The AL West is a bit of a mess right now. For the first time in a decade, the Astros are flawless. The Mariners — the defending champion and preseason favorite — have come a little out of the blocks and are now kicking into gear. So almost by default, Major League Baseball’s only unknown franchise is in first place.
I don’t think anyone can blame Carlos Cortes for driving the Athletics offense; his 67 plate appearances are nearly half of what full-time starters like Shea Langeliers, Nick Kurtz, and Tyler Soderstrom have recorded. But in that limited playing time, Cortes is hitting .377/.433/.689 with four home runs and just four strikeouts.
That’s right, Cortes is DiMiaggioing.
This brings me great joy, because Cortes is one of my favorite rare baseball prospects, and I never thought I would ever be able to share him with the big league viewing public. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good prospect; the Mets selected Cortes in the third round in 2018 and gave him a million dollar bonus.
But Cortes spent a lot of time around the minors between that time and his big league debut, and he got the sense that after four straight years in Triple-A, it might not happen. Cortes took a few picks ahead of Cal Raleigh in that draft, and made his big league debut last July. It’s been a long development curve.
Why was Cortes so interesting at the time? Well, he’s a veteran of the University of South Carolina, which interests me. (You want to know how old Cortes is? He was in college long before the Gamecocks were good.) There, he twice led the Gamecocks in home runs while playing mostly in the outfield, while being billed as a second baseman. Reasonable fan of Max Schrock, for those of you baseball sickos who remember some of Carolina’s younger sluggers.
You are not a FanGraphs Member
It appears that you are not yet a FanGraphs Member (or signed in). We’re not mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we’d like to point out a few good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Free Viewing! We will not mistake you for this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited topics! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles per month. Members are never cut off.
3. Dark mode and classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, the way you want.
5. One-click data export! Use our predictions and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove images from the home page! (Honestly, this doesn’t sound that good to us, but other people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. More Steam guesses! We have offer, percentage, and context neutral predictions available only to members.
8. Get the FanGraphs Walk-Off, a custom year-end review! Find out how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don’t fall prey to FOMO.
9. Weekly mailbag column, for Members only.
10. Help support FanGraphs and all of our staff! Our members give us valuable resources to improve the site and bring new features!
We hope you will consider Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize that this has been a very long marketing article, so we’ve removed all other ads from this article. We didn’t want to overdo it.
If you only know Cortes as a major leaguer, you probably know he’s a lefty. Look, here he is, clicking to pick up the ground ball, and throwing it back to left field:
How could he play the second team?
However, Cortes’ father taught him how to throw to the right, because that skill would greatly increase his chances. Ultimately, Cortes doesn’t need that skill at the highest level; he only spent a season and a half in the dirt in the Mets system.
Changeup pitchers are rare but unprecedented in baseball history. In the 1880s, before quarterback battles became common, there was a center fielder named William “Yank” Robinson who was famous for throwing to first base in the right and third base in the left. Whether this strategy was worth the trouble is not clear to me; In 1886, Robinson committed 95 errors in 125 games. In any case, Cortes is forced to wear a glove in the field, which will prevent any kind of Yank Robinson-style shenanigans.
Last August, Cortes became the third player on record, and the first baseman, to change hands in a modern major league game. The A’s hit Gio Urshela in the top of the ninth, leaving them on the bench with no one playing. Cortes hadn’t played third base since getting a few innings in the Florida Collegiate Summer League in 2016, and had to borrow a right-handed glove. But in this case of who speaks the most Italian, Cortes was the most experienced footballer.
There is no video of Cortes making a right-handed play, because he only spent one inning at third base and the only ball hit in the inning went to the other side of the infield. Mercy.
Still, even as an outfielder, Cortes is an intriguing prospect. He’s only 5-foot-7, and while he hit hard in his youth, he’s done some bat control in his limited playing time this season.
As I write this, MLB sent out a press release announcing Cortes as the American League Player of the Week, on the strength of his 13-for-24 performance over the past six games. Six of those 13 hits were for extra bases, including three home runs.
Despite those big slugging numbers, Cortes isn’t a speed guy, even accounting for his small frame. He has a 28% bat speed, and his fastball rate is only 13.4%. That’s at the bottom of the league as well. So is his good attack rate.
But Cortes’ projected stats from Statcast say he’s not just booming and dying at a 204 wRC+. Cortes has an xBA of .386, against a .377 batting average, and an xSLG of .648, against a real world SLG of .689. You kill the ball, great bat speed or not, good launch angle or not.
Aggregate bat speed numbers can be misleading. Compare Cortes to two other left-handed hitters with similar bat speed. Bryson Stott and Mike Yastrzemski have average speed; Cortes’ bat speed is all over the place:
Cortes uses that different bat speed to make more contact. After managing contact rates in the 70s for most of his major league career, Cortes has climbed to 81.5% in Triple-A in 2025 and 80.1% in the short major league game. This year, his overall contact rate has reached 87.5% and his field contact rate is 89.5%. That’s great — going into Monday’s action, Cortes was 10 percent behind Juan Soto in Z-Contact% for the leaders — but he’s hardly exceptional.
Where Cortes stands out is his strikeout rate: 6.0%, second best in the league behind Luis Arraez and unthinkable in a full season by no one else. Indeed, Arraez is the only hitter to post a strikeout rate below 6.0% in a full season. He is in the process of doing it for the fourth year in a row.
Pitchers pay off the mortgage on their ability to get hitters to swing out of the zone; those are boundary pitches, which are included in Statcast’s Shadow field, and experimental pitches further outside the strike zone, which appear as Chase pitches. Despite the lack of playing time, Cortes is in the top 15 in the league in runs scored in the shadow zone. He also swings on just 13% of pitches in the bullpen, which is half the league average.
And when Cortes swings at pitches outside the strike zone, he makes contact; his contact rate on pitches outside the strike zone is 81.8%, one of the highest marks in baseball. A lot of really good hitters don’t connect that much with pitches inside place.
The ability to make tons of contact on pitches outside the zone, while not being a shooter and taking cricket swings from places away from the plate is, well, a rare combination. Cortes is one of 10 hitters with 50 or more plate appearances (as of Monday morning) with an O-Swing% below 25% but an O-Contact% above 75%. The other nine: Miguel Vargas, Masataka Yoshida, Yandy Díaz, Kevin McGonigle, Liam Hicks, Chase Meidroth, Caleb Durbin, Geraldo Perdomo, and Steven Kwan.
This combination of skills is unusual, yes, but it does not guarantee that the hitter in question is good. It’s just that he doesn’t hit much.
But of those 10 hitters, Cortes has the highest strikeout rate by more than nine percent and the fourth-best EV90, behind only Díaz (who can swing more than Cortes’ body weight), McGonigle (who might get MVP votes this year), and Vargas (I have nothing here).
It’s a very small sample, but Cortes makes good decisions about when to swing, and when he swings, he communicates. And when he gets his pitch, he hits the stuffing on the ball. We’ll see how strong those parts are as the season goes on, but the A’s are no late bloomers. The outbreak of the late 20s would be typical, according to Cortes’ standards.
