I was just 15-20 minutes into writing this when the Rays placed Richie Palacios back on the injured list and selected the contract of prospect Chandler Simpson, widely regarded as the fastest player in the sport. Simpson swiped 104 bags in 110 minor league games last year. He was caught only 13 times. He’s 8-for-11 in steals to begin the current season. He’s struck out in fewer than 10% of his professional plate appearances. Simpson has virtually no power, but he’s an oddity in today’s game and a throwback to the leadoff hitters of yesteryear. If he can carry those wheels and that preternatural contact ability over to the majors, he’s going to garner a lot of national attention, simply because he’s a departure from the MLB archetype in an era of baseball that’s increasingly focused on power, elevating the ball, exit velocity, etc.
Maybe Simpson will be a star for the Rays. Maybe he’ll follow the Billy Hamilton career path. We can’t know yet. He hasn’t played a single big league game. But even without the promotion of a notable prospect, the Rays’ future was already starting to look quite bright.
We’re early in the 2025 season, of course, so lots of things can be chalked up to small sample sizes. And the Rays do have plenty of early small-sample success stories. It hasn’t yet translated into winning ball, evidenced by their 8-11 record, but Tampa Bay has a +11 run differential and has spent a good portion (in some cases all) of the season playing without some key stars. Shane McClanahan is wrapping up his rehab from Tommy John surgery. Josh Lowe has been out almost all year with a strained oblique. Ha-Seong Kim was signed knowing that he’d be out into at least May following shoulder surgery. The version of the Rays that president of baseball operations Erik Neander and manager Kevin Cash trot out in June and July should be expected to look quite a bit different than the April version.
There are still some intriguing names on the roster right now, however, many of whom are flying too far under the radar. It’s easy to get too caught up in early-season data, as it tends to balance out over a larger sample. But with many of the Rays’ young and/or returning contributors, the breakout campaigns they’re teasing date back to the second half of the 2024 season. Tampa Bay operated as a seller last summer, trading away veterans Zach Eflin, Jason Adam, Isaac Paredes, Randy Arozarena, Aaron Civale and Phil Maton, among others.
That opened the door for a wave of younger players to begin receiving more playing time, and if you trace things back to that point, some of these eye-opening March/April stats start to look a little more legitimate. It’s still only about 40% of a season — less than that in some cases — but as is always the case with a Rays team that ebbs and flows through periods of contending and rebuilding on the fly, there are some very intriguing components of a core taking shape.
Let’s run through a few particular standouts.
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