Chase DeLauter’s early power binge had him looking like a video-game line waiting to happen. He hit four home runs in his first three MLB regular-season games, then added his fifth on April 3 in the Guardians’ home opener.
Since then, the home runs have come more slowly. DeLauter has one homer since April 3, and on May 3 he connected again against the Athletics in Sacramento for his sixth of the season. The stretch between his fifth and sixth home runs covered 121 at-bats and 34 games played, a reminder that the opening burst was never likely to hold.
That slowdown is what prompted fresh attention on May 16, 2026, but it has not changed the larger picture. Terry Pluto described DeLauter as a good hitter, not a pure power bat right now, and pointed to a player still doing plenty of damage in other ways. DeLauter has 16 strikeouts and 21 walks. He has 10 doubles. Against left-handed pitching, he is batting.405.
The numbers from the first few games were never realistic as a season pace, but they made the later drop-off stand out. DeLauter hit two home runs on Opening Day against the Seattle Mariners, then followed with one home run in each of the next two games. That start projected to a cartoonish 216 home runs over a 162-game season, the kind of pace that says more about a hot week than a true expectation.
What has mattered since then is that DeLauter has kept reaching base and putting together quality at-bats. In May, he is batting.348 with a.426 on-base percentage and a.926 OPS. He has had at least one hit in eight of the 12 games he played in May, and six of those games have been multi-hit efforts. For a player whose three-year minor league career was limited by multiple injuries, that kind of steady production matters as much as any home run total.
He has also been available. DeLauter has played in 41 of Cleveland’s 46 games so far this season, a workload that helps explain why the conversation around him has shifted from pure power to broader offensive value. Pluto’s view was blunt: let him swing and do not lock him into chasing homers. That is the real story now. The early blast off the bat was loud, but the more telling sign is that DeLauter is still hitting when the power spike has settled down.
