2025's EV Gainers & Losers
Comparing Exit Velocity Data From 2024 to 2025
How’s THAT for some “AI SLOP” for the graphic baby! Is it lame to use AI for your images? SORTA! Is it better than nothing or what I would do with my Word Art? Actually.. maybe not, Word Art went kinda hard.
I told Chat GPT to make me a graphic, but make it look like 2002 Word Art. How’s that for a fusion of the old and the new? But it didn’t work. I guess those models didn’t train on Windows XP application data. Sad. Let’s go to the actual post now, though.
Of all the stats that have come out of the Statcast era, exit velocities are probably the most important. So much of what you do in the box score is determined by how hard you can hit the ball.
So we need to know how hard each guy is hitting the ball to win in the game of predicting the future. I’m here to look at some of the biggest gainers and losers in exit velocity, comparing the last two seasons with each other.
We’ll use 90th Percentile Exit Velocity, just because we prefer it. But in this case, average EV would give you the same general results.
What’s Normal?
Here’s a histogram of the deltas. If you don’t know what that means or what you’re looking at, you’ll be fine.
90% of values changed by less than 2.5mph
85% of values changed by less than 2.0mph
72% of values changed by less than 1.5mph
53% of values changed by less than 1.0mph
We’ll focus on the changes of greater than 1.5mph in either direction.
Losers
This is mostly bad news, but we’ll also want to look for the guys who might have been playing hurt. We should be trying to buy in on players who are likely to bounce back after down years that came from playing hurt. Elly De La Cruz is a good example of this. He lost one mile per hour on the EV90, and we know for sure he was playing for a good chunk of the year with a bad quad.
Same goes for Gunnar Henderson. It came out that he was playing through a bad shoulder for most of the year:
He lost 1.3mph in this study.
Neither of those guys is cheap, but I’m more than happy to get them at their ADP.
Let’s look at the biggest losers here, and we’ll look only at the guys currently going in the top 500 for 2026.
2+ MPH LOSSES
BRENT ROOKER
The first thing that pops into your head, seeing Brent Rooker here, is AGE. Tom Tango gives us this swing speed aging curve:
![r/baseball - [Tom Tango] Statcast aging curve for swing speed: swing speed is roughly flat until roughly age 31. After that, the drop is quick. Which makes sense with everything we know. We didn’t know the magnitude. Now we do.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nhSx!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa4ad149f-c2d5-4be5-ba2c-96517cb9b2d6_891x594.jpeg "r/baseball - [Tom Tango] Statcast aging curve for swing speed: swing speed is roughly flat until roughly age 31. After that, the drop is quick. Which makes sense with everything we know. We didn’t know the magnitude. Now we do.")
Brent Rooker turned 31 in November. So he is on the edge of the cliff looking down, and we already saw some losses show up last year. His bat speed only dropped from 73.7 to 73.5 from 2024 to 2025, so it’s not a big drop-off there. It was probably just a lower frequency of truly squaring up the ball, which we expected to happen last year after seeing the .362 BABIP and 23% HR/FB he put up in 2024. But a 105.8 EV90 at age 31 isn’t something to be overly excited about. That park in Sacramento will provide him some “cheap” homers to make up for it, but you shouldn’t be surprised if Rooker drops to a mid-20s homer bat pretty soon.
JUNG HOO LEE
I fell for the Jung Hoo Lee thing last year. I saw the strong contact marks, the foot speed, and the decent EVs and thought he could break out. And that wouldn’t have happened even if he did keep up the EVs. The guy just doesn’t hit fly balls, and he doesn’t have the will to steal bases. So it was a dumb take by me. Honestly, I was pretty trash with my draft advice last year. But I think I’ve learned some lessons and can do a better job this year.
Hoo Lee played 150 games, hit eight homers, and stole ten bags. He’s not good for fantasy. On top of that, he has a .265 batting average in the MLB now. So what does he do for you in fantasy?
→ MLB DW Projection: 607 PA, 12 HR, 11 SB, .272 AVG
→ OOPSY Projection: 609 PA, 11 HR, 10 HR, .262 AVG
With a 101.3 EV90, I’d have trouble buying in on double-digit homers for the guy. But he does get a lot of balls in play with his sub-15% K% and sub-8% BB%.
JUAN SOTO & MATT WALLNER
It’s interesting to see Soto here. His EV90 went down, but he hit two more homers in the same playing time. But a 108.0 EV90 is still elite, and he hit a few more fly balls last year. Nobody is worried about Soto’s power production at the age of 27. He seems to be in his prime power years right now with plenty more to go.
It’s an interesting question about fluctuation year-to-year. You’re not going to have the same average EV every year, obviously. Pretty much the only thing that doesn’t fluctuate year to year is your height.
I looked at EV90 by age, using the data we have available (2016-2025):
We have outliers on the ends. The old guys were David Ortiz, Nelson Cruz, and Carlos Beltran. The 19-20 year olds that qualified were Acuna, Vlad, Soto, and Chourio. So you have freak-of-nature type outliers there that you really shouldn’t count.
The lesson we learn there is that EV really doesn’t start clearly descending in the same way that bat speed does. And that’s probably because exit velo is about more than just how hard you’re swinging the bat. You can get into your mid-30s and still put up high EVs if you’re constantly squaring the ball up. And that’s what we typically see with guys who are staying in the lineup at 33-36 year olds.
All of that to say, there’s no reason to change anything in your mind about Juan Soto just because he lost two miles per hour in EV90 last year.
As for Wallner, he was hurt last year with some oblique and hamstring stuff going on. He maintained an elite 108 EV90 with that. I think it’s fair to expect a bit of a bounce-back and a big per-game power season. Read more about Wallner here.
1.5-2.0 MPH LOSSES
As we talked about with Soto and Wallner, going from 109 to 107 isn’t a big deal. If you’re well above 105, we’re not worried much about it. I mean, more is always better, but we’re more concerned about the guys who went from 105 to 103. That seems to be the range where you’d start seeing some dingers go for flyouts.
JOSH NAYLOR
Naylor fits that bill. He lost almost two points on the 90th, and 0.7 on the average. And he did, while adding seven to the max.
Maybe that was a misreading or something, but regardless, it shows you how noisy a max EV can be.
Naylor has gone from 17 homers (202) to 31 (2024) back down to 20 (2025). He’s never profiled, to me, as a true 30-homer threat, so that 2024 looks more and more like the outlier season for him. I think he’s a bit of a bust candidate as far as standard roto leagues go. More on him coming in the Mariners preview that will be out in the next couple of weeks.
SPENCER STEER
Steer is fringey in standard fantasy leagues this year, but for bigger leagues, he’s someone who is rostered. He’s had a pretty decent fantasy baseball career so far. He had a 20-25 season in 2024, and he hit 21 more bombs last season (with only seven steals). The EVs have never been great for him, but he’s gotten to 20+ bombs with that home park advantage and a nice ability to pull the ball. His 25.8% Air Pull% last year was the best of his career. If that keeps up, he’ll hit some dingers, but he’s not a guy getting any of those extra dingers that come from raw power. So I’d be pretty hesitant to depend on him this year, especially if you think the steals are going to be in the ten range rather than the twenty range. There’s also some extra competition for reps at first, third, and in the outfield in Cincy now.
Gainers
3+ MPH GAINERS
We saw more big gains than big losses last season, and the biggest changes were almost all positive.
TREVOR STORY
2024 was a short sample for him, and he wasn’t healthy. So, not a surprise to see him do a lot better than the 99.7 mark from 2024. The guy can still hit the ball hard, and really, all he needs is health to be a very productive hitter.
JORDAN WALKER
We’ve never questioned Walker’s raw power. It’s not a surprise to see him put up a big EV90 number, but 110.4 was striking. He was really hitting it hard last year. The issue was and is the launch angles
It doesn’t do you a ton of good to hit a ball 112 if it’s right into the ground. But man, if he can lift it a bit more… watch out. More on Walker here.
FIVE 2025 BREAKOUTS
I’m just putting these guys all together. Looking back, we probably should’ve been in on the Daulton Varsho potential. He went 104.6, 104.2, and 106.2 before a dip down to 103.3 in 2024.
The guy can hit the ball hard. But a higher strikeout rate (28% last year) and a super-heavy fly ball rate have kept his batting average in the pits. He also came into last year recovering from a shoulder issue, so that kept me away. There’s still a pretty limited fantasy ceiling with his batting average and 5% stolen base attempt rate from last year, but he’s a legit power hitter, and he’ll be in centerfield for the Blue Jays every day he’s capable with his defense.
Brice Turang, man. That had to be the most surprising power bust-out of the year. The guy banged ten homers in August.
You could start thinking that August was a total weird, freak occurrence and he’ll never have another 5+ homer month ever again. But he did make huge gains in EV… which yeah, that’s why we’re talking about him in the first place.
He went up a bunch in average and max as well as 90th, so that’s a good sign for some repeatability. Every system has him for at least a dozen dingers:
That, plus 30 steal potential and a good number of runs scored makes him a pretty appealing option at a super-weak 2B position.
2.5-3.0 MPH GAINERS
James Wood has elite tools. We’re likely to get some sort of 40+ homer, 20+ steal season from him eventually. But the strikeout (32.5% K%) and ground balls (50% GB%) limited him last year. He still hit 31 round-trippers, but the batting average was held down to .256.
Kyle Stowers’ power breakout was legit. All of the batted ball data shows him as being one of the game’s elite power bats. But he’ll have to overcome a high strikeout rate of his own (27.4%), and he’s also probably going to deal with some natural regression on his launch angle profile. It’s tough to repeat an 83rd-percentile sweet spot rate and 19% barrel rate. I’m selling a bit on him for those reasons, but I think he’ll sleepwalk to 20+ homers again as long as he’s healthy.
Will Smith played just 110 games, but he reached a career-high .901 OPS. He did the best work of his career by a good margin with the bat. And it was powered by a +2.8 in EV90 with a +1.7 in average.
Some of the numbers don’t match exactly between screenshots. I’m using Savant for the main graphics and FanGraphs for these player tables, so there will be very slight discrepancies, just in case you caught that and were wondering about it.
Xander Bogaerts’ presence here gives us some hope that he could build on his career-low 2.0% home run rate from last year. Age isn’t on his side, and neither is the home park, but a 105.6 EV90 puts him in the 20-25 homer discussion.
2.0-2.5 MPH GAINERS
I’m all over Ivan Herrera on sites where you already have his catcher eligibility. In leagues where he’s DH-only, I probably wouldn’t be too excited about it. But he has top five catcher upside with the bat, and the less he actually squats down behind the plate, the better in those situations. [Player Profile Here]
And I’m a big Ezequiel Tovar guy. Read about that here. He’s not for OBP leagues, but I think there’s a lot of potential there for standard leagues.
And hey, Jacob Wilson boosted his way up to 99.3! That’s still extremely low, but it was enough to get him to 13 bombs last year with the help of that home park. He hit six of those 13 on the road though, so he’s not a total Sacramento power merchant. If he hits .300 again with ten bombs, you’re onto something.
MORE!
Here’s everybody between +1.7 and +1.9:
What I’ve learned through the years is that your initial inclination to think that the biggest projection-beaters will be young players who are in the process of developing - that’s wrong. You more often get those big, unexpected seasons from veterans. That’s what we saw with George Springer last year.
I will eventually do a bit of a study on Springer from last year to see if we can make some predictions about veterans who could follow in his footsteps. You can see here that his EV90 never dropped below 105:
He was just healthier and more consistent last year. Everything came together.
I’m intrigued by the growth we did see from Colt Keith last year. He’s hit 13 homers in each of his two MLB seasons now, but he hit those 13 last year in less playing time.
→ 2024: 556 PA, 13 HR, 2.3% HR%
→ 2025: 468 PA, 13 HR, 2.8% HR%
So that’s a 17.5-homer pace over 625 PAs. I could see Keith being a guy with a .270 batting average and 20 bombs, which not a lot of people are expecting. He’s a hit-tool first bat, so he’s good with the bat. I don’t think he’ll ever be an All Star calibur hitter, but I think he can beat his projections again this year.
BOUNCE BACK CANDIDATES
We talked about this with Varsho. The guys who are consistently at a certain level and then dip down in the most recent year. That gives them bounce-back potential, especially if they’re not in their 30s when you start to see the age pull them down.
So we’re looking for players under 31 years old or so who had down years in EV90 last year after at least a couple of seasons previously being above where they were.
Here’s what I’ve got, these are just query results, so they aren’t exactly handpicked:
Will somebody give Nolan Jones another shot? Can Ryan O’Hearn push over 20 homers in PNC Park even if he gets some of that lost EV back? The two big upsides names at the bottom of the list are enticing. You could see both Tyler O’Neill and Royce Lewis having pretty big seasons if things go right. But there’s a lot that has to go right for those two glass bros.
That’ll do it! A bit of a mess, but hopefully some actionable data for you guys to use.