Has Ceddanne Rafaela Made the Leap?

Ceddanne Rafaela’s breakout 2025 season has truly been a surprise. It wasn’t just that he ran a wRC+ of 80 in his first full big league campaign in 2024. It was how he got there. He ran the worst chase and strikeout rates of all qualified players. His contact rate and exit velocity ranked right near the bottom as well. He still looked like he could be a very good player by way of excellent defense in center field, but even though he was just 23, it raised real concerns about his potential at the plate. Beyond the fact that players haven’t historically improved their chase rates much after their rookie seasons, Rafaela’s chase rate was so extreme that it was hard to find someone to compare him to. A young player would be expected to refine his plate discipline some, but even if he had literally knocked an unheard of 10 percentage points off his chase rate, he still would’ve had the 12th-highest chase rate among all qualified players. And yet here he is now.

Rafaela has a 115 wRC+ and is on pace for 5.6 WAR this season. He has been the most valuable position player on the Red Sox. It’s probably helped that Rafaela has a year of experience under his belt and has been allowed to stick in center field all season, but this is a huge turnaround nonetheless. How did it happen? Let’s start at the beginning.

Through May 27, Rafaela was batting .221 with a wRC+ of 64. It was ugly, and because it wasn’t that far from what he did last season, it was easy to overlook some genuinely encouraging underlying numbers. (Credit to reader rickdugo3000 who set me straight in the comments when I overlooked those gains back in May.) Even during that terrible stretch, Rafaela’s walk rate was up a bit from last year and his strikeout rate was down significantly. His average exit velocity had taken an enormous jump from 86.6 mph in 2024 – 12th lowest among all qualified players – all the way up to 90.5, which put him around the 70th percentile. His xwOBA had climbed from .273 all the way to .335. He looked a whole lot better, but the ball just wasn’t finding grass.

Since May 28, Rafaela has hit 12 home runs and put up a 178 wRC+. His 2.7 WAR over that 40-game stretch have made him the third-best player in the entire game, sitting between Aaron Judge and Byron Buxton. According to our overall fielding metric (which includes a positional adjustment), he’s been the sixth-best defender in baseball across that same span, just ahead of Pete Crow-Armstrong. As you might expect, Rafaela has experienced some batted ball luck over this period, too. When you combine the ice-cold start and the red-hot recent stretch, his luck has just about balanced out. His wOBA and xwOBA are within a few points of each other, as are his DRC+ and wRC+. He’s making David Laurila’s bold prediction of 4.0 WAR and a Gold Glove look very smart indeed.

So Rafaela really has been better this season. Let’s talk about how he got there, and we’ll start by recapping our three main concerns. First, Rafaela was chasing way, way too much. Next, he wasn’t making enough contact on pitches in the zone. Last, he wasn’t hitting the ball hard. Put that all together and you’ve got a player who never walks, strikes out too much, and won’t get on base when he does put the ball in play. That’s not a recipe for success, so let’s see what’s changed.

Statcast credited Rafaela with a 46.4% chase rate in 2024. That’s the sixth-highest single-season mark among all qualified players since 2008, the beginning of the pitch tracking era. If we use data from Sports Info Solutions, which has chase rates going back to 2002, Rafaela just ran the highest full-season chase rate of any qualified player ever. We are talking about arguably the worst plate discipline campaign in recorded history. This season, he has dropped his chase rate to 42.1%. That’s a significant improvement, but it still leaves him with the fourth-highest mark among all qualified players, and it’s awfully hard to be a good hitter while you’re chasing that much. Rafaela has cut his chase rate against breaking balls and fastballs, but he’s chasing offspeed stuff more than ever. It’s great that he has improved some in this respect, but this is still a very, very troubling part of his game.

On the other hand, Rafaela’s contact rate on pitches inside the zone rose from 75% in 2024 to 82.8% this season. Not only is that a huge gain – the fifth highest among qualified players this season – but it also pulls Rafaela back from a scary precipice. As Ben Zeidman wrote in an eye-opening article for Baseball Prospectus last year, zone contact is a shelf statistic. That is, it’s important to reach a certain minimum threshold, but as long as you do, it’s not all that important. “The difference between 71% and 79% might mean the world for a big leaguer’s viability,” Zeidman wrote, “but the same eight-point differential between 80% and 88% sees a stark reduction in significance.” Rafaela is still running a below-average zone contact rate, but he’s close enough to that average that it’s not going to hold him back all that much. He has specifically stopped whiffing against offspeed stuff in the zone, improving his contact rate on those pitches from 74% all the way to 94%.

Last comes contact quality, and it provides another really encouraging sign. We probably should’ve expected that Rafaela could hit the ball harder than he showed last season. He hit more than 20 homers in the minors in both 2022 and 2023, and he ran a 45.4% hard-hit rate in Triple-A in 2023. But even knowing that, this season represents quite a jump.

In every measure of contact quality we’ve got, Rafaela has gone from significantly below average to above average. To be sure, part of this comes from the fact that he’s making better swing decisions. In 2024, 70% of his balls in play came on pitches inside the zone. This season he’s at 79%. If we look at the heart of the plate, those numbers are 44% and 51%. It’s a lot easier to hit the ball harder when you’re swinging at a decent pitch. But that’s not the sole explanation for his improved quality of contact, because even when we look only at pitches in the zone (and again within the heart of the zone), he’s hitting the ball harder than he did last year. His bat speed has increased a bit. His hard-hit rate has improved against fastballs, breaking balls, and offspeed pitches – that is, against all pitches.

Rafaela also looks a bit different at the plate. He added muscle in the offseason and came into spring training with a plan to improve against lefties. He has adjusted his stance to be a little less open, and his leg kick is much more dramatic this season. At the suggestion of new teammate Alex Bregman, he has pretty much eliminated all pre-pitch hand movement.

So that’s where we are. Rafaela is still chasing disconcertingly often, but his contact rate on pitches inside the strike zone has jumped toward the bottom of the acceptable range and he’s hitting the ball much harder. He no longer looks like a liability at the plate. Rather, he looks like a player whose high strikeout rate and low walk rate will cause him to be very dependent on batted ball luck – setting him up to be very streaky, as we’ve seen so far this season – but one who really could be an above-average hitter overall despite those flaws. Of course, all of that depends on Rafaela holding onto these gains. It’s easier to trust the gain in exit velocity. That’s hard to fake, and it alone raises Rafaela’s floor in a significant way. But his contact rate will be the one to watch. Going forward, plate discipline will still decide how Rafaela’s story turns out.