Cedric Mullins Rises And… Oh No. No, No, No, No, No.

I came here by accident. I was writing about Steven Kwan yesterday, and I found myself on a leaderboard containing all 3,658 hitters’ qualifying seasons since 2002. That’s the first year Sports Info Solutions started tracking its reams and chunks of granular data, so I spend a lot of time with leaderboards set up for that particular date range. If someone is at the top or bottom of a column on that leaderboard, then they have earned the highest amount. 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 at an all-time high, too. How is it possible to pull the ball 63% of the time? It sure sounds improbable, but I believe the number is true both because the second and eighth spots also belong to Batista, and because, well, remember Tony Batista’s hitting streak?

Yeah, that’s what you’d expect a guy with a 63% pull rate to look like. Batista’s offensive style made him look like a long-distance guy from long before proper field was discovered.

Today, we’re talking about a different former Oriole who, at least right now, can stake a claim to one of the best seasons of the year. Here is the top of the leaderboard for the football rankings. Again, we only looked at qualifying seasons.

First, hello again Tony Batista. You were 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 group of 3,658 players from the last 23 years, but Mullins is also the leader according to Statcast – sort of. His average launch angle is 28.0 degrees, which is, again, the highest ever recorded (this time from 2015). Because launch angles have done nothing but increase over the past few decades, I think it’s safe to say that no one in baseball history has put the ball in the air as often or as hard as Mullins has so far this season.

You may have something wrong: The fly ball is not the type of ball that is hit with the highest launch angle. That honor belongs to the popup. Mullins sits atop the fly ball leaderboard because SIS labels bunts as “infield fly balls” and includes them as a subheading under fly balls. He is sporting an incredible 19.2% infield flyball rate, the 34th highest of all time, according to SIS. Combine that with an outfield fly ball rate of 39.7%, which is just outside the top 100, and you get a squeeze at the top of the combine fly ball category. It’s not just that Mullins hits fly balls. He puts the ball absurdly high in the air at an absurdly high rate.

As you can see from the table above, that doesn’t work at all. Everyone else in the top 10 saw at least 10% of their fly balls turn into home runs. These were great strikers who put the ball in the air because when they put it, it usually went over the fence. Second place belongs to Cal Raleigh, who rode a 25.3% HR/FB to pass Roger Maris last year. Mullins was down 6.1%. He’s not a home run guy. His 30/30 season in 2021 was the only time he came out of the minors, and he is now sporting one of the lowest percentages of his entire career. He’s let his wRC+ stray more than six points away from 100 just once in the last six seasons, but now he’s down to 67. That’s tied for the fourth-worst mark in the game. Things are bad.

How does Mullins do this? Again, it’s a combination of things. Statcast thinks his swing is steep, but not by much. His swing angle – the flight of the bat that defines it over every swing – is 31 degrees, actually flatter there is an average. However, his average angle of attack – where the bat moves at contact – is high. It’s 12 degrees, which puts him in the 67th percentile. So even though Mullins has a fairly flat swing, his club still ends up being steep when the ball lands. That said, if you’ve spent much time watching Mullins at the plate, you know that his swing looks pretty steep to the naked eye. The voice is distant and low, but he still finishes with his hands raised near his ear.

It looks like Mullins is trying to lift every ball in the air. I think it’s possible that this high finish is indicative of some kind of unusual recent change in his swing, just before contact, that creates a recent spike that may cause the metrics to underestimate the effective angle, but that’s just speculation on my part.

We can get some extra help from the brand new, super cool Baseball Savant leaderboard. It has a feature that shows the percentage of time each player ends up holding his barrel under or over the ball. We’re only looking at the pitches the hitter misses, but that still allows us to think a little bit about where his belt usually is in relation to the ball. Mullins has been in baseball 34% of the time this season. That’s a 26-point high, putting him in the 94th percentile. He is very high, but he does not succeed above everyone else. But you are also at 94 percent on the other side; his barrel ends up above the ball just 6% of the time, which ranks 21st from the floor. Because he has a steep angle to begin with, when he hits the ball, he may be putting it in the air. And because he’s never above the ball, if he doesn’t hit the running ball, he just puts it too high in the air.

One strange thing is that the average pitch Mullins has thrown this season has crossed the plate by 2.24 meters above the ground. That’s the third-lowest mark of his entire career. In general, higher heights tend to result in higher launch angles, because it takes more work to lift the bat high enough to land on it. But that’s not what happened here. Pitchers don’t get more balls off him than they normally would, and he doesn’t want high pitches. He just goes under them, over and over again. His popup rate increased on all pitch types.

In a sense, none of this is news. Mullins has consistently produced high popup rates, and his popup and regular fly ball rates have been on the rise for nearly his entire career.

Regardless, it doesn’t work. In 2025, Raleigh put the ball in the air at a record high while hitting the ball hard. He put the ball in the air because he was hitting it in the right direction, which was intended to hit the ball. Mullins, on the other hand, is hitting his lowest rate since becoming an everyday player in 2020. His case in free agency was always going to be tough. He put up 9.7 WAR in two senior seasons in 2021 and 2022, but this is his age-31 season. His batting has been around league average since then, and his defense has been declining for years. I was happy to see him get a job and a chance to play regularly in Tampa Bay, and his resurgence in defense is really good news.

If Mullins can continue to play well defensively and find a way back into cromulence at the plate, he could be a productive outfielder. But that’s a big if, and right now, it looks like it will require a rethink of his approach, his swing, or both. I know players don’t usually make that kind of change mid-season, but if I were the hitting coach in Tampa Bay right now, I’d adjust. Mullins plays every day, so the need is urgent, and besides, he has nowhere to go but up — in terms of production, that is. His launch angle is going nowhere but down.

We’re not even halfway through the season yet, and chances are that even if nothing changes, the decline will come down to Mullins’ starting angle. This math quirk probably won’t last, and for the sake of his work, I hope he fixes things. Well, while we’re here, we might as well enjoy ourselves. Something is happening, and it’s even more exciting because Mullins spent the season playing next to Chandler Simpson, whose current groundball rate of 59.4% is the 35th highest mark ever recorded. Maybe things are getting weird on the outskirts of Tampa.