One slow afternoon late in spring training, Chandler Simpson did something nobody had seen in nearly 1,500 of his professional at-bats: he hit a ball over the fence. He pulled an 89 mph slider 344 feet along the right-field line, and the Rays’ dugout lost its mind. (His previous home-run trot, at Georgia Tech in 2022, came courtesy of a ball that bounced off an outfielder’s glove and over.) He hasn’t hit another in the six months since. He’s batting .309 anyway.
That’s fourth-best in baseball, to go with an American League-leading 46 stolen bases for the AL’s best team, which clinched a first-round playoff bye this week. The 25-year-old is the only player in the majors with at least 150 at-bats and no home runs, and the only qualified hitter without a single barrel — MLB’s stat for balls struck with the sweet-spot mix of exit velocity and launch angle. While the rest of the sport chases elevation and hard contact, he hits the ball softly, on the ground more than anyone, and then outruns it: 3.96 seconds from the left-handed batter’s box to first, the best time in MLB.
The splits tell the whole story. League-wide, hitters bat .249 on ground balls and .258 on fly balls. Simpson hits .339 on grounders — and is 3 for 72 on fly balls, a .042 average — so he’s at his best doing the very thing modern hitters are coached to avoid. Only three players this century have gone a 550-at-bat season without a homer, the last being Elvis Andrus in 2010, and the last to do it while hitting .300 was Harold Reynolds in 1989. With one weekend left, Simpson’s knocking on that door.
The 355-foot temptation
He says the power’s in there — spring training proved it — he just hasn’t rebuilt his swing to go looking for it, because he knows what his game is built around. On Sept. 15 against the Athletics, he smoked a ball off the bat at 98 mph that carried 355 feet: gone at Yankee Stadium, a double off the wall at his home park. Nothing else he’s hit this year has traveled even 350. “I know my job,” he said. Critics have doubted his old-school style at every rung of the ladder, and he’s answered them every time.
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Call him the dead-ball investor (IN04). Portfolios don’t usually go wrong because a strategy was unfashionable; they go wrong when a natural singles hitter decides to swing like a slugger — the steady saver who chases whatever hit home runs last year and finds out he’s 3 for 72 on fly balls. Simpson’s edge is knowing his job and building everything around it. For most households the job is paying for a life, and the ground balls are gloriously dull: an emergency fund, steady contributions, dividends, rebalancing. The house keeps its own safe money in Treasury bills and floating-rate paper, about as close as finance gets to a slap single that beats the throw.
The hard part is the 355-foot drive. Every plan gets one — a stock that doubles, a year that makes the boring approach look timid — and the temptation is to rebuild the swing around it. Simpson hasn’t. Effective and fashionable are different stats, and only one of them wins ballgames.