The New York Yankees gave their pitchers an unusual scouting report this week: Give Tampa Bay Rays center fielder Chandler Simpson a good pitch to hit. Don’t try to induce weak contact. Try to get him to barrel a ball up. 

It makes sense: With the fastest man in baseball, every fraction of a second counts. A slow roller is almost a guaranteed single—that can quickly become a double or a triple. 

“He’s playing a different game than most people,” says Jackson Loftin, who played with him in the summer collegiate Northwoods League. 

Indeed, sometimes it seems as if Simpson, 24, is experiencing physics differently than the rest of us. When he makes contact—which he does 88% of the time, good for 15th in baseball—time seems to slow down for him just as it speeds up for everyone else. Simpson breaks for first. The unlucky defender in the path of the ball rushes to collect the ball and sling it to first. Sometimes he sneaks a glance at Simpson. Sometimes he fails to set his feet or to find a solid grip. Sometimes he does everything right and it still doesn’t matter. Safe at first. 

And then the real trouble begins. Infielders have to play close to the bag to have any chance at containing him. Pitchers who might have preferred to throw an off-speed pitch choose a fastball to limit how long he has to steal. Everyone in the ballpark is thinking about him.

“Speed is the only thing that makes all nine players on the field nervous,” says Morgan Ensberg, who managed Simpson at Triple A Durham. 

In the two and a half weeks since Simpson’s call-up, he has nine infield hits, tied for sixth in the sport. (Everyone ahead of him has more than twice as many plate appearances.) Statcast measures his home-to-first time at 3.97 seconds; he’s the only player who clears 4. (Some scouts have that number closer to 3.85.) In the last week alone, he reached first safely on choppers to the pitcher, to the shortstop, to the third baseman and to the pitcher again. Those four singles traveled a combined 37 feet in the air. 

Tampa Bay Rays center fielder Chandler Simpson
Simpson has the quickest home-to-first time in the majors. | Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images

Major leaguers are learning what those at the lower levels have been complaining about for years: “His whole game is a problem,” says Perry Roth, the bench coach at High A Bowling Green. 

In Double A, Simpson once turned a line drive to left into an inside-the-park home run. In collegiate summer ball, he scored from third on pop-ups to the infield and from second on passed balls. At Georgia Tech, he once scored from second base on a sacrifice fly. In the minors, opponents played the infield in against him—with no one on base. 

Pretty much the only thing Simpson, who is generously listed at 5' 11", 170 pounds, can’t do is hit the ball hard—hence the Yankees’ scouting report. (They held him hitless in the first game of the series; he entered the second as a pinch runner, immediately stole two bases and scored the tying run; and he had two infield singles and scored on another in the third game.) And hence the low regard in which he was held as a prospect until about two and a half weeks ago. 

Simpson had only one NCAA Division I offer, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, out of high school. Even after he made the conference all-freshman team in 2021, he received only a temporary position for the summer collegiate Fond du Lac (Wisc.) Dock Spiders. But he played so well that they couldn’t let him go—a .378 average and 55 stolen bases in 51 games, the single-season Northwoods League record—and Georgia Tech took notice. There he led Division I with a .433 average. But he fell to the second round of the 2022 draft. 

“Coaches were looking for the 6' 3", 6' 4", 210, 225 guy that can hit bombs,” says Mike Lancaster, who coached him at St. Pius X (Atlanta) Catholic High School. “Well, that’s not Chandler.”

The joke was that on the 20 to 80 scouting scale, he had 90 speed and 10 power. He has never left the yard as a pro; the one time he did in college, it was because the outfielder bobbled the ball. His average exit velocity this year is 83.8 mph; in 2021, the last year pitchers hit regularly, they as a group averaged 83.6 mph. But Simpson never tried to be someone he wasn’t. 

Tampa Bay Rays center fielder Chandler Simpson
Simpson has just one extra-base hit in 15 games, but he does have 16 hits, three walks and six stolen bases. | Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images

Both his mother, Edye, and his father, Ralph, are educators; Ralph topped out at middle school baseball and knew his son was genetically unlikely to become a slugger. So once he realized that most other grade schoolers weren’t just stealing bases at will, he encouraged the right-handed Chandler to bat lefty to give himself an extra step coming out of the box, and they worked on molding his skill set to his natural talents. 

“Anything can happen if you put it in play,” Ralph would remind his son. “Nothing can happen if you swing and miss.”

In the parking lot before and after games, while other parents lectured their kids about squaring up balls, St. Pius X coaches would hear Ralph reminding Chandler: “We don’t pop out. We hit the ball on the ground.”

This strategy did not get most scouts’ attention. “He wouldn’t stand out in a showcase because his skills weren’t showcaseable, for lack of a better word,” Ralph says. “But during the game, his skill set makes an impact. It has an impact on the game, and that’s where he had the advantage.”

And Chandler liked the throwback style so much that it never really bothered him that he didn’t fit the modern prototype. “I’ve always tried to cause havoc,” he says. “I’m happy that I stand out for playing my game and being who I am.”

Still, the lack of power concerned many major league teams, as did questions about his defense at second base, where he spent most of his time in college. But as such an outlier, he was a perfect Rays experiment.

“In my whole career, I’ve never seen a player so undervalued by the industry,” says Kevin Boles, Simpson’s manager at Double A Montgomery. He sighs as he explains: “Because it’s different. Everything now is exit velocity. Everything is impacting the baseball. His just takes a little bit more time. He ends up hitting a double or triple—he just has to steal his bases to do it. It’s still impact.”

But plenty of players have come through the sport with incredible speed, only to learn that you can’t steal first. What sets Simpson apart from the Billy Hamiltons and Terrance Gores and Herb Washingtons who came before is his ability to make contact. 

“Speed is an unusable tool if [you] can’t hit the baseball,” says Ensberg. “But he also has elite bat-to-ball [skills]. I mean, I think there’s an argument that his bat-to-ball is as good as his speed.”

Between those tools and his makeup, the Rays were excited about what they had. “This kid has the most drive, most determination and the best work ethic out of any player in our entire organization,” outfield and baserunning coordinator Jared Sandberg says matter-of-factly.

Simpson has worked out with Hamilton and studied footage of batting champions Rickey Henderson and Luis Arraez at the plate. He spoke to Tony Gwynn Jr. about what made his dad great. He has borrowed running mechanics from Olympic sprinters Usain Bolt and Michael Johnson. Once, when the Rays asked Simpson to make a minor swing adjustment, he spent an entire off-day watching video of other hitters with similar stances. 

He leaves nothing to chance. “My routine is like an old man’s routine,” he says. “I want to be able to run like I run now at 34, 35, 36.” He starts his day with time in compression boots, then a dip in the hot tub, then works his way up from his feet to his ankles to his hamstrings to his hips to his lower back. The whole thing can take half an hour. Only then does he begin the typical pregame lifting and hitting sessions. 

And as he climbed the ladder—a minors-leading 94 stolen bases in 2023, a minors-leading 104 in ’24, a .389 average overall—he began to answer those questions about whether this would work. “It’s worked so far,” he liked to say. “What’s one more level?”

The Rays agreed. “You couldn’t reference recent examples to say, ‘Oh, look at these examples to give you an indication,’” says president of baseball operations Erik Neander. “They don’t really exist. So the only way to really, truly understand it is to give him the opportunity.”

You might say Simpson has run with it.


This article was originally published on www.si.com as Chandler Simpson Is a Reminder of a Bygone Era in Baseball.

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