The All or Nothing Luke Raley

Luke Raley took a big hack. Then he took another.

Raley has struck out 36.6% of the time to begin 2026, third most among batters with at least 100 plate appearances. He’s walked just 5.9% of the time, well below the median. His 0.16 K/BB ratio is one of the 10 worst in baseball this year. That’s typically not a recipe for success.

But this is:

Raley has six homers so far in 2026, carrying him to a 132 wRC+. He’s hitting the ball hard (51.8%), to the pull side (50.0%), and in the air (60.7%). His .595 xwOBA on contact is third in the majors. The only batters who have made better contact are Aaron Judge and James Wood, putting Raley ahead of Ben Rice, Munetaka Murakami, Mike Trout, and Yordan Alvarez. It’s impressive company to keep.

But Raley also has the league’s highest whiff rate, and by a lot. He’s missed on 46.9% of his swings this year, over three percentage points higher than the second-most whiff-prone player, Murakami. That’s partially because Raley often chases out of the zone, but it’s largely because he also struggles to make contact on hittable pitches. His 39.3% whiff rate in the zone is highest in the league, clearing Murakami, again in second, by about five percentage points.

This whiff-for-contact tradeoff makes Raley the most extreme player in the majors this year:

Now, I’m obviously not the first to point out the relationship between whiff rate and contact quality. That’s one of the central tenants of contemporary baseball: Home runs are good, and to go yard, you need to swing hard, but swinging hard also leads to more whiffs. But I’m curious about how extreme Raley could get and still be a net-positive with his swings.

I set up a crude study. I assumed any swing that doesn’t result in a ball in play (whiffs and fouls) is worth -.066 runs. Next, I converted xwOBACON to runs above average, to put it on the same scale. Finally, I created a breakeven curve to determine the xwOBACON necessary to justify each BIP rate.

That gives us the following plot, with BIP rate on the x-axis and xwOBACON on the y-axis:

And yeah, Raley is well clear of the breakeven line. His contact quality relative to frequency is still one of the 10 best in the majors. He’d need to cut his BIP rate in half before finding himself on the losing end of that tradeoff; or in the other direction, he’d need to cut his contact quality to about .425.

The plot also provides further justification for why hitters tend to sell out for barrels and the like. The slope is fairly shallow, and not too far removed from the average xwOBACON line. More power is almost always worth less contact, in terms of an overall swing profile. Everybody makes outs, but not everybody hits the ball far — that’s where value above average lies.

Let’s run through a series of tables. The first is the best and worst contact quality relative to BIP rate (the distance from the line in the plot above):

The top of the list is as you’d expect. It’s neat to see Wood in the first spot, as he’s often dinged for his high whiff rates. But the contact he’s made so far in 2026 is so good that it doesn’t really matter. Further adding to the intrigue is most of that high-quality contact is going to the opposite field, as I pointed out in last week’s Mailbag column. He’s the best slugger in the league, and he’s doing it in a way few players ever have.

Then there’s Judge and Rice sparring for the Yankees. But really it’s Alvarez who stands out on this list, as he’s making both lots of contact and elite contact. He leads the leads the league with a .357 xBA because of it.

The caboose here is Raley’s teammate, Rivas. This a fun coincidence because, as Matthew Trueblood recently pointed out for Baseball Prospectus, Rivas is notorious for not swinging. His career 35.2% swing rate is the lowest in the majors since 2024, and that’s probably for the best: No player is more justified in leaving the bat on his shoulder by this analysis.

Let’s get at the mushy middle of this chart. The next tables shows the batters with the highest xwOBACON to fall below the breakeven threshold:

Another Raley teammate tops this list. Raleigh is one of the premier three true outcome hitters in the league, known for making this exact tradeoff. Last year, it worked fine and he set all sorts of home run records despite a 31.5% whiff rate. This year, his timing seems a bit off, and he’s yet to find consistent barrels. He will likely be OK in the long run, but without last year’s power, his wRC+ is down to 81. Such is the nature of all or nothing.

Neto is having a weird season. Like Raleigh, the Angels shortstop seemed to nail this balance in 2025, increasing his strikeout rate while also lifting his xwOBACON to an impressive .447. This year he’s struck out even more and lost much of his power. But where he was once fully reliant on this dynamic, he’s now doubled his walk rate (13.6%), so he is still running a 107 wRC+ despite his worse contact quality. All or nothing isn’t always everything.

Finally, let’s look at the batters with the lowest xwOBACON to place above the breakeven threshold:

The main takeaway is that the lowest xwOBACON to result in a net-positive is .372, which is essentially average. Few if any players are capable of putting the ball in play at high enough rates to get away with poor contact. Quality is the name of the game.

Now, again, this is pretty crude. I’m making all sorts of assumptions to simplify a dynamic that is quite complex. I’m not considering the game state or pitch location or batter approach; nor am I even acknowledging that whiffs and fouls produce two very different values. This analysis relies on the murky concept of “relative to average,” or what makes a good swing profile, rather than what makes a good swing. Even Rivas should swing at a middle-middle fastball in a two-strike count.

But really what this is meant to show is that players like Raley, with massive whiff totals and tremendous contact quality, are justified in such an approach. It’s a feature, even if it can look like a bug at times.

I wasn’t satisfied with just one crude metric, so I made another. I z-scored walk rate, strikeout rate, and xwOBACON, then added them all together to find the players whose profile most relies on contact quality. As you might guess, Raley is having one of the five most extreme seasons of the Statcast era.

But what amuses me about Raley is not only is he all power at the plate, he’s also a platoon outfielder with poor range and just-fine baserunning. His power is, truly, the one place on the field he contributes in any measurable sense. So I tossed Fielding Run Value and Baserunning Run Value into the score as well. (Note that I arranged the z-scores to isolate xwOBACON, so higher scores were given to players with worse defense and baserunning.)

Raley technically ranked second to 2021 Salvador Perez by this measure. But the initial list was against the spirit of my query. (Some players weren’t sluggers and were just really bad at everything.) The table below instead shows the highest scores for players at least two standard deviations above the mean in xOBACON. In other words, here are the true all or nothing players of the last decade:

We just haven’t seen a player do so much and so little as Raley to this point in 2026.

Now, it’s early — the line that undercuts any freewheeling analysis in May. This probably won’t continue. Raley will likely make worse contact at some point, and he’ll likely make more contact, too. That’s fine. He posted a 129 wRC+ for the Rays in 2023, then was dealt to the Mariners for José Caballero and posted an identical a 129 wRC+ in 2024. He wasn’t quite as extreme in either season, and his overall line was just as good. Last year was a bit of a step back, but as Kate Preusser at Lookout Landing pointed out last month, Raley’s power was sapped by a nagging oblique injury. He certainly seems healthy now.

Raley is far from a perfect player. He’s limited, unrefined, and runs like a giraffe. There’s a whole list of things he cannot do on the field, but he’s simply powered through, staking his claim as the league’s next pure slugger. Raley is all or nothing. Isn’t that something.