While hitting the baseball hard doesn’t guarantee base hits, it sure does help a ton. For a select few  Miami Marlins hitters, making quality contact on a consistent basis has been a key to success in the early going of the 2026 campaign. Liam Hicks, Xavier Edwards and Otto Lopez are all in the top seven — Hicks is fourth, Edwards sixth and Lopez seventh — in biggest year-to-year jumps in hard-hit percentage, per Statcast . It’s a statistic that signals that this trio of Marlins has figured out how to barrel up the baseball and knock it around the yard, something that Miami has been in desperate need of throughout the past several seasons. Last year, Hicks had a hard-hit percentage of 27.7%. It’s currently at a whopping 40.4% through the first quarter of 2026. Edwards and Lopez have similar stories. The former has a 38% hard-hit rate in 2026 compared to just 29.4% in 2025. Lopez, whose 46.9% hard-hit percentage leads the Marlins, has improved by 8.6% from 2025.…