Meet Andréanne Leblanc, The Yandy Diaz Of WPBL

She May Break Out In Too Big Of A Way To Be Underrated For Too Long.

Revue de Web

Austin Klewan, Lover of music and baseball / Writing about the Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL) / Based in LA

It has always been a fun and nerdy (good nerdy) activity for baseball followers to trade names of players who are under appreciated in the public eye. Baseball accounts on Twitter, Youtube, and other social media sites regularly dedicate posts and videos to great ball players who, despite being all-star players during their heyday, may not be the most recognizable to the everyday fan.

Yandy Diaz, DH/1st baseman for the MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays, has always been one of those types of players I’ve loved to inform people about. He has become more of a known quantity among baseball fans in recent years, after batting .330 to win the AL Batting Title in 2023, but many are still unaware of the true scope of his productivity, both in terms of years and his overall performance.

At first glance, given his big physique (particularly his massive biceps), one would assume that Diaz is a 35+ home run hitting slugger with an average somewhere around .240. Instead, Diaz profiles as one of the game’s purest hitters. With all field power and total coverage of all areas of the plate, combined with having one of the most disciplined bats in all of MLB, Diaz has been a pest for pitchers since being acquired from Cleveland by the Rays in 2018. Including this year (through 8/17/26), he’s put up a .302 average and an OPS of .840 over his last five seasons, with 295 walks and just 417 strikeouts. But despite his consistently well above-average production, he has been named to just two all star teams and won a single silver slugger award over that time. Other players have just had bigger peak seasons that got more recognition over the steady and talented Diaz.

Andréanne Leblanc, similarly, doesn’t stand out in a major way upon taking a peek at the WPBL stats leaderboards. She’s isn’t close to being the biggest name on her own team either; Leblanc hits behind two of the league’s biggest stars in Kelsie Whitmore and Jill Albayati, and she is still waiting on her first WPBL homer to join those two plus Alexia Jorge and Amanda Gianelloni for SF. In taking a closer look at Leblanc with the bat, however, one finds a hitter with an unexpectedly sophisticated approach.

When one watches Leblanc step up to the plate, two words immediately come to mind: Big Power. And she certainly has that in spades, no doubt about that. But Leblanc hasn’t found success by simply going all out for home runs. Instead, she has excelled at simply meeting the ball where it gets thrown and making contact, trusting that her raw power will turn that contact into loud base hits.

Saturday’s game between the Firebells and Heights provided a few excellent examples of Leblanc at bats that illustrate this very point. In her first at bat against NY’s Jaida Lee, Leblanc gently guided her bat like a wand to slap this down and hard fastball right back up the middle for a single:

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Photo ci-dessus : Andréanne Leblanc. (Photo Credit: Zoe Davis / Getty Images)