When He Reached the New World, Cortes Burned Opposing Pitchers

The AL West is a bit of a mess right now. For the first time in a decade, the Astros are nonfactor. The Mariners — defending champion and heavy preseason favorite — got out of the blocks slowly and are just now kicking into gear. So almost by default, Major League Baseball’s only mononymous franchise is in first place.

I don’t think anyone would accuse Carlos Cortes of driving the Athletics’ offense; his 67 plate appearances are only about half what full-time starters like Shea Langeliers, Nick Kurtz, and Tyler Soderstrom have recorded. But in that limited playing time, Cortes is hitting .377/.433/.689 with four home runs and only four strikeouts.

That’s right, Cortes is DiMiaggioing.

This brings me great joy, because Cortes is one of my all-time favorite weird baseball prospects, and I didn’t think I’d ever get to share him with the big league-watching public. That’s not to say he wasn’t a good prospect; the Mets picked Cortes in the third round in 2018 and gave him a million-dollar bonus.

But Cortes spent a lot of time tooling around the minors between then and his big league debut, and you got the sense that after four straight years at Triple-A, it might not ever happen. Cortes went a couple picks before Cal Raleigh in that draft, and only made his major league debut last July. It’s been a long developmental curve.

Why was Cortes so interesting back then? Well, he’s veteran of the University of South Carolina, which is of personal interest to me. (You want to know how old Cortes is? He was in college so long ago the Gamecocks were good.) There, he twice led the Gamecocks in home runs while playing mostly outfield, while being billed as a second baseman. A logical successor to Max Schrock, for those of you college baseball sickos who remember other undersized Carolina sluggers.

If you know Cortes only as a big leaguer, you’re probably aware that he’s left-handed. See, here he is, scuttling over to pick up a groundball, and tossing it back into the infield left-handed:

How could he have ever played second base?

Well, Cortes’ father taught him how to throw right-handed as well, since that ability would greatly expand his opportunities. Ultimately, Cortes hasn’t needed that ability much at the highest level; he only spent a season and a half on the dirt in the Mets’ system.

Switch-throwers are rare but not unprecedented in baseball history. In the 1880s, before fielders’ mitts were common, there was a middle infielder named William “Yank” Robinson who was famous for throwing to first base right-handed and throwing to third base left-handed. Whether this trick was worth the trouble is not clear to me; in 1886, Robinson made 95 errors in 125 games. Either way, Cortes is obliged to wear a glove in the field, which would preclude any Yank Robinson-style shenanigans.

Last August, Cortes became the third documented player, and first position player, to switch throwing hands in a modern major league game. The A’s had pinch-run for Gio Urshela in the top of the ninth, leaving them with no infielders on the bench. Cortes hadn’t played third base since a few innings in the Florida Collegiate Summer League in 2016, and had to borrow a right-handed glove. But in this figuring-out-who-speaks-the-most-Italian situation, Cortes was the most experienced infielder available.

There’s no video of Cortes making a play right-handed, because he only spent one inning at third base and the only batted ball in the inning went to the other side of the infield. Pity.

Anyway, even as an outfielder, Cortes is an interesting prospect. He’s only 5-foot-7, and while he was a power hitter in his youth, he’s doing some wild bat control stuff in his limited playing time this season.

While I was writing this, MLB sent out a press release declaring Cortes the American League Player of the Week, on the strength of his 13-for-24 performance over the previous six games. Six of those 13 hits had gone for extra bases, including three home runs.

Despite those big slugging numbers, Cortes is not a big bat speed guy, even accounting for his smaller frame. He has 28th-percentile average bat speed, and his fast-swing rate is only 13.4%. That’s in the bottom half of the league as well. So is his ideal attack angle rate.

But Cortes’s expected stats from Statcast say he’s not just blooping and dinking his way to a 204 wRC+. Cortes has an xBA of .386, against a batting average of .377, and an xSLG of .648, against a real-world SLG of .689. He’s killing the ball, big bat speed or no, perfect launch angle or no.

Aggregate bat speed numbers can be misleading. Compare Cortes to two other left-handed hitters with similar average bat speed. Bryson Stott and Mike Yastrzemski just have middling bat speed; Cortes’ bat speed is all over the place:

Cortes is using that varied bat speed to make more contact. After running contact rates in the 70s for most of his minor league career, Cortes popped up to 81.5% in Triple-A in 2025 and 80.1% in a brief major league cameo. This year, his overall contact rate is up to 87.5% and his in-zone contact rate is 89.5%. That’s good — entering Monday’s action, Cortes was a 10th of a percent behind Juan Soto on the Z-Contact% leaderboard — but by no means exceptional.

Where Cortes stands out is his strikeout rate: 6.0%, second best in the league behind Luis Arraez and basically unthinkable over a full season for anyone else. Indeed, Arraez himself is the only hitter to post a strikeout rate under 6.0% in a full season. He’s on pace to do it for the fourth year in a row.

Pitchers pay their mortgages by their ability to get hitters to swing at pitches outside the zone; those are borderline pitches, included in Statcast’s Shadow zone, and tempting pitches farther outside the strike zone, characterized as Chase pitches. Despite a paucity of playing time, Cortes is in the top 15 in the league in run value in the shadow zone. He also swings at just 13% of pitches in the chase zone, which is half the league average.

And when Cortes does swing at pitches outside the strike zone, he makes contact; his contact rate on pitches outside the strike zone is 81.8%, one of the highest marks in baseball. A lot of really good hitters don’t make that much contact on pitches inside the zone.

The ability to make tons of contact on pitches outside the zone, while not being a hacker and taking cricket swings at pitches a foot off the plate, well, it’s a rare combination. Cortes is one of only 10 hitters with 50 or more plate appearances (as of Monday morning) with an O-Swing% under 25% but an O-Contact% over 75%. The other nine: Miguel Vargas, Masataka Yoshida, Yandy Díaz, Kevin McGonigle, Liam Hicks, Chase Meidroth, Caleb Durbin, Geraldo Perdomo, and Steven Kwan.

This combination of skills is rare, yes, but it does not guarantee that the hitter in question is good. Only that he doesn’t strike out much.

But of those 10 hitters, Cortes has the highest hard-hit rate by more than nine percentage points and the fourth-best EV90, behind only Díaz (who can curl more than Cortes’ body weight), McGonigle (who might get MVP votes this year), and Vargas (I’ve got nothing here).

It’s a very, very small sample, but Cortes is making good decisions on when to swing, and when he’s swinging, he’s making contact. And when he gets his pitch, he’s hitting the stuffing out of the ball. We’ll see how durable those components are as the season progresses, but the A’s are no stranger to late-blooming prospects. A late-20s breakout would be normal, by Cortes’ standards.