The Kyle Stowers Power Hour

Kyle Stowers used to be part of that Baltimore Orioles position player prospect fire hose, but it’s OK if you forgot about him. Said fire hose has turned to a dribble as the Orioles’ fortunes have reversed. You also might have gotten him confused with Colton Cowser, which might be why the Orioles felt like they could trade him to Miami last summer for Trevor Rogers. (The other prospect in that trade, Connor Norby, has the same similar-name-mixup thing going with Coby Mayo. This town ain’t big enough for the two of us, etc.)

And if you still had your eye on Stowers after all that, you were probably put off when he hit .186/.262/.295 in 50 games for the Marlins after the trade. A better team, with a deeper talent pool, might’ve removed a 27-year-old outfielder with that batting line from its major league roster. But in Miami it’s more like a talent splash pad, so Stowers remains.

So much the better, because after 52 games, the former Stanford slugger is hitting .291/.362/.508. He has the same wRC+ as the much-celebrated Pete Crow-Armstrong, a higher wRC+ than Fernando Tatis Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Bobby Witt Jr., three second-generation big leaguers with more than $1 billion in contracts among them.

If Stowers’ current form continues, he’d end the season within spitting distance of that .300 batting average, 30-homer, 100-RBI level that we expect from middle-of-the-order hitters. Or at least, what we expected when I was a kid, when we knew about round numbers but not any of the fancy stats that have developed in the 21st Century.

Regardless, that’s a heavy expectation to drop on a guy who’s in his first full major league season, and who started said season under replacement level for his career.

So, “Can he keep doing this?” is a different question from “Is he doing anything different?” The answer to that second question is a resounding yes.

Here’s our guy at the end of last season, hitting a triple off Alex Vesia. A groundball triple, it bears mentioning. Through 2024, Stowers loved a grounder. Five of his 16 extra-base hits in 2024 came off groundballs; over the first three partial seasons of his big league career, Stowers hit the ball on the ground 46.2% of the time.

If you’re a big, strapping young man like Stowers, “the ground” is not a terribly efficient place to hit the baseball. Even in his lamentable 2024 season, Stowers had plus bat speed, so he did get relatively good results when he put the ball on the ground: a 74 wRC+ on grounders, compared to the league average of 41. But a 74 wRC+ isn’t going to cut it generally, especially when his fly ball wRC+ of 77 was well below the league average of 126. This is, of course, to say nothing of Stowers’ biggest problem last season: a 35.4% strikeout rate.

Here’s Stowers now.

As batting stance changes go, this one is fairly subtle. He’s holding his hands just a little farther out from his body, standing a couple inches farther back in the box, and he’s opened his stance a few degrees. This isn’t the Ben Rice adjustment, for instance.

But it’s changed everything.

Stowers has both increased his bat speed and shortened his swing. He’s hitting more line drives and more fly balls, and a greater percentage of both are going to the pull side, where they can do more damage. He’s cut his groundball rate by 10 percentage points and nearly doubled his barrel rate.

Now, barrel rate is by no means the be-all and end-all of hitting. Barrel rate includes batted balls with an exit velocity and launch angle that have led to a batting average of .500 or better and a slugging percentage of 1.500 or better, since 2015. These are where a lot of doubles and home runs come from. There are plenty of hitters, even good hitters, hitters with a bit of pop, who put up big numbers with low barrel rates because they have superb bat control and use the whole field and never strike out.

But a power hitter will want to have a barrel rate in the double digits at least. If you spend a lot of time on Baseball Savant, seeing Stowers’ 19.5% barrel rate probably flipped an alarm in your brain. That’s a number you don’t see too often.

Indeed, out of the 256 hitters on the Baseball Savant leaderboard, Stowers’ ratio of barrels per batted ball event is the fifth highest. The four hitters ahead of him — the only four hitters with a barrel rate of at least 20% — could not have been better hand-selected to illustrate what kind of a hitter we’re talking about here: Oneil Cruz, Cal Raleigh, Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge.

And unlike Cruz, Ohtani, Judge, Kyle Schwarber, and some of the other exit velo monsters out there, Stowers’ raw power is not going to get scouts breathing into a paper bag. His hardest-hit ball this season is just 110.3 mph, tied for 126th in the league with (among others) Mickey Moniak, Lenyn Sosa, and Maikel Garcia.

But Stowers ranks 21st among qualified batters with an EV50 — median exit velocity — of 103.7 mph, the same as Elly De La Cruz. So while he’s not putting up outlier exit velos, he’s making especially hard contact when he puts the ball in play. He needs to do that, because lot of the previous criticisms remain. He still chases a lot of pitches outside the zone. He swings and misses an absolute buttload, even within the strike zone; his Z-Contact% is the fourth worst among all qualified hitters.

But you can get away with that if you get your money’s worth when you do make contact. Here are some of the other hitters in the bottom 20 in Z-Contact%: Rafael Devers, Logan O’Hoppe, Cruz, De La Cruz, Ohtani, Matt Olson, Freddie Freeman, and Bryce Harper. Stowers has made huge strides toward becoming that kind of hitter.

On balls in the strike zone, Stowers’ swing rate (77.6% in 2024, 76.3% in 2025) and contact rate (75.9% and 76.4%) have barely budged since last year. But he’s slugging .603 on those pitches now, up from just .428 last year. On pitches in Baseball Savant’s Heart attack zone — the middle of the zone — he actually has cut his whiff rate from 24% to 19%, while increasing his SLG from .515 to .795.

While he’s done more damage on pitches in the zone, he’s mitigated the negative impacts of his swing-and-miss. Last year, he whiffed 34.5% of the time; the only players in the 21st Century who have carried that kind of strikeout rate to even a league-average overall performance have either been elite defenders (Javier Báez and Matt Chapman), 40-homer guys who draw tons of walks (Adam Dunn) or both (prime Joey Gallo).

This year, Stowers is striking out 27.6% of the time, which is still not good. But it’s within the normal bounds of “not good.” The cost of doing business for a power hitter in the age of the 100-mph splitter “not good.” Especially since Stowers has also increased his walk rate to 8.9%, which is actually a fraction better than league average.

Now that he’s made these changes, can we pencil Stowers in for 30 homers a season for the next five years? I wouldn’t go that far just yet; it’s only been a few months. But he looks like a good hitter right now. Good enough that you should remember the name.