Just a big old picture of TJ Rumfield as the featured graphic. What a strange season he had.
Today, we’ll look at batting average regressors. This is simple, easy, but good to do. And you guys like reading baseball articles in November, you sickos.
I remember when I first discovered BABIP. Probably back in 2010 or something. I was stupid about it. The logic in my head, I remember, was that .300 was the expected BABIP. Anything above that meant the guy would hit for a lower average next year. Anything below that, the opposite.
But it’s not that simple, and we now have expected batting average to use alongside of it.
So we’ll look at the hitters with the biggest gaps between their batting average and their expected batting average and look into some of the names.
AVG Above xBA
BIGGEST GAPS
I required at least 400 PAs for this. There were five hitters with at least a 30-point gap:
Chandler Simpson is the outlier of outliers in the batter’s box. He takes a different approach than almost anybody we’ve ever seen. He’s never had a barrel, he’s never hit an out-of-the-park homer in his professional career. He just slaps the ball somewhere and uses his league-leading 90 foot running splits to rack up knocks.
Fastest Hitters to First Base, 2026
Chandler Simpson 3.68 seconds
Nasim Nunez 3.72 seconds
Henry Bolte 3.73 seconds
Corbin Carroll 3.73 seconds
AJ Ewing 3.74 seconds
David Hamilton 3.74 seconds
Wade Meckler 3.75 seconds
Garrett Mitchell 3.75 seconds
Victor Scott II 3.75 seconds
Spencer Jones 3.76 seconds
There is one right-handed hitter on that list, Henry Bolte. It’s incredible that he’s #3 since all of the left-handers get a head start.
xBA, the way Statcast does it, does weigh in the speed of the hitter. So this gap isn’t explained away by him being faster than everybody else.
We should take the gap mostly seriously. The xBA was .261. I think it’s possible that the speed input they put into xBA didn’t really consider someone like Simpson. Like I said, this guy is unlike anyone else. Not only does he have speed, he also has this wizardry with the bat to where he’s able to put the ball seemingly exactly where he wants to.
FB%: 14% (lowest in league)
LD%: 22% (around average)
GB%: 62% (highest in league)
Lots of bunts, lots of intentional swinging bunts, persay. Just a guy who plays perfectly to his physical capabilities.
I’m not going to sit here on my computer in my living room and say that Simpson will hit .265 next year. But I’m also not going to ignore the xBA and say he’s going to hit .300 every year. I think you could see a drop to .280 in the future. Which is fine, you’ll still get your 40+ steals, and he did a whole lot of things this year that will give him a locked-in job next year. So he’s a fine pick, but maybe a bit overvalued by this .300 average in 2026.
TJ Rumfield is next. The posterboy. The big face of the post. His .331 BABIP was one of the highest in the league, and not something I see being repeatable. Coors helps (he hit .304 there and .294 on the road, so the splits weren’t wide), but nothing else in this profile supports a high BABIP.
He has 5th percentile sprint speed. I’m pretty sure I’m faster than that. No, I’m sure I’m faster than that. Give me some cleats, put the trackers on me, let me run. I bet I’m at least 40th percentile.
Rumfield also isn’t a line drive machine. The league average is 24%, he was at 26%. He hit 40% ground balls and 29% fly balls. His 38% Sweet Spot% was above the league average, but several points below the league leaders.
This looks like a lot of luck to me. To his credit, he does not strike out much at all (13.6%), so he’ll get some extra hits by virtue of just getting a ton of balls into play. But he’s like a .300 BABIP guy, so he seems like a big-time sell in the batting average department. Lots more on Rumfield in the Rockies preview that is published on the new site already, ready for you to read when we cut over.
Chase Meidroth is next. He has profiled in the past as a decent batting average guy, but I’m not seeing it in the data from 2026. Just a 35% Sweet Spot% (right at the league average), not very fast to first (ranked #335 in baseball), and the strikeout rate is only barely below league average (22%).
So I’m not buying a .335 AVG. I think he can strike out less and hit a few more line drives next year, but this .239 xBA is scary, especially when you consider that he doesn’t hit the ball super hard or steal many bags. It could be a pretty rough fantasy year for Meidroth in 2027.
Ceddanne Rafaela comes in with a .336 BABIP, with a 36-point gap between the xBA and AVG. We have a few seasons worth of data on him already, so we can look at the past BABIPs.
2024: .312
2025: .289
2026: .336
That makes it tough to believe in the boosted BABIP this past year. It’s a 25% LD% and 36% Sweet Spot%. Nothing special there. Just a pretty lucky year for Rafaela.
He did change his approach in 2026 and cooled down on the swing rate. He was near 60% in years prior, and calmed down to 52% last year. That doesn’t say much about his BABIP by itself, but it does help bring more pitches into the hitting zone since pitchers can’t just feed him junk balls and get cheap outs on bad pitches he chases. So I’m encouraged by that.
But I don’t think he’s a .285 hitter. He hit .246 in 2024 and .249 in 2025. And his 2026 xBA? .249. Looks like a .250 hitter to me!