How Dodgers 3B Max Muncy, At Age 35, Is On Pace For His Best All-Around Season

LOS ANGELES — Max Muncy wasn’t alive the last time a Dodgers third baseman started in the All-Star Game. Adrian Beltré belted a career-high 48 homers and finished second in MVP voting in his final season as a Dodger in 2004, but the Hall of Famer didn’t become an All-Star for the first time until six years later in Boston. In 2014, Justin Turner joined the Dodgers and proceeded to accumulate more than 1,000 hits over the next nine years with the team, but his two All-Star appearances during that stretch came as a reserve. For all of their sustained success over the past decade and standout play at third base over the years, the Dodgers haven’t had an All-Star starter at the position since Ron Cey in 1977. A month from now, that 49-year drought should end. At 35 years old, Muncy is playing arguably the best all-around baseball of his career. He leads all qualified National League third basemen in home runs, on-base percentage, slugging, OPS and FanGraphs’ version of wins above replacement. He also has the highest batting average of his career and, perhaps most strikingly, is grading out as one of the best defensive third basemen in the league by some metrics. The first All-Star balloting update reflects Muncy’s preeminence. As of Monday, Muncy already had accumulated more than 900,000 votes while every other NL third baseman had fewer than 400,000. After the update was announced, I asked Muncy what it meant to be playing at this level, in his mid-30s, five years since his last All-Star appearance. A smile crept across his face in the Dodgers’ dugout. “The truth is,” Muncy told me Monday afternoon before the Dodgers hosted the Rays, “it just means I’m healthy.” Muncy pointed out that after a slow start last year, he was on a similar pace to what he’s on right now until injuries slowed him down. Indeed, he produced an OPS over .900 from the start of May through the end of the 2025 season, aided by the addition of prescription glasses that he began wearing at the plate in late April to correct his vision — a “diamond-in-the-rough find,” as he described it. But oblique and knee injuries ultimately limited him to 100 games in 2025. The year prior, he hit 39% better than league average but missed three months with an oblique and rib issue. “For me, when you start getting older, and you’re finding it harder and harder to stay healthy, that always raises the question marks in your mind,” Muncy said. “So, it’s a big thing to just have been healthy so far this year.” Muncy has played in 68 of the Dodgers’ 74 games and is on pace for a 6.3-WAR season, which would make this the most valuable season of his standout 11-year career. His 148 OPS+ — hitting 48% better than league average — is the second-highest mark of his career behind only his breakout 2018 season (161 OPS+), when he rewarded the Dodgers for rescuing his career from the brink after he was released by the A’s. Eight years later, he’s continuing to reward the Dodgers in a season in which stars Mookie Betts, Kyle Tucker and Will Smith are all hitting well below their career norms. “He put in a lot of work with his body this offseason to put himself in a good spot, and that’s helped the consistency of the swing mechanics,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “But also, I think, Max has really matured as far as not letting things that he can’t control bother him. I think in years past, if it didn’t go well, it would start to speed up.” That could be evident both at the plate and in the field. Offensively, Muncy told me that it wasn’t until the beginning of the 2024 season when he finally felt like he had gotten his swing back, years after a collision at first base damaged the UCL in his left elbow and ended his All-Star 2021 season prematurely. He was constantly tinkering in an attempt to find his form again — “a lot of different Band-Aids,” as he described it — cycling through various bat models and even trying out a stepback move with his back foot in the box to assist with timing, looking for anything that could help get him back on track after averaging an .890 OPS and making two All-Star teams over his first four seasons as a Dodger. Defensively, meanwhile, he was struggling to translate his work from practice into the game after his transition from first to third base following Freddie Freeman’s arrival in 2022. “When I’d do my work, I’d feel very free with the glove, not afraid to field [the ball] at different positions, field it off-balance, field it on the wrong foot,” Muncy told me. “And then when the game would come, I just couldn’t find that freedom. The ball would get hit to me, and I would tense up. My feet would get stuck. I would be scared to field the ball one-handed, even though that’s how I do most of my work.” Conversations with Betts last year, as the six-time Gold Glove Award-winning outfielder made the full-time transition to shortstop, played a part in helping Muncy gain a better understanding of how he should be thinking about playing his own position. Then, early this spring, something clicked. A couple of balls were hit Muncy’s way that he said he “went out and got,” with his feet moving the way he wanted them to. “I’ve been able to take that ever since,” he said, “and just been kind of running with it.” More than his .266 batting average, his 16 home runs or his .891 OPS, it’s Muncy’s work at third base that he said he is most proud of this season. Better footwork has helped him improve his range, and he has made considerable progress on plays charging in. But it’s the routine ones — the balls hit right at him — that he feels much better equipped to handle this season. “You tend to get stuck at third base with the ball straight at you,” Muncy said. “When your feet are stuck, and you’re not moving, you’re always putting yourself at the chance of a bad hop. Going to my left, going to my right, I was always fine in years past. But it was the ball straight at me, that was the one you’d see bounce off my chest or I’m bobbling it. I just couldn’t find my rhythm because my feet would get stuck. So, now, I’ve been so much better at the one straight at me.” It’s not perfect. Last week, a potential inning-ending grounder got underneath Muncy’s glove in Pittsburgh and allowed a run to score. On Tuesday, the hardest-hit ball of the night from the Rays kicked off the heel of his glove, and he was unable to recover in time to make the play at first. Overall, though, those blunders are much more infrequent. He is producing his highest fielding percentage since making the full-time switch to third base, and Roberts said Muncy’s defense is as good as it has been since he can recall. By outs above average, Cleveland’s José Ramírez is the only qualified third baseman who has graded out better than Muncy this season. “Who I’ve been this year defensively is who I always thought I could be,” Muncy told me. “There’s been flashes of it and there’s been stints, but consistently it just hasn’t been there in past years.” There was no major technical change or transformation to get to this point. “A lot of it now is just about confidence,” Dodgers infield coach Chris Woodward told me. “He trusts that he can make any play.” He is also doing a better job listening to his body and understanding what it needs. Woodward said Muncy has learned that he has to throw every day, even on days when he’s not feeling his best, to have his arm where he wants it to be. But as Muncy has come to find out, more does not always mean better. “As I got older, part of the injuries happening the last couple of years was maybe me doing too much,” Muncy realized. There’s a balance that Muncy is finding between being prepared and not overdoing it, the way he had in previous seasons, in an effort to reduce injury risk. “Whether it’s weight room, cage, ground balls, throwing, running, there’s only so much your body can do,” Muncy told me. “For me, it was just maturing enough to realize there is a limit to that. “I used to come out here and take ground balls for an hour, trying to get better and trying to figure out what was going on. I’d be throwing for an hour, and I’d go into the cage, and I’d be hitting for hours, and my hands would be bleeding. And I had to understand that’s not the best way to stay healthy. You’re putting your body through so much stress.” Every year since suffering his elbow injury, Muncy has seen his batting average steadily rise: .196 in 2022, .212 in 2023, .232 in 2024, .243 in 2025 and now a career-high .266 to start the 2026 season. Five years after his last All-Star season, he has found a happy medium that is allowing him to excel as an all-around talent. The only Dodgers player worth more WAR than Muncy this season is Shohei Ohtani. “Now, he’s managed the lows, and the highs have been much more consistent,” Roberts explained. “I said this even last year, a year and a half ago, he’s just a better hitter now. I do think that he values getting a hit more than he used to.” And after making the All-Star team as a first baseman in 2019 and 2021, Muncy is now on track to become an All-Star third baseman for the first time in his career. “I’m happy to see him at the top,” Roberts said. “This All-Star Game, if it works out, this is going to mean a lot to him.”