God Has a Plan for All of Us. Do the Rays Have a Plan for Cedric Mullins?

The Tampa Bay Rays have signed outfielder Cedric Mullins, late of the Mets and Orioles, to a one-year contract worth $7 million. This deal makes a lot of sense if you look at Mullins’ overall numbers from 2025: 17 home runs, a 10.0% walk rate, and a 94 wRC+ from a guy who can run well enough to play center.

That sounds like a pretty good player, and for just $7 million. Inflation’s so bad these days that $7 million is reliever money on the free agent market — not even good reliever money — and for that the Rays got themselves a fringe-average center fielder.

The Rays, whose owner was a legendary cheapskate even before he started gearing up to sell the team, have to pick their spots on the free agent market. Good news: Those spots are easy to identify. Tampa Bay’s presumptive rotation of Drew Rasmussen, Ryan Pepiot, Shane Baz, and Shane McClanahan: Good! The infield and DH spots: Very good, especially if Carson Williams supplants Taylor Walls at shortstop. Catcher? Eh, but everyone’s catcher is eh these days.

The outfield, however, swell, it stinks! RosterResource’s latest projected roster has the Rays carrying six guys who can play the outfield: Mullins, Josh Lowe, Chandler Simpson, Ryan Vilade, Jonny DeLuca, and Jake Fraley. Of those five, only DeLuca had a wRC+ of 100 or better in 2025, and that came in only 59 plate appearances.

It’d be one thing if the Rays had a bunch of up-and-coming outfield prospects who had underwhelmed in their first call-up or partial season in the majors. But all six of these guys are between the ages of 25 and 31. The development plan, such as it is, seems to involve going to the league office and groveling until commissioner Rob Manfred changes the rules so Simpson can steal first base.

I doubt the Rays think Mullins is going to be the second coming of Joe DiMaggio out there, or even the six-win player he was in 2021. Maybe not even the two- or three-win player he’s proved to be since that career year.

But Mullins’ modest 1.3 WAR in 133 games in 2025 is more than any of his new outfield colleagues produced. In fact, those five players only put up 1.6 WAR combined. At the very least, Mullins improves Tampa Bay’s outfield. He might even be the team’s best outfielder, as it stands.

I want you to hold on to that thought, because for the next 1,000 words I’m going to list Mullins’ faults at this point in his career. He might be the Rays’ best outfielder, but he also stank for most of this past season. Those two facts are not contradictory.

Back in April, I wrote about Mullins, partially because I’ve always liked watching him. I love a short guy with some punch in his bat and some mojo on the bases, and even if Mullins is no longer a down-ballot MVP vote-getter, he can still be a useful and fun player on a winning team.

That’s not newsworthy in and of itself, but at the time Mullins was white hot, while the rest of his Orioles teammates were playing like they’d only learned about baseball the day before. Mullins hit six home runs in his first 21 games, and when I wrote about him he was walking almost 20% of the time, with a 196 wRC+. That’s genuinely not too far off your garden variety Aaron Judge season.

That’s only about 20% of Mullins’ total 2025 playing time, but even so, you have to work pretty hard to get back to below average after such a ridiculously good start.

Obviously, Mullins was playing over his head in April, but a .367 xwOBA is still really good. Over a full season, that would’ve been comfortably inside the top 20 in baseball, around Cal Raleigh, Bryce Harper, Bobby Witt Jr. territory. If Mullins had posted that number as a wOBA all year, he’d be asking for at least 10 times the $7 million he actually signed for.

The .265 xwOBA Mullins ultimately posted over the final five months of the season was lower than anything any qualified hitter produced in 2025. Literally, he went from one of the best hitters in baseball to one of the worst. And there was four times more “worst” in Mullins’ 2025 stats than “best.”

Let’s look under the hood.

The contours of Mullins’ quality of contact didn’t change too much as the season went on, but he started chasing more and making less contact, even within the strike zone. By September, Mullins was whiffing on 43.5% of the breaking balls he swung at, and 21.6% of the in-zone fastballs he swung at. In his regrettable 42-game tenure with the Mets, Mullins still walked more than 10% of the time, but a .182 batting average and .281 SLG are just not the kind of hitting you can float with good on-base skills.

It pains me to say this as a longtime admirer of his work, but if I ran a team I would not choose to get into the Cedric Mullins business at this point in time.

It could be worse; he’s maintained his bat speed over the three seasons Baseball Savant has been publishing that data. In fact, Mullins’ fast swing rate was the highest it’s ever been. But he also posted the highest pull rate of his career. And while that includes a terrific 29.6% in-air pull rate, Mullins also pulled some nine groundballs for every one he hit to the opposite field. That’s a lot of free outs for anyone, especially a fast left-handed hitter.

If I were signing Mullins, those figures — plus his decline in in-zone contact rate over the course of the season — would have me worried that he is masking a slowing bat by coming out of his shoes swinging. It’s by no means a certainty, but with the way he ended the season, it’d be foolish not to look at him skeptically.

Surely the Rays have done their research on Mullins, and they have a plan to get the best out of him. A smart enough manager can turn six bad outfielders into two or two-and-a-half good ones by playing matchups right. But again, Mullins presents a conundrum here.

In 2025, even with the rotten end to the season, Mullins hit .268/.354/.429 against left-handed pitching, with a walk rate of 11.4% and a strikeout rate of 15.9%. That’s a 121 wRC+, which is middle-of-the-order stuff on most teams. But Mullins, a former switch-hitter who gave up batting right-handed just before his 2021 All-Star campaign, is not traditionally a reverse splits guy; for his career, he has a 113 wRC+ against righties and a 91 wRC+ against lefties. In 2024, Mullins had a 120 wRC+ against righties and a 42 wRC+ against lefties. So if the Rays are thinking about using him as a platoon player, they’d better be sure which side of the platoon to use him on.

And while Mullins can still run just fine — 22-for-26 in stolen bases, three runs above average in baserunning, 77th percentile sprint speed — there are downsides to using him in center field full-time. Mullins produced four outs above average in range in 2025, playing exclusively in center. That’s quite good.

The problem is that he gave all four of those runs back with his throwing arm. Mullins had 87th-percentile range and first-percentile arm value in 2025, making his one of the more shocking cases of Juan Pierre’s Disease you’ll find in the league right now. That puts even more pressure on him to produce with the bat.

I get why the Rays are doing this. Their outfield situation was, and to be frank still is, pretty dire. So are the available options on the free agent market. A challenge trade for an upgrade there, especially in center, would require weakening the big league roster elsewhere. And $7 million over one year isn’t that big a financial risk, even for the Rays, especially if they think they can jump-start Mullins’ bat.

But the direction the bat was heading in the second half of last season scares me. I would’ve liked to have seen the Rays wait out the market a little longer to make sure they couldn’t afford Harrison Bader. Failing that, just punt center field, and find the fastest, best defender the league minimum salary can buy and live with it, even if he only puts up a wRC+ of 80.

A Taylor Walls for the outfield, in other words.