How Sustainable Is Logan O’Hoppe’s Torrid Start to the Season?

One of the biggest early surprises of the 2025 season resides over in the American League West. The Los Angeles Angels are just a game-and-a-half behind the Texas Rangers for the lead in their division with a 9-8 record.

The Angels offense was third to last in run production last year as they occupied the division cellar. That hasn’t been the case so far this season as they currently sit 12th in MLB at 4.47 runs per game. Not perfect, but certainly an improvement over 2024.

There have been plenty of big contributors to the offensive resurgence. It helps that Mike Trout is back. Nolan Schanuel might be breaking out. Kyren Paris has been a revelation that few expected.

And then there is Logan O’Hoppe. The 25-year-old catcher has come out swinging, in every sense of the word, to start the season and has joined the others in leading the L.A. offense to its current rate of success.

O’Hoppe had always been a decent offensive catcher prior to 2025. In 192 games from 2022 to 2024, he has slashed .243/.303/.431 with 23 doubles, 34 homers, and a 104 wRC+.

He has been on another level to start 2025, though. In 14 games, he is slashing an impressive .327/.340/.653 with a double, five homers, and a 185 wRC+.

Few expect that O’Hoppe will be able to fully sustain his crazy start over the course of a full season. But will he at least be able to stay close or is he due for a crash back down to earth?

There are reasons to think Logan O’Hoppe will continue to rake, and reasons to think he won’t.

Based on the numbers, O’Hoppe seems to have one big strategy at the plate in 2025: be aggressive. It’s helped lead to many of his positive results but also some of the negative ones.

While some of his plate discipline stats have stayed consistent with his career numbers, his 77.8% rate of swinging at pitches in the zone is up from 71.5% for his career and his total swing rate of 56.2% is up from 52.1% for his career.

Where he is truly being more aggressive in particular is on the first pitch of his at bats. O’Hoppe is ambushing first pitches, swinging at 54% of them in 2025 compared to 36.6% of them for his career.

That could explain why he is feasting on fastballs this year. Pitchers love starting off at bats with a fastball, so it might not be a surprise that O’Hoppe has upped his average on fastballs from .254 last year to a whopping .423 this season. That’s where four of his five homers have come from as well.

The approach has led to harder hits, namely a 54.8% hard hit rate and 22.6% barrel rate, both well above his career averages. The former rate is highly likely to be sustainable as only Aaron Judge (26.9%) had a higher barrel rate in 2024.

Being that aggressive has other unfortunate side effects. O’Hoppe is striking out at a crazy 36% rate, way above his 28.5% average and in the bottom fourth percentile in the league.

He’s also barely walking with just one walk in 49 plate appearances (2.0%). It makes it even more impressive that he has a .340 OBP on the year despite that. If the hits start drying up, the OBP will start to plummet if he doesn’t get more patient.

One more part that will obviously be hard to sustain: O’Hoppe has a staggering .423 average on balls in play, well above his career .305 mark. Last year’s qualified MLB leader was Seiya Suzuki at .370 so at some point, some of those hits will start going for outs.

O’Hoppe has too many extremes currently working in his favor to not eventually result in regression toward the mean. That much is hard to deny.

But his early season approach is also leading to a new type of success, one that has resulted in more offense for the Angels. If he sticks to some form of that approach, he still has a great shot at ending up with his best offensive season to date.