From The Babe’s home run handles to Bonds’ maple mashers: A brief history of bats
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Bradford Doolittle
So often in recent years, baseballs have been the subject of controversy. How tightly are they wound? What is the height of their seams? What’s inside them that might determine how far they fly? What has been slathered onto them that might impact how slick they are?
In that sense, the sudden furor over so-called torpedo bats is refreshing. At least, for once, we’re arguing and conspiracy-theorizing about a different piece of equipment.
But torpedo bats are simply an iteration in the art of bat-making, a practice that has been evolving since the day some long-gone hominid first swatted at a round stone with a stick they found lying on the ground.
In that spirit, let’s take a moment to consider the turning-point moments in baseball bat history — an abridged guide to how we got from sticks to torpedoes.
Wee Willie, wood wars and the wild west of bat experiments
From the beginning, the partnership between players and their bats have been personal affairs, with everything from length to weight to wood preference coming under scrutiny. While the points of emphasis in the game have changed, the choice of bat has always depended on the size of the hitter, the shape of his swing and the kind of batsman he wants to be.
During the early days of baseball, regulations were few and far between and there was a lot of experimentation with the stick. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, some hitters used a flat-faced bat that was supposed to help with bunting but looked more suitable for hammering nails.
Bats were heavier in those days. The style of knob varied, from a ball-shaped knob, a mushroom knob to a barely-there knob at the end of bat handles that were much thicker than the ones we see now. Future Hall of Famer Nap Lajoie used a bat that had two knobs, which seemed to work fine considering he ended with 3,243 career hits, five batting titles and a modern-era record .426 batting average in 1901.
Like many hitters of his time, Ty Cobb swung a heavy bat (40 ounces until late in his career; bats today weigh between 30 and 33 ounces), and he gripped it with his hands apart to maximize control. That was the dominant theme of the era: The ability to control the bat while slapping at the ball, or bunting, was far more important than bat speed. Perhaps the avatar for that kind of baseball was Wee Willie Keeler, the guy who said, “Keep your eye on the ball and hit ’em where they ain’t.” Keeler, who stood 5-foot-5, slapped the ball around with what was basically an oversized baton.
Keeler’s bats measured 30½ to 31 inches in length (bats are now typically 33 or 34 inches), with varying weights up to 46 ounces. Such a thing would look comical in today’s game. Keeler flourished with his small body and heavy bat, hitting .341 over a long career. Power was simply not the aim for Wee Willie, and only 33 of his 2,932 career hits were homers — an estimated 30 of which were of the inside-the-park variety.
Even after specifications on what was allowed were codified, there remained plenty of experimentation. A famous take on bat shape was that of Heinie Groh, an on-base machine for the Giants and Reds in the early 20th century. His “bottle bat” had a long, thick barrel and thin handle. It looked like something more apt for cricket than baseball. Groh’s teammate, Hall of Famer Edd Roush, used a 48-ounce stick.
There was also a long-standing competition in wood sources, with hickory rivaling ash for supremacy. Cobb used a bat made out of what he claimed was black ash, but was probably just white ash. Perhaps the most famous bat in history was Shoeless Joe Jackson’s “Black Betsy,” a massive 36-inch, 39-ounce stick Jackson used his entire career. It was made out of a hickory tree from South Carolina, his native state.
Hickory has fallen completely out of favor, and, considering the rise in importance of power and bat speed over the decades, it’s not hard to understand why. According to Steven Bratkovich, author of “The Baseball Bat: From Trees to the Major Leagues, 19th Century to Today”, Roger Maris used a 33-ounce ash bat when he broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961. If he had used a hickory bat of the same dimensions, it would have weighed 42 ounces.
The invention of The Louisville Slugger
The origin story of the Hillerich & Bradsby Co., at least the bat-making portion of it, traces back to a seminal spring day in 1884. As with most of baseball’s storied past, details of the story have been questioned — even the Louisville Slugger Museum refers to it as “company legend” — but if it’s not exactly true, it ought to be.
One of the great hitters of the day, Pete Browning, had a frustrating day at the plate during a home game in Louisville and seemed to be especially irked by a bat that had broken. In the stands was 17-year-old Bud Hillerich, son of a local woodworker and an apprentice in the craft. Browning, having heard of Hillerich’s skills, asked the teenager whether he could help. Hillerich could, and the next day Browning rang out three hits with the custom-made bat Hillerich constructed for him out of Northern White Ash.
Browning went on to win two battling titles after that day, adding the nickname “the Louisville Slugger” to his existing moniker “Gladiator.” The ramp-up was a bit slow, but by 1894, the company had trademarked “Louisville Slugger” and the bat business was swinging away.
Three years later, Honus Wagner’s big league career began with the Louisville Colonels. Just after the turn of the century, when he had become one the game’s first true superstars with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he also became what is believed to be the first athlete to endorse athletic gear when he signed on as a pitch man for the Louisville Slugger. His autograph began appearing in the wood of the bat itself — the beginning of that long-common practice.
For 100 years or more, the Louisville Slugger reigned supreme as the bat of choice in the majors. The Slugger remains a popular choice, but in recent years, it has had to make room for batmakers such as Victus and Marucci atop the leaderboard.
The Babe’s thin-handled stick helps change baseball forever
Baseball writer and historian Bill James has often pointed to the continual thinning of the bat handle as a key driver of the game’s shift from an emphasis on bat control to one of bat speed. This evolution began in the early 1920s and, yes, it exploded when Ruth clubbed an unthinkable 54 homers in 1920, turning the dead ball era on its ear.
Ruth swung heavy bats — it’s one of the things for which he’s most well known. They tended to weigh at least 44 ounces and as heavy as 50, though it’s not believed he used the latter much during the regular season. But the handles were thin, allowing him to lash the bat around on the pitchers of his day. There was no one factor that led to the game’s transformation to a power-based sport, but the proliferation of thin handle bats in the wake of the Ruth phenomenon was certainly a contributor.
Incidentally, Ruth modeled the bat shape after that of another Hall of Famer, Rogers Hornsby, who didn’t use as heavy a stick but favored thin handles, recognizing their value in getting the bat head through the zone more quickly than was possible with thicker handles. Through 1920, Hornsby was already a .328 career hitter but had just 36 career homers in 2,903 plate appearances. During the next nine seasons, he hit .384 with 241 homers.
Other players, including The Babe, tend to notice such things.
Teddy Ballgame’s baked bats
If you had to anoint one player as the Albert Einstein of hitting, it would be Ted Williams. Williams had a theory of everything, as long as it pertained to hitting, and there was no detail too small. Naturally, this included his bats.
The story goes that while Williams was still in the minors, using a fairly standard-for-the-time 35-ounce bat, he borrowed a lighter stick from a teammate named Stan Spence. He used it to club a home run to center field and immediately knew that, for him, the lighter bat was the way to go. Initially, when Williams tried to order a lighter-weight model, Hillerich and Bradsby tried to talk him out of it. But you couldn’t really talk Teddy Ballgame out of anything.
A few years later, around 1948, a young Red Sox fan named David Pressman — who must have been a spiritual descendant of Bud Hillerich — noticed that, one night, after he had left a bat outside overnight in some dew-covered grass, it felt heavier. When he weighed it, sure enough, it had gained about two ounces. Assuming it had absorbed some moisture, he put the bat into a coal oven and — voila! — it was back to normal.
The story was recounted in Ben Bradlee Jr.’s “The Kid.” The excited Pressman managed to get this information to Williams, his favorite player, who invited him to Fenway Park for a chat. Pressman told him what he had found, and Williams listened. They settled on a system of using clothes dryers in the Boston Red Sox clubhouse to heat up and dry out Williams’ bats, and Williams used scales to monitor the weight of his weapons of choice from there on out.
This system of heating up his bats continued during the rest of Williams’ Hall of Fame career, during which he hit .336 with 299 homers — beginning with his age-30 season. Williams and Pressman remained friends and associates for the rest of Teddy Ballgame’s life. But Williams insisted Pressman keep the bat-heating ploy a secret until his passing.
However, Williams did ask Pressman to explain the theory of bat-heating one time to Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio, according to Pressman, looked unconvinced and simply walked away.
Superballs, pine tar — and an MLB ‘Mission: Impossible’
Cheating has a long, inglorious history in baseball, and when it comes to bats, there have been plenty of shenanigans and intrigue. DiMaggio used a bat named “Betsy Ann” during his 56-game hitting streak in 1941. The bat was stolen in the midst of his spree between games of a doubleheader. Despite his despair over losing Betsy Ann, DiMaggio kept his streak alive. Then she returned, arriving a week later in a plain brown package delivered by a courier. It turned out that the thief, a guy from Newark, had bragged about his prize to the wrong people.
One famous incident was the George Brett pine tar episode from 1983, though despite the rule on the books about the substance, it has never really been explained why having extra pine tar on a bat, while messy, would give a hitter any kind of edge.
Numerous players have been rumored to have used corked bats, which seemed to be most prominent from the 1970s through the early 2000s. The goal was simply to lessen the weight of the bat in the never-ending pursuit of bat speed.
There are all sorts of things you can stuff into a bat. On Sept. 7, 1974, Yankees star Graig Nettles homered against the Tigers. His next time up, Nettles stroked a single but broke his bat in the process. While Nettles ran to first, Detroit catcher Bill Freehan was busy chasing the six Superballs that had come tumbling out of Nettles’ bat.
Nettles explained that the bat had been a gift from a fan and, apparently, the powers-that-be bought his story. Nettles wasn’t suspended.
In another famous incident, a suspension was handed out. During a game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1994, White Sox manager Gene Lamont challenged Albert Belle’s use of a bat, and it was confiscated by the umpiring crew for later investigation.
Meanwhile, the rest of the game played out. Cleveland reliever Jason Grimsley crawled through the ceiling from the visiting clubhouse to the umpire’s room and swapped Belle’s bat out for one belonging to Paul Sorrento, leaving behind chunks of ceiling tile and mangled metal. The umpires were not fooled, and Belle was suspended seven games.
An even longer suspension was doled out to Sammy Sosa in 2003, when his bat shattered during a game and revealed the cork that was within. Sosa claimed he picked up the bat by mistake. He did not get the same benefit of the doubt that Nettles did.
Barry, Barry good wood
Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001. It’s a record. No, really, you can look it up.
There has been so much clamor about Bonds’ training methods over the years that his place in bat evolution tends to be overlooked. When Bonds set that record, he swung bats made out of maple, not ash.
ESPN wrote about this at the time. Bonds said then, “I tried it and I liked it. Ash wood is a softer wood that has a tendency to split and crack easier. Maple gives you the opportunity that if you feel comfortable with it, you’ve got a chance of keeping it for a while.”
It seemed to work out for him. Bonds wasn’t the first player to use a maple bat, but many others followed his example once his historic numbers attracted unprecedented attention.
A few years later, after the use of maple bats spread, it became a source of concern. While maple bats were harder to break than bats made out of other wood, including ash, when they did come apart, they tended to shatter. This would send dangerous shards of wood flying through the air around the field. People got hurt. Since then, after some MLB-led investigations into maple bats, the manufacturing processes evolved and the rate of broken bats has improved.
In the years since Bonds largely sparked their proliferation, maple bats raced past ash as the wood of choice in the big league. The trend was accelerated by blight — a massive infestation of invasive beetles wreaked havoc on the ash trees that companies such as Hillerich & Bradsby so long relied upon. More than three years ago, The Athletic profiled this sea change in the industry, describing Joey Votto as the last of the ash bat advocates. Votto, of course, has since retired.
Even so, more than 150 years since the advent of major league baseball, the source of wood for bats is not a settled, consensus part of the game. Birch is used in some bat models, and bamboo is often cited as a possible competitor. How long before someone tries to bring back hickory?
The only constant is change.
Synthetic sticks
In 2022, commissioner Rob Manfred announced that baseball would be experimenting with aluminum bats in hopes of introducing them for regular-season use in the middle of that campaign.
Except he didn’t — because that story making the rounds three years ago was an April Fools Day concoction, one that has cropped up around that date a few times. But this hoax underscores why it’s outlandish to even ponder metal bats rising from Little League and college ball up to the majors. Pitchers might have to wear Kevlar on the mound. Still, while aluminum bats aren’t coming to MLB, James wrote about the profound impact the advent of metal bats at other levels of the game has had in the big leagues in “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.”
In a nutshell, James wrote that it was once dogma that a hitter couldn’t prosper by crowding the plate and trying to drive outside pitches to the opposite field, the likely outcome being a stream of ground outs to middle infielders. But then aluminum sticks showed up and amateur batters found they were able to drive outside pitches just fine. Soon, advanced hitters learned that the same approach worked once they made the switch to wood.
Now, it’s no longer considered strange to see a hitter trying to drive the ball, in the air, to the opposite field. (See: Aaron Judge.) There’s more to it than the rise of the aluminum bat, but the kind of stick a player uses as a kid impacts what they do when they swing wood bats when they reach the big time.
The bat, er, beat goes on
The appearance of the torpedo bat is noteworthy, but the only thing novel about it is that it took so long for someone to think of it. There have been flat bats and round bats. Thin handles, thick handles, V-handles (a Don Mattingly innovation) and axe handles. Heavy bats, heavier bats and light bats. Short bats and long bats. The bat is always changing, and always has.
Twenty-five years ago, the rise of maple seemed like a revolution. Thirty years before that, it was the sudden appearance of cupped bats, a style in which the end of the bat is hollowed out. The origin story of those is another murky area, but it appears that while you could get cupped bats in America as early as the late 1890s, they first became much more popular in Japan’s professional leagues. In the late 1960s, onetime Cubs outfielder George Altman played in Japan after his career in the majors wound down, then brought some of the cupped bats back with him, where they attracted the attention of outfielder Jose Cardenal. (Or possibly Lou Brock, and Cardenal saw Brock with them.) The use of cupped bats had been sporadic but spread quickly, and the bats are now ubiquitous.
With companies such as Victus offering painted bats and other modes of aesthetic customization, including the popular pencil bats, bats have become as much about personal expression as they are about productivity. This is on full display on Players Weekend, when players and those who supply their bats can let their creativity fly. While these innovations might not have much competitive impact, they add color and flavor to the old game.
Torpedo bats are just the latest entrant on this ongoing continuum. They are the product of a collaboration between data science, bat manufacturers and each individual player. Just as bats have long been made to spec depending on a player’s swing and proclivities, so too is the torpedo bat.
For now, we can’t declare one way or another whether the advent of the torpedo bat is going to change the game, but it probably won’t. As we collect the data, chances are any tangible effect the bat might have will be subsumed by a thousand other factors that produce the game’s statistics. Perhaps we wouldn’t even be discussing this if Yankees announcer Michael Kay had not pointed out that New York was using these newfangled bats during a historic game in which the team ultimately went deep nine times against the Milwaukee Brewers.
Torpedo bats won’t work for everyone, but for some they will. Will they change the game? Whether they’re here to stay or another passing fad, they’re part of a sport that is constantly evolving — and will continue to do so.
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Bill Connelly
Back in May, ESPN’s team of college football reporters voted on the sport’s best coaches for 2025. The results were about as you would expect: Start with the three active guys who have most recently won national titles (Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Ohio State’s Ryan Day, Clemson’s Dabo Swinney), move on to guys with recent top-five finishes or national title game appearances (Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman, Texas’ Steve Sarkisian, Oregon’s Dan Lanning, Alabama’s Kalen DeBoer, Penn State’s James Franklin), then squeeze in a couple of long-term overachievers at the end (Utah’s Kyle Whittingham, Iowa State’s Matt Campbell).
The rankings made plenty of sense, but I couldn’t help but notice that the top eight coaches on the list all work for some of the richest, most well-supported programs in the country. There are some epic pressures associated with leading these programs — just ask Day — but there are also major advantages. It might only take a good head coach to do great things in those jobs, while at programs with smaller alumni bases or lesser historic track records, it might take a great coach to do merely good things. They’re such different jobs that it’s almost impossible to even know how to compare the performance of, say, Matt Campbell to Steve Sarkisian. Could Campbell have led Texas to back-to-back CFP semifinals? Could Sark have brought ISU its first two AP top-15 finishes?
The May rankings made me want to see if there were a way to apply stats to the conversation. If you think about it, we’re basically measuring two things when we’re gauging coach performance: overall quality and quality relative to the expectations of the job. I thought it would be fun to come up with a blend of those two things and see what the results told us.
Performance versus expectation
Gauging overall performance is easy enough. You could simply look at win percentage, and it would tell you quite a bit. From 2015 to 2024, the active coaches with the best FBS win percentages (minimum 30 games) were Day (.870), Lanning (.854), Swinney (.850) and Smart (.847). All ranked high in the May rankings. I tend to want to get fancy and use my SP+ ratings whenever possible, and they tell a similar tale. Looking at average SP+ ratings for the past decade, the top active coaches are Day (30.4), Smart (27.0), Lanning (22.3), Swinney (21.9), Franklin (20.3) and Freeman (19.0). They’re all in the May top 10 too.
Again, though, all of those coaches are employed by college football royalty. (Granted, Swinney gets bonus points for helping Clemson turn into college football royalty, but still.) Isn’t it more impressive to win 11 regular-season games at Indiana, as Curt Cignetti did in 2024, than to go 10-4 like Swinney did? Isn’t it probably harder to finish 12th in SP+ at SMU, as Rhett Lashlee did in 2024, than to finish fifth like Franklin did?
I’ve begun to incorporate teams’ performance against long-term averages into my preseason SP+ projections, and it seems we could use a very similar concept to evaluate coach performances. For each year someone is a head coach, we could compare his team’s SP+ rating for that season to the school’s average from the 20 previous years. (If the school is newer to FBS and doesn’t have a 20-year average, we can use whatever average exists to date. And for a program’s first FBS season, we can simply compare the team’s SP+ rating to the overall average for first-year programs.)
By this method, the 10 best single-season coaching performances of the past 20 years include Art Briles at Baylor in 2013-14, Jim Harbaugh at Stanford in 2010, Mark Mangino at Kansas in 2007, Bobby Petrino at Louisville in 2006, Greg Schiano at Rutgers in 2006 and Jamey Chadwell at Coastal Carolina in 2020 — legendary seasons of overachievement — plus perhaps lesser-remembered performances such as Gary Andersen at Utah State in 2012, Matt Wells at Utah State in 2018 and Brian Kelly at Cincinnati in 2007.
As far as single-season overachievement goes, that’s a pretty good list. And if we look at a longer-term sample — coaches who have led FBS programs for at least nine of the past 20 years — here are the 15 best performance versus baseline averages.
(Note: I’m looking only at performances within the past 20 years, so Nick Saban’s work at LSU (2000-04) or Michigan State (1995-99), for instance, isn’t included. I also went with nine years instead of 10 so Smart’s current nine-year run at Georgia could be included in the sample.)
Best performance vs. historic baseline averages for the past 20 years (min. nine seasons):
1. Chris Petersen, Boise State (2006-13) and Washington (2014-19): +12.8 points above historic baseline
2. Art Briles, Houston (2005-07) and Baylor (2008-15): +12.8
3. Gary Pinkel, Missouri (2005-15): +12.5
4. Nick Saban, Alabama (2007-23): +10.7
5. Jeff Monken, Army (2014-24): +10.3
6. Willie Fritz, Georgia Southern (2014-15), Tulane (2016-23) and Houston (2024): +10.0
7. Lance Leipold, Buffalo (2015-20) and Kansas (2021-24): +9.5
8. Bobby Petrino, Louisville (2005-06), Arkansas (2008-11), Western Kentucky (2013) and Louisville (2014-18): +9.5
9. Gary Patterson, TCU (2005-21): +8.6
10. Jim Harbaugh, Stanford (2007-10) and Michigan (2015-23): +8.5
11. Blake Anderson, Arkansas State (2014-20) and Utah State (2021-23): +8.5
12. Steve Spurrier, South Carolina (2005-15): +8.2
13. Greg Schiano, Rutgers (2005-11 and 2020-24): +7.8
14. Jeff Brohm, Western Kentucky (2014-16), Purdue (2017-22) and Louisville (2023-24): +7.7
15. David Cutcliffe, Duke (2008-21): +7.7
If we are looking for pure overachievement and aren’t in the mood to reward coaches for winning at schools that always win, this is again a pretty good list. Petersen was spectacular at both Boise State and Washington, while Briles, Pinkel, Monken and Patterson all won big at schools that hadn’t won big in quite a while. (Monken, in fact, is still winning big.) Blake Anderson’s presence surprised me, but most of the names here are extremely well regarded. And Saban’s presence at No. 4, despite coaching at one of the bluest of blue-blood programs, is a pretty good indicator of just how special his reign at Alabama was.
Still, looking only at performance against expectations obviously sells coaches like Saban and Smart short. Saban is probably the best head coach in the sport’s history but ranks only fourth on the above list. Meanwhile, Smart has overachieved by only 6.0 points above the historic baseline in his nine seasons at Georgia thanks to the high bar predecessor Mark Richt set. But he has also won two national titles, overcoming Georgia’s history of falling just short and at least briefly surpassing Saban as well. If our goal is to measure coaching prowess, we need to account for raw quality too.
The best coaches of the past 20 years
If we combine raw SP+ averages with this performance versus baseline average, we can come up with a pretty decent overall coach rating. We can debate the weights involved, but here’s what an overall rating looks like if we use 60% performance versus baseline and 40% SP+ average:
I always like to say that numbers make great starting points for a conversation, and this is a pretty good starting point. Anyone reading this would probably tweak this list to suit their own preferences, and while it probably isn’t surprising that Pinkel is in the top 20, seeing him fourth, ahead of Meyer, Harbaugh and others, is a bit jarring. (I promise that this Mizzou alum didn’t put his finger on the scales.) Regardless, this is a fun mix of guys who won big at big schools and guys who won pretty big at pretty big schools. That was the goal of the exercise.
Maybe the most confusing coach in this top 20 is Dabo Swinney. Clemson had enjoyed just one AP top-five finish in its history before he took over 16 years ago, and he has led the Tigers to 2 national titles, 6 top-five finishes and 7 CFP appearances. And while they haven’t had a true, title-caliber team in a few years, they’ve still won two of the past three ACC crowns. How is he only 10th?
The main culprit for Swinney’s lower-than-expected ranking is his recent performance — it has been inferior to both national title standards and his standards. Since we’re using a team’s performance against 20-year averages, a lot of this rating is basically comparing Swinney to himself, and he hasn’t quite measured up of late.
From 2012 to 2020, Swinney’s average rating was an incredible 17.0, which would have ranked second to only Saban on the list above. But his average over the past four seasons is only 3.6.
Part of what made Saban so impressive was how long he managed to clear the bar he himself was setting in Tuscaloosa. Per SP+, his best team was his 14th — the 2020 team that won his sixth and final title at Bama. While Swinney was basically matching Saban’s standard 12 years into their respective tenures, Saban continued at a particularly high level for at least three more years while Swinney fell off the pace.
Comparing Saban, Swinney and Smart year by year, we see that Smart was hitting Saban-esque levels seven seasons into his tenure, but his rating has fallen off each of the past two seasons. Even Saban slipped starting in Year 15, even though he still had nearly the best program in the sport for a couple more years.
The best coaches of 2025
Six of the top seven coaches on the list above are either retired or coaching in the NFL now, so let’s focus our gaze specifically on the guys who will be leading college teams out onto the field in 2025. Using the same 20-year sample as above — which cuts off the tenure of Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz but includes everything else — here’s how the current crop of FBS head coaches has performed at the FBS level. We’ll break this into two samples: the guys who have coached for at least four years in this sample and the guys who have coached between one and three years.
Our May top 10 list featured eight guys who have been head coaches for at least four years; all eight are represented on this list, including four of the top five. (Sarkisian has averaged a 13.8 rating over the past two seasons, which is a top-five level, but his overall run as head coach at Washington, USC and Texas has featured a number of ups and downs.)
Maybe the name that jumps out the most above is Josh Heupel. I think anyone would consider him a very good coach (he’s 37-15 overall), but he doesn’t exactly draw any “best in the game?” hype. He benefited from a positive situation at UCF, where he inherited a rising program from Scott Frost in 2019 and produced big ratings in his first couple of years on the job. But his average rating at Tennessee has been a solid 14.0 as well; the Volunteers had been up and down for years, but he has produced four top-20 SP+ ratings in a row and two top-10s in the past three years. He might not be getting the credit he deserves for that.
All in all, I enjoy this list. We’ve got mostly predictable names at the top, we’ve got some oldies but (mostly) goodies spread throughout, and we’ve got room for up-and-comers like Jeff Traylor too. This 60-40 approach probably doesn’t give enough respect to the Chris Creightons of the world — the Eastern Michigan coach has overachieved against EMU’s baseline by 7.2 points per season, which is a fantastic average, but at such a hard job, his Eagles have still averaged only a minus-14.4 SP+ rating during his tenure. Still, this is a mostly solid approach.
Now let’s talk about some small-sample all-stars.
Four of the top six of this list coached in the College Football Playoff last season, and while the guys ranked fifth and sixth made our May top 10 list, the guys who won big at SMU and Indiana, not Oregon and Notre Dame, take priority here. I was honestly floored that Curt Cignetti didn’t make our top 10 list; he led James Madison to one of the best FBS debuts ever, going 19-4 in 2022-23, then he moved to Bloomington and led Indiana — INDIANA! — to 11 wins in his first season there.
On this list, however, Rhett Lashlee tops even Cignetti. I’m not sure we’ve talked enough about the job he has done at SMU. He, too, inherited a rising program, as Sonny Dykes had done some of the nitty-gritty work in getting the Mustangs back on their feet (with help from an offensive coordinator named Rhett Lashlee). SMU hadn’t produced a top-50 ranking since 1985 before Dykes did so for three straight seasons (2019-21). But after holding steady in his first year replacing Dykes, Lashlee’s program has ignited: 12-2 and 24th in SP+ in 2023, then 11-3 and 12th in 2024. Looking specifically at the 2021-24 range, as the game has undergone so much change, Lashlee’s 16.8 average rating ranks second overall, behind only Smart (18.0) and ahead of Kiffin (15.1), Cignetti (15.0), Odom (15.0), Heupel (14.0) and Day (13.9).
Along with quite a few others here, Lashlee made my 2024 list of 30 coaches who would define the next decade; he’d definitely still be on the list — along with new additions like GJ Kinne and perhaps Fran Brown — if I remade that list today.
It’s 2025 MLB All-Star Home Run Derby day in Atlanta!
Some of the most dynamic home run hitters in baseball will be taking aim at the Truist Park stands on Monday (8 p.m. ET on ESPN) in one of the most anticipated events of the summer.
While the prospect of a back-to-back champion is out of the picture — 2024 winner Teoscar Hernandez is not a part of this year’s field — a number of exciting stars will be taking the field, including Atlanta’s own Matt Olson, who replaced Ronald Acuna Jr. just three days before the event. Will Olson make a run in front of his home crowd? Will Cal Raleigh show off the power that led to 38 home runs in the first half? Or will one of the younger participants take the title?
We have your one-stop shop for everything Derby related, from predictions to live updates once we get underway to analysis and takeaways at the night’s end.
MLB Home Run Derby field
Cal Raleigh, Seattle Mariners (38 home runs in 2025)
James Wood, Washington Nationals (24)
Junior Caminero, Tampa Bay Rays (23)
Byron Buxton, Minnesota Twins (21)
Brent Rooker, Athletics (20)
Matt Olson, Atlanta Braves (17)
Jazz Chisholm Jr., New York Yankees (17)
Oneil Cruz, Pittsburgh Pirates (16)
Live updates
Who is going to win the Derby and who will be the runner-up?
Jeff Passan: Raleigh. His swing is perfect for the Derby: He leads MLB this season in both pull percentage and fly ball percentage, so it’s not as if he needs to recalibrate it to succeed. He has also become a prolific hitter from the right side this season — 16 home runs in 102 at-bats — and his ability to switch between right- and left-handed pitching offers a potential advantage. No switch-hitter (or catcher for that matter) has won a Home Run Derby. The Big Dumper is primed to be the first, beating Buxton in the finals.
Alden Gonzalez: Cruz. He might be wildly inconsistent at this point in his career, but he is perfect for the Derby — young enough to possess the stamina required for a taxing event that could become exhausting in the Atlanta heat; left-handed, in a ballpark where the ball carries out better to right field; and, most importantly, capable of hitting balls at incomprehensible velocities. Raleigh will put on a good show from both sides of the plate but will come in second.
Buster Olney: Olson. He is effectively pinch-hitting for Acuna, and because he received word in the past 72 hours of his participation, he hasn’t had the practice rounds that the other competitors have been going through. But he’s the only person in this group who has done the Derby before, which means he has experienced the accelerated pace, adrenaline and push of the crowd.
His pitcher, Eddie Perez, knows something about performing in a full stadium in Atlanta. And, as Olson acknowledged in a conversation Sunday, the park generally favors left-handed hitters because of the larger distances that right-handed hitters must cover in left field.
Jesse Rogers: Olson. Home-field advantage will mean something this year as hitting in 90-plus degree heat and humidity will be an extra challenge in Atlanta. Olson understands that and can pace himself accordingly. Plus, he was a late addition. He has got nothing to lose. He’ll outlast the young bucks in the field. And I’m not putting Raleigh any lower than second — his first half screams that he’ll be in the finals against Olson.
Jorge Castillo: Wood. His mammoth power isn’t disputed — he can jack baseballs to all fields. But the slight defect in his power package is that he doesn’t hit the ball in the air nearly as often as a typical slugger. Wood ranks 126th out of 155 qualified hitters across the majors in fly ball percentage. And he still has swatted 24 home runs this season. So, in an event where he’s going to do everything he can to lift baseballs, hitting fly balls won’t be an issue, and Wood is going to show off that gigantic power en route to a victory over Cruz in the finals.
Who will hit the longest home run of the night — and how far?
Passan: Cruz hits the ball harder than anyone in baseball history. He’s the choice here, at 493 feet.
Gonzalez: If you exclude the Coors Field version, there have been just six Statcast-era Derby home runs that have traveled 497-plus feet. They were compiled by two men: Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton. James Wood — all 6-foot-7, 234 pounds of him — will become the third.
Olney: James Wood has the easy Stanton- and Judge-type power, and he will clear the Chophouse with the longest homer. Let’s say 497 feet.
Rogers: Hopefully he doesn’t injure himself doing it, but Buxton will break out his massive strength and crush a ball at least 505 feet. I don’t see him advancing far in the event, but for one swing, he’ll own the night.
Castillo: Cruz hits baseballs hard and far. He’ll crush a few bombs, and one will reach an even 500 feet.
Who is the one slugger fans will know much better after the Derby?
Passan: Buxton capped his first half with a cycle on Saturday, and he’ll carry that into the Derby, where he will remind the world why he was baseball’s No. 1 prospect in 2015. Buxton’s talent has never been in question, just his health. And with his body feeling right, he has the opportunity to put on a show fans won’t soon forget.
Olney: Caminero isn’t a big name and wasn’t a high-end prospect like Wood was earlier in his career. Just 3½ years ago, Caminero was dealt to the Rays by the Cleveland Guardians in a relatively minor November trade for pitcher Tobias Myers. But since then, he has refined his ability to cover inside pitches and is blossoming this year into a player with ridiculous power. He won’t win the Derby, but he’ll open some eyes.
What’s the one moment we’ll all be talking about long after this Derby ends?
Gonzalez: The incredible distances and velocities that will be reached, particularly by Wood, Cruz, Caminero, Raleigh and Buxton. The hot, humid weather at Truist Park will only aid the mind-blowing power that will be on display Monday night.
Rogers: The exhaustion on the hitter’s faces, swinging for home run after home run in the heat and humidity of Hot-lanta!
Castillo: Cruz’s 500-foot blast and a bunch of other lasers he hits in the first two rounds before running out of gas in the finals.
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