Shea Langeliers Is Hotter than the Surface of the Sun

Over the past 30 days, the major league leader in position player WAR and wRC+ is also tied for the league lead in home runs and runs scored. You might not have noticed because the team he plays for, the Athletics, is taking some time off to go find itself before settling down. The player in question is not Nick Kurtz! Haha, I pulled the ol’ switcheroo there, didn’t I?

No, it’s Shea Langeliers.

That’s right, the most dangerous hitter in baseball over the past month is a catcher. Not only that, a catcher who entered this season with a career wRC+ of just 98, who was hitting an uninspiring .226/.285/.424 at the All-Star break. Since then, Langeliers is hitting .398/.419/.857, with as many home runs (12) in 105 second-half plate appearances as he hit in 267 PA in the first half.

A month ago, some three years, 378 games, and 1,444 plate appearances into Langeliers’ career, I thought we knew who he was. He was a 2.0-WAR player in 137 games in 2024, and had hit at least 20 home runs in both of his previous full major league seasons. Prime Buster Posey this is not; Langeliers is a negative framer for his career, and out of 64 catchers with at least 1,000 defensive innings since the start of 2022, he’s 53rd in FRV.

And as nice as that 20-homer pop is, Langeliers (at least until this most recent Bastille Day) walked too little and struck out too much, resulting in a .217 career average and a .278 OBP.

To be clear, the offensive standards for catchers are so pitiably low these days that Langeliers was still a good player. Anyone who can hit 20 homers a year, and catch well enough that he doesn’t have to chase the ball to the backstop five times a game, is going to get to start in the majors. In the land of men who hit like they’re blind, the one-eyed man is king, or something like that.

So why is Langeliers suddenly hitting like Jimmie Foxx?

Well, he’s not getting pitched any differently, that’s for starters. Langeliers has seen the same pitch mix, within a percentage point or two for each pitch type, on either side of the break. Before the break, 50.8% of the pitches he saw were in the zone, compared to 51.2% after. (All stats are accurate through Tuesday’s games.) Langeliers has seen 344 pitches in his past 24 games, which comes to about one and a third extra strikes in the past month. “Negligible” hardly does that number justice.

Here’s something that is different, which mirrors an advantage Andrew Vaughn has had during his renaissance. (Or, if you’ll indulge me, the Renai-Vaughnce.) In the first half, 85.6% of the pitches Langeliers saw came against righties. In the second half, that’s down to 71.2%.

I mentioned a similar finding in my piece on Vaughn, and with hindsight I regret not exploring the instrument through which he might’ve encountered those more favorable matchups. My theory was that the Brewers had mostly stacked Vaughn between the left-handed Christian Yelich and the switch-hitting Isaac Collins, making it impractical to hunt Vaughn with a right-handed reliever. If anything, a manager would want the platoon advantage against Yelich, the former NL MVP, giving Vaughn an extra look at a left-handed bullpen arm.

Regardless, no such effect exists for Langeliers. In the first half, on either side of an oblique injury that kept him out for most of June, the right-handed Langeliers spent most of his season sandwiched between Tyler Soderstrom and JJ Bleday, both left-handed hitters. Sometimes, it was an open-faced sandwich, with only one of Soderstrom or Bleday (or the similarly left-handed Kurtz, CJ Alexander, or Lawrence Butler) flanking Langeliers. But only twice in 63 first-half starts did Langeliers hit between two righties in the order.

In the first half, 73% of the lineup spots adjacent to Langeliers went to left-handed hitters. In the second half, Langeliers has usually hit behind Brent Rooker, or led off with Max Schuemann in the nine-hole. So only 52% of adjacent lineup spots have gone to lefties.

Here’s a more likely cause: In 98 first-half games, the A’s faced 18 left-handed starters. That includes a run of three straight one-inning openers in an April series against the White Sox. Moreover, six of those 18 lefty starts came in the 23-game stretch during which Langeliers was hurt. By contrast, the A’s faced seven left-handed starters in their first 24 games of the second half.

This season, Langeliers has a platoon split of more than 50 points of wRC+, which is a huge number. But a binge on lefties isn’t the reason he’s been the best position player in baseball over the past month.

Over his career, Langeliers’ platoon splits are as close to even as you’ll find. And after posting a .287 wOBA against righties in the first half, Langeliers has teed off over the past month, to the tune of a .536 wOBA.

So if it’s not the platoon matchup, what is it?

Well, if you see a few stray drops of blood on your computer screen, know that I just cut myself on Occam’s Razor. Why is a hitter playing way over his head in a span of about 100 plate appearances? Because anything can happen in a small sample size!

Langeliers’ first-half BABIP was .236; in the second half, it’s .375. Langeliers posted a .304 wOBA and .316 xwOBA in the first half; in the second half, it’s .525 and .376, respectively. Now, BABIP doesn’t include home runs, and while Langeliers’ second-half HR/FB% of 28.6% is definitely high, it’s not completely unheard-of fluky. If it were a full-season mark, it wouldn’t crack the top five among qualified hitters.

According to Baseball Savant, seven of Langeliers’ 12 first-half home runs would’ve been out of all 30 major league parks. That’s true of only three of his 12 second-half dingers. Those three would’ve escaped fewer than a third of major league parks, including one that would only have gone out of the stadium in which it was hit. But the same is true of that first-half sample: three that would’ve gone out in fewer than 10 parks, with one singleton.

In the first half, Langeliers hit 24 batted balls (12.4% of his total balls in play) with an estimated distance of 340 feet or more. They turned into 12 home runs, four doubles, and eight outs. In the second half, Langeliers has hit 15 batted balls (17.9% of his total balls in play) with the same estimated distance. The result: 12 home runs, two doubles, and one out. The average first-half Langeliers home run would’ve gone out of 24 parks (23.583, to be precise); the average second-half home run would’ve gone out of 21.

So yeah, Langeliers is getting more bang for his, well, bang. But I do feel like I’m nitpicking here. Also, I’ve been talking about home runs for so long I feel like a tease for not showing you one yet. Here you go:

This ball was a wallscraper, landing in the first five rows of the seats. It would only have escaped 18 of the 30 ballparks. And yet he crushed that ball 402 feet at 104.8 mph off the bat, to the opposite field and over the 12-foot-high wall in right center at Nationals Park. It wasn’t a cheapie.

Because, yeah, it’s a small sample, and yeah, a lot of it (like, two-thirds if I had to ballpark it) looks fluky. But Langeliers is definitely crushing the ball now in a way he wasn’t in the first half, and definitely not before he came back from his injury.

Those of you who know college baseball will remember that Langeliers played his college ball at Baylor, and went to high school in Texas. I’ll relate a relevant (if only barely) story from the battleship named after Langeliers’ home state. The USS Texas was part of the armada that supported the D-Day invasion, and a week after the landings, Allied troops had made it far enough inland that they were moving out of range of their offshore gun support.

In order to hit a target that was out of the listed range of the ship’s main batteries, the captain had several compartments on the starboard side flooded, causing the ship to list to that side, thereby elevating her guns to an angle from which they could hit the designated target.

The moral of the story: Sometimes you’ve got to lean back and let it rip.

Langeliers has always had great bat speed and a remorselessly aggressive approach, and he’s only swinging harder and more freely since the break. He’s increased his average swing spend from 72.7 mph in the first half to 74.7 mph in the second half, tilted his attack angle up one degree, and increased his ideal attack angle percentage from 59.1% to 65.4%.

The result is a six-degree increase in his average launch angle, a decrease in his GB/FB ratio from 1.04 to 0.64, and a 4.5-point increase in his pull rate. Langeliers is only barely making more contact, but he’s swinging far more frequently, up from 48.6% to 56.4%. Langeliers’ first-half swing rate would be 65th out of 158 qualified hitters; his second-half swing rate would put him seventh.

Langeliers’ aggressiveness is coming at the cost of a higher chase rate and fewer walks, but he’s swinging at (and crushing) everything in the zone. Hot damn, I just figured out who Langeliers’ second half swing rates reminded me of:

In short, swinging at everything is a legitimate strategy, if you can hit the ball incredibly hard. This much Langeliers has done over the past month. We shall see how much of it sticks.