I ended up here by accident. I was writing about Steven Kwan yesterday, and I found myself on a leaderboard that contained all 3,658 qualified seasons for batters since 2002. That’s the first year Sports Info Solutions started tracking its reams and reams of granular data, so I spend a lot of time with the leaderboards set to that particular date range. If somebody is at the top or bottom of a column on that leaderboard, then they have earned a superlative. For example, in 2003, SIS credited Tony Batista with a 63.4% pull rate — the highest pull rate ever recorded! I have to believe it’s the highest of all time, too. How is it even possible to pull the ball 63% of the time? It certainly sounds impossible, but I believe the number to be true both because the second and eighth spots also belong to Batista, and because, well, do you remember Tony Batista’s batting stance?
Yeah, that’s what you’d expect a guy with a 63% pull rate to look like. Batista’s offensive approach made him look like a guy who had time traveled from an age long before right field was even discovered.
Today, we’re talking about a different former Oriole who, at least as of right now, can lay claim to one of the most extreme seasons of all time. Here’s the top of the fly ball rate leaderboard. Once again, we’re looking only at qualified seasons.
| Season | Name | GB/FB | FB% | HR/FB% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Cedric Mullins | 0.40 | 58.9 | 6.1 |
| 2025 | Cal Raleigh | 0.43 | 57.7 | 25.3 |
| 2006 | Frank Thomas | 0.42 | 57.3 | 17.4 |
| 2010 | Aramis Ramirez | 0.48 | 56.8 | 11.6 |
| 2002 | Frank Thomas | 0.40 | 56.7 | 11.8 |
| 2002 | Tony Batista | 0.53 | 55.4 | 10.9 |
| 2004 | Jose Valentin | 0.52 | 55.2 | 17.6 |
| 2020 | Joey Gallo | 0.48 | 55.0 | 16.7 |
| 2010 | Mark Reynolds | 0.58 | 54.9 | 19.9 |
First of all, hello again Tony Batista. You were so delightfully weird. Please come back.
Second, SIS credits Cedric Mullins with a 58.9% fly ball rate. Not only is that the highest mark in our 3,658 player pool from the past 23 years, but Mullins is also the leader according to Statcast – sort of. His average launch angle is 28.0 degrees, which is, once again, the highest ever recorded (in this case since 2015). Because launch angles have done nothing but rise over the past couple decades, I think it’s fairly safe to say that no one in baseball history has ever put the ball in the air as frequently or as intensely as Mullins has so far this season.
Something may be bugging you, though: The fly ball isn’t the batted ball type with the highest launch angle. That honor belongs to the popup. Mullins sits atop the fly ball leaderboard because SIS labels popups as “infield fly balls” and includes them as a subheading under fly balls. He’s running a staggering 19.2% infield fly ball rate, the 34th highest ever, according to SIS. Combine that with a 39.7% non-infield fly ball rate, which ranks just outside the top 100, and he’s got a chokehold on the top spot in the inclusive fly ball category. It’s not just that Mullins is hitting fly balls. He’s putting the ball absurdly high in the air at an absurdly high rate.
As you can tell from the table above, that’s not working out at all. Everybody else in the top 10 saw at least 10% of their fly balls turn into home runs. These were big power hitters who put the ball in the air because when they did, it often went over the fence. The second spot belongs to Cal Raleigh, who rode a 25.3% HR/FB all the way past Roger Maris last year. Mullins is down at 6.1%. He’s not a home run hitter. His 30/30 season in 2021 was the only time he even made it out of the teens, and he’s now running one of the lowest slugging percentages of his entire career. He let his wRC+ stray more than six points away from 100 just once in the past six seasons, but now he’s all the way down at 67. That’s tied for the fourth-worst mark in the game. Things are bad.
How is Mullins doing this? Once again, it’s a whole combination of factors. Statcast thinks his swing is steep, but not notably so. His swing path tilt – the plane his bat describes over the entirety of his swing – is 31 degrees, which is actually flatter than average. However, his average attack angle – the direction the bat is moving at the point of contact – is higher. It’s 12 degrees, which puts him in the 67th percentile. So although Mullins actually has quite a flat swing, his bat still ends up fairly steep by the time the ball arrives. That said, if you’ve spent much time watching Mullins at the plate, you know that his swing looks very steep to the naked eye. This pitch is away and somewhat low, but he still finishes with his hands up high next to his ear.
It kind of does look like Mullins is trying to lift every single ball into the air. I suppose it’s possible that this high finish is indicative of some sort of unusual late alteration in his swing path, right before contact, creating late steepness which might cause the metrics to underestimate the effective angle, but that’s purely conjecture on my part.
We can get a little more help from Baseball Savant’s brand-new, super-cool miss distance leaderboard. It has a feature which shows you the percentage of time that each player ends up with his barrel underneath or above the ball. We’re only looking at pitches that the batter misses, but that still allows us to infer quite a bit about where his bat generally tends to be in relation to the ball. Mullins has been underneath the baseball 34% of the time this season. That’s the 26th-highest mark, which puts him in the 94th percentile. He’s very high, but he’s not way out above everybody else. But he’s also in the 94th percentile on the other end; his barrel ends up above the ball just 6% of the time, which ranks 21st from the bottom. Because he has a fairly steep bat angle to start with, when he hits the ball flush, he’s probably putting it in the air. And because he’s almost never above the ball, when he doesn’t hit the ball flush, he’s almost always putting it even higher in the air.
One odd thing is that the average pitch Mullins has put into play this season has crossed the plate 2.24 feet above the ground. That’s the third-lowest mark of his entire career. Normally, higher pitches tend to result in higher launch angles, because it requires more work to raise the bat high enough to get on top of them. But that’s not what’s going on here. Pitchers aren’t locating the ball any higher than they usually have to him, and he’s not seeking out higher pitches. He’s just getting under them, over and over again. His popup rate has risen against every kind of pitch.
In one sense, none of this is news. Mullins has always run high popup rates, and both the popup and regular fly ball rates have been rising for practically his entire career.
Regardless, it’s not working. In 2025, Raleigh put the ball in the air at a historic rate while hitting the ball very hard. He put the ball in the air because he was hitting the ball in the exact way that his steep swing was intended to hit the ball. Mullins, on the other hand, is running his lowest hard-hit rate since he became an everyday player in 2020. His case in free agency was always going to be rough. He put up 9.7 WAR across two sublime seasons in 2021 and 2022, but this is his age-31 season. His bat had been right around the league average ever since, and his defense had been trending down for years. I was thrilled to see him get a job with the chance for regular playing time in Tampa Bay, and his defensive resurgence really is great news.
If Mullins can continue defending well and find his way back to cromulence at the plate, then he can be a productive center fielder. But that’s an awfully big if, and right now, it looks like it will require a radical rethinking of either his approach, his swing, or both. I know that players don’t usually undertake that kind of overhaul during the season, but if I were a Tampa Bay hitting coach right now, I’d get right on it. Mullins is playing everyday, so the need is urgent, and besides, he has nowhere to go but up – in terms of production, that is. His launch angle has nowhere to go but down.
We’re not yet at the halfway point this season, and odds are that even if nothing changes, regression will come for Mullins’ launch angle. This statistical oddity probably won’t last, and for the sake of his career, I hope he gets things straightened out. However, while we’re here, we might as well enjoy ourselves. Something wild is happening, and it’s even more fun because Mullins has spent the season playing next to Chandler Simpson, whose current 59.4% groundball rate is the 35th-highest mark ever recorded. Maybe things are just weird in the Tampa outfield.
* This article was originally published here
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