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Every 12U baseball team has the same types of players. There’s the chunky first baseman who hits like Mark McGwire but has the speed and agility of a 70-year-old version of himself. There’s the coach’s son, who hits leadoff and plays shortstop, even though he just flat-out sucks. Then there’s the slap hitter: often undersized, blessed with excellent bat-to-ball skills, yet cursed with a swing that can hardly generate a cool breeze. These kids were always lightning fast and a nightmare for GameChanger parents everywhere, somehow going 4-for-4 with four infield singles, two of which were probably errors, but generously scored as hits anyway.
Players like this tend to dry up as they grow up. By junior year of high school, most of the talented ones add power as they grow into their bodies. As for the rest, they usually fade out of baseball in favor of a sport that more directly rewards their speed and athleticism.
By the time they reach college or pro ball, the few pure contact hitters who persist often see their swing changed into something more analytically viable. The highly paid stats nerds behind the modern front office are quick to erase .030 points of batting average in exchange for some more extra base hits. It’s just optimal baseball nowadays, and now that most teams have come to that same conclusion, many of them aim to trot out rosters that are strategic carbon copies of one another.
Yet one player in MLB can still be called a true slap hitter, bucking nearly every trend of modern offensive efficiency while serving as the everyday outfielder for the American League’s top team: Tech alum Chandler Simpson.
Simpson had a brief yet productive stint on the Flats, slashing .433/.506/.517 with 25 RBIs and 27 stolen bases in his sole season. He was subsequently drafted with the 70th pick of the 2022 draft by the Tampa Bay Rays.
The Rays have always been unafraid to balk at league conformity, running what can only be described as a modern-day Moneyball scheme. Their greatest exploits have been on the mound, turning castaway arms into bona fide aces year in and year out. Their system valued Simpson higher than most, picking him some 50 spots ahead of where some outlets had him. So far, that bet has paid off, as Simpson sits on a .294 batting average with 70 stolen bases in his first 207 MLB games.
Yet these surface-level numbers don’t even begin to tell the story. In reality, Simpson is more of a crusader against modern three-true-outcome baseball. He doesn’t strike out much, with the third-fewest among qualified hitters. He also doesn’t take many free passes, with the 13th-fewest walks. The coup de grâce? Simpson is the only qualified hitter in the MLB not to hit a home run this season. Remarkably, Simpson has actually never hit a true over-the-fence home run in a post-high school baseball game.
Now, technically Simpson has three home runs. Personally, I don’t believe any count. In reverse order, there was one earlier this season, but that was in spring training, and any league where the likes of Will Ferrell and Russell Wilson see the field shouldn’t statistically count. Then there was an inside-the-park home run when Simpson was playing for the Montgomery Biscuits, the Rays AA affiliate, but since that ball didn’t leave the park, that doesn’t count either. Finally, there was a game on the Flats against Gardner-Webb. Simpson pulled a ball down the right field line, which, if undisturbed, would’ve bounced off the top of the wall and landed in play, likely for a triple. Instead, the Gardner-Webb outfielder tries to catch the ball at the track and winds up volleyball-setting it over the wall. That, for obvious reasons, shouldn’t count either.
This playstyle produces a Baseball Savant page that is simply a thing of beauty. It looks like a min-maxed RPG build rather than an actual baseball player. He is either last or wrestling for last in nearly every imaginable offensive statistic, except those related to the mechanics of his swing or low K rate. Yet, it’s obvious that he isn’t the worst offensive player in the league, so what gives? Well, Baseball Savant just doesn’t have the metrics to convey the value of Simpson’s ultra-small-ball playstyle, because there is no other player like him.
In search of a contemporary, the closest thing you’ll find is Luis Arraez, another ultra-contact hitter. But Arraez isn’t very fast and has the upside for 5-10 home runs per season. Simpson trades this power upside for being, according to Baseball Savant, the best baserunner in MLB. While Simpson is quite good at swiping bags, his best value comes in taking extra bases: turning doubles into triples and scoring from first on shallow doubles. This alone has generated 6 extra runs this season, a league best.
In his rookie campaign, the biggest knock on Simpson was his defense, as he graded as one of the worst fielders in MLB. His issue was his range, marked as 11th percentile in outs above average, confounding for such an athletic player. He drastically improved within the next season, going from 11th to 95th percentile, a meteoric rise that shows his adaptability.
All of this goes to show why Chandler Simpson fascinates me. In a game that analytics gurus have deemed all but solved, Simpson shows there still are multiple ways to not only survive in the league, but thrive. To many players, Simpson’s results would be treated as a fault, an inefficient bug waiting to be squashed. To him, it’s a feature, and one that he’s using to become a top outfielder in MLB. There is simply no other player like him, and with how the sport is trending, I doubt there will be one for a very long time. But, who knows? Maybe there’s a 14-year-old somewhere watching Simpson that’ll ditch the Muscle Milk and squat racks in favor of peppering endless ground balls up the middle. Sure, it’s not glamorous, but it certainly gets the job done.
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