angeles Angels was next up, at 8.0.
Soto's first season in Queens saw him post some of his usual gaudy offensive stats, with a 6.2 WAR and a .263 average, .396 OBP and 160 OPS+. The issue was that those totals were all much lower than his lone season with the Bronx Bombers, when he had 7.9 WAR, a .288 batting average with an OBP of .419 and an OPS+ of 179. He finished third in the AL MVP race in 2024.
Rice's second MLB campaign saw him post a WAR total of 2.2 in 138 games as a DH, though his .255 average and 131 OPS+ spoke to the gulf between actual results and expected outcomes for the 26-year-old. Rice and the Yankees find themselves in the Wild Card Round after losing a tiebreaker to the Toronto Blue Jays for the AL East crown.
Who Else Was Unlucky This MLB Season?
Outside of those five hitters, the MLB's unluckiest list featured names like Luis Garcia Jr. of the Washington Nationals, who had a score of 9.3 on our scoreboard, while Corey Seager of the Texas Rangers and Dansby Swanson of the Chicago Cubs were next up, with matching scores of 10.3 each.
Garcia had a dismal year at the dish for the equally dreary Nationals, with a 0.4 WAR in 139 games. Seager rebounded at the plate, with year-over-year gains in WAR (6.1, versus 5.0), OPS+ (151, versus 149) and OBP (.373, versus .353), though that wasn't enough to get him where he's been for much of his stellar MLB career as Texas missed the postseason again in 2025.
Swanson and the Cubs nabbed the top Wild Card spot in the Senior Circuit and the 31-year-old regained his footing at the dish. He had a 4.5 WAR in 159 games, with the former being his most since 2023 (5.2) while the latter stands as the most games he's played since 2022, when he appeared in all 162 games for the Atlanta Braves.
The two MLB players that rounded out our unlucky hitters top 10 were Otto Lopez of the Miami Marlins and Josh Bell of the Washington Nationals, who posted scores of 10.7 and 13.0, respectively.
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