Kyle Stowers was a part of that Baltimore Orioles place participant prospect fireplace hose, however it’s OK should you forgot about him. Stated fireplace hose has turned to a dribble because the Orioles’ fortunes have reversed. You additionally might need gotten him confused with Colton Cowser, which is perhaps why the Orioles felt like they might commerce him to Miami final summer season for Trevor Rogers. (The opposite prospect in that commerce, Connor Norby, has the identical similar-name-mixup factor going with Coby Mayo. This city ain’t large enough for the 2 of us, and so forth.)
And should you nonetheless had your eye on Stowers in spite of everything that, you had been most likely delay when he hit .186/.262/.295 in 50 video games for the Marlins after the commerce. A greater workforce, with a deeper expertise pool, may’ve eliminated a 27-year-old outfielder with that batting line from its main league roster. However in Miami it’s extra like a expertise splash pad, so Stowers stays.
A lot the higher, as a result of after 52 video games, the previous Stanford slugger is hitting .291/.362/.508. He has the identical wRC+ because the much-celebrated Pete Crow-Armstrong, the next wRC+ than Fernando Tatis Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Bobby Witt Jr., three second-generation massive leaguers with greater than $1 billion in contracts amongst them.
If Stowers’ present type continues, he’d finish the season inside spitting distance of that .300 batting common, 30-homer, 100-RBI degree that we count on from middle-of-the-order hitters. Or no less than, what we anticipated once I was a child, once we knew about spherical numbers however not any of the flamboyant stats which have developed within the twenty first Century.
Regardless, that’s a heavy expectation to drop on a man who’s in his first full main league season, and who began mentioned season below substitute degree for his profession.
So, “Can he preserve doing this?” is a special query from “Is he doing something totally different?” The reply to that second query is a powerful sure.
Right here’s our man on the finish of final season, hitting a triple off Alex Vesia. A groundball triple, it bears mentioning. By means of 2024, Stowers cherished a grounder. 5 of his 16 extra-base hits in 2024 got here off groundballs; over the primary three partial seasons of his massive league profession, Stowers hit the ball on the bottom 46.2% of the time.
If you happen to’re an enormous, strapping younger man like Stowers, “the bottom” shouldn’t be a very environment friendly place to hit the baseball. Even in his lamentable 2024 season, Stowers had plus bat pace, so he did get comparatively good outcomes when he put the ball on the bottom: a 74 wRC+ on grounders, in comparison with the league common of 41. However a 74 wRC+ isn’t going to chop it usually, particularly when his fly ball wRC+ of 77 was nicely beneath the league common of 126. That is, after all, to say nothing of Stowers’ largest downside final season: a 35.4% strikeout price.
Right here’s Stowers now.
As batting stance adjustments go, this one is pretty refined. He’s holding his palms just a bit farther out from his physique, standing a pair inches farther again within the field, and he’s opened his stance a number of levels. This isn’t the Ben Rice adjustment, for example.
But it surely’s modified all the pieces.
A Stowering Fly Ball
| Season | LD% | GB% | FB% | Air Pull% | Barrel% | xwOBACON |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 17.6% | 49.6% | 32.8% | 10.1% | 10.9% | .417 |
| 2025 | 23.5% | 39.4% | 37.1% | 24.8% | 19.5% | .508 |
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Stowers has each elevated his bat pace and shortened his swing. He’s hitting extra line drives and extra fly balls, and a higher proportion of each are going to the pull aspect, the place they will do extra injury. He’s minimize his groundball price by 10 proportion factors and almost doubled his barrel price.
Now, barrel price is on no account the be-all and end-all of hitting. Barrel price contains batted balls with an exit velocity and launch angle which have led to a batting common of .500 or higher and a slugging proportion of 1.500 or higher, since 2015. These are the place a number of doubles and residential runs come from. There are many hitters, even good hitters, hitters with a little bit of pop, who put up massive numbers with low barrel charges as a result of they’ve very good bat management and use the entire discipline and by no means strike out.
However an influence hitter will need to have a barrel price within the double digits no less than. If you happen to spend a number of time on Baseball Savant, seeing Stowers’ 19.5% barrel price most likely flipped an alarm in your mind. That’s a quantity you don’t see too typically.
Certainly, out of the 256 hitters on the Baseball Savant leaderboard, Stowers’ ratio of barrels per batted ball occasion is the fifth highest. The 4 hitters forward of him — the one 4 hitters with a barrel price of no less than 20% — couldn’t have been higher hand-selected as an example what sort of a hitter we’re speaking about right here: Oneil Cruz, Cal Raleigh, Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Choose.
And in contrast to Cruz, Ohtani, Choose, Kyle Schwarber, and a few of the different exit velo monsters on the market, Stowers’ uncooked energy shouldn’t be going to get scouts respiratory right into a paper bag. His hardest-hit ball this season is simply 110.3 mph, tied for 126th within the league with (amongst others) Mickey Moniak, Lenyn Sosa, and Maikel Garcia.
However Stowers ranks twenty first amongst certified batters with an EV50 — median exit velocity — of 103.7 mph, the identical as Elly De La Cruz. So whereas he’s not placing up outlier exit velos, he’s making particularly onerous contact when he places the ball in play. He wants to try this, as a result of lot of the earlier criticisms stay. He nonetheless chases a number of pitches exterior the zone. He swings and misses an absolute buttload, even throughout the strike zone; his Z-Contact% is the fourth worst amongst all certified hitters.
However you may get away with that should you get your cash’s value once you do make contact. Listed here are a few of the different hitters within the backside 20 in Z-Contact%: Rafael Devers, Logan O’Hoppe, Cruz, De La Cruz, Ohtani, Matt Olson, Freddie Freeman, and Bryce Harper. Stowers has made large strides towards turning into that form of hitter.
On balls within the strike zone, Stowers’ swing price (77.6% in 2024, 76.3% in 2025) and call price (75.9% and 76.4%) have barely budged since final 12 months. However he’s slugging .603 on these pitches now, up from simply .428 final 12 months. On pitches in Baseball Savant’s Coronary heart assault zone — the center of the zone — he really has minimize his whiff price from 24% to 19%, whereas growing his SLG from .515 to .795.
Whereas he’s achieved extra injury on pitches within the zone, he’s mitigated the destructive impacts of his swing-and-miss. Final 12 months, he whiffed 34.5% of the time; the one gamers within the twenty first Century who’ve carried that form of strikeout price to even a league-average general efficiency have both been elite defenders (Javier Báez and Matt Chapman), 40-homer guys who draw tons of walks (Adam Dunn) or each (prime Joey Gallo).
This 12 months, Stowers is putting out 27.6% of the time, which continues to be not good. But it surely’s throughout the regular bounds of “not good.” The price of doing enterprise for an influence hitter within the age of the 100-mph splitter “not good.” Particularly since Stowers has additionally elevated his stroll price to eight.9%, which is definitely a fraction higher than league common.
Now that he’s made these adjustments, can we pencil Stowers in for 30 homers a season for the following 5 years? I wouldn’t go that far simply but; it’s solely been a number of months. However he appears to be like like an excellent hitter proper now. Adequate that you need to bear in mind the identify.