Will Simpson Makes His Case to Profile at First Base

Earlier this month, I wrote about the emphatically excellent start to the first full season of the A’s 13th-round pick in last year’s draft, lefthander Will Johnston. As dominant (2.51 ERA, 46 K, 12 BB, and 16 H allowed in 28 ⅓ IP) as Johnston’s 2024 has been, however, he has surprisingly strong competition for the distinction of best 2024 from a late-round 2023 A’s pick named Will.

Two rounds after they picked Johnston, the A’s selected Washington Husky first baseman Will Simpson, a senior coming off a .335/.418/.623 season. Simpson got to be one of the few members of the A’s draft class to get to play significant time in full-season ball that summer, and that went well, as he hit .322/.373/.522 in 29 games in Low-A Stockton. That performance no doubt played a big role in Simpson being one of just three 2023 A’s draftees to get pushed above Stockton to open the 2024 season.

Simpson has rewarded the organization’s aggressiveness by being arguably the most dominant hitter in the Midwest League, hitting .327/.455/.522 and serving as a cleanup-hitting linchpin in a Lansing Lugnuts offense that has somewhat surprisingly raced out to the top of the circuit’s leaderboards.

As with Johnston, it’s hard to ignore dominance like this, even for a late-round draftee in A-ball, and so Simpson, like Johnston, has begun to appear on A’s prospect lists–both rank right around 30th-place on the organizational lists at FanGraphs and MLB Pipeline, for instance. But with that acknowledgment is also going to come skepticism–minor league history is littered with late-round picks on both sides of the ball who got off to torrid professional starts that retrospectively proved to be red herrings as far as higher-level success was concerned.

So here I am to try to get to the bottom of where on the “continuum of legitimacy,” as I termed it in the Johnston analysis, Simpson lies. To do that, I’m going to begin by establishing an important contextual backdrop for analyzing Simpson. Then I’ll make the case for his prospectdom by considering everything he seems to legitimately bring to the table, before then turning to his weaknesses/questions he’ll need to answer affirmatively to continue being considered a future big leaguer by the minor league analysis community at large. Finally, I’ll discuss some new wrinkles in his potential role and conclude with an overall assessment of where Simpson’s prospectdom stands and where things might progress from here.

The Challenge of First Base

It goes without saying that a 15th-round college senior faces huge challenges in playing a significant role in the major leagues. As a college first baseman, however, Simpson began his professional career staring down about the most daunting numbers game in all of prospectdom.

Big slugging first basemen can generally fill two positions in a lineup: first base and DH. Major league teams don’t always employ a full-time DH, though–often, the position is used to rotate a few different players through. So, generally speaking, a first base prospect is angling for, what, one of fifty big league jobs for 1B/DH types? Even with the implementation of the universal DH, it’s gotta be somewhere around there, because as much as the universal DH might help open up jobs for first basemen, it also pretty much erases the old NL pinch-hitter role that would allow a few extra sluggers to sneak onto MLB rosters.

The thing that makes this such a daunting numbers game is that the race to fill those fifty slots isn’t just being run by minor league first basemen. Take a look at the list of current MLB cold cornermen and then consider what positions they played when they were drafted, or even when they were in Double-A. For every Matt Olson, Anthony Rizzo, or Rhys Hoskins, there’s a Salvador Pérez, Bryce Harper, or Yandy Díaz moving over from another position. Within the A’s organization, winning the first base or DH job a few years down the line doesn’t just mean holding off Kevin Dumé, it means edging your way past some group of Tyler Soderstrom (C), Jordan Díaz (3B), Brennan Milone (3B), Kyle McCann (C), Daniel Susac (C), and probably other heavy hitters who haven’t even come into the system yet. Sure, some of those guys will be playing other positions in the big leagues, but if you’re a 1B/DH type, you really can’t let more than one of them be a better hitter than you or your job is in serious jeopardy.

So though a player like this is theoretically competing for one of fifty big league jobs, the number of players of a pure 1B/DH pro background in MLB at one time is closer to twenty. No other position has to deal with anything like that pressure of scarcity. There are about 70 big league catching jobs, and usually about 67 or 68 of them go to guys drafted or signed as catchers. Minor league shortstops can become big league shortstops or second basemen or third basemen or outfielders–if they can hit, things will work themselves out. Even corner outfielders–the next position up from first base on the defensive spectrum–have both corners, plus DH and often first base as potential destinations.

Therefore, the standard of performance on first base prospects is incredibly high. It’s not enough to just be a middle-of-the-order contributor to minor league teams on your way up the ladder, and it’s not enough to just hit a bunch of homers. The player’s performance, and the underlying tools enabling it, have got to be pretty undeniable if he’s going to get real prospect credibility.*

It bears noting here that “having real prospect credibility” is not necessary to actually have big league success. Late bloomers happen–the A’s got a good season out of Ryan Noda last year, and every now and then a Ji-Man Choi sort of career comes together for a player. But I’m concerned here with making good assessments. Indeed, players prove good assessments wrong all the time. In my opinion, though, a good assessment leaves open the possibility of being wrong–and is thus open to change with new information–but is not consumed by the weight of all* theoretical possibilities for the player. There is a big difference between all theoretical possibilities and all clearly visualizable ones. Much as we can’t look at a random D3 pitcher who sits in the mid-80s and say “Well, Mason Miller was once that, so…why not?” we can’t look at every fence-clearing first baseman in A-ball and get carried away by the fact that they look vaguely first baseman-y.

This sort of guilty-until-proven-innocent status puts minor league 1B/DH types in easily the toughest spot of any position group where their “prospectdom” is concerned. Relief pitchers face a similar scale of crowding, in that a lot of big league relief jobs are taken up by guys who were minor league starters, but there are also so many more relief jobs to go around than first base jobs. And relievers can be famously fungible: the difference between even a Double-A reliever and a (middling) big league reliever is not always a gigantic one. The difference between an upper-minors cleanup hitter and a big-league cleanup hitter, on the other hand, is a freaking chasm. Being “almost there” just doesn’t go as far at 1B/DH as it does anywhere else, which renders legitimately strong minor league hitters often to organizational player status rather than being considered even fringe prospects.

And this challenge especially tends to impact the perceptions of late-round college draftees like Simpson. He played in a power conference, surely was seen by scouts for years, and was passed over not only for fourteen-plus rounds in 2023, but all twenty the year before.* You’d think, without knowing anything about him, that he probably has some flaws that haven’t quite been exposed in A-ball but will be exposed enough at higher levels to keep him short of the daunting first base standard.

*He was, however, taken out of high school by the Phillies in the 18th round in 2019.

I could go on in more depth about this, but there comes a point at which I have to cut myself off on establishing context and get to the subject at hand. The context is tough, yes, but against that challenging backdrop, let’s see what case can be made for Will Simpson, Legitimate First Base Prospect.

The Case for Will Simpson, Legitimate First Base Prospect

Statistical Intrigue

In part because of the extremely high bar for first base prospect status, the way an evaluation of somebody like Simpson works (at least for me) is considerably different from the way that, say, the way an evaluation of his Lansing teammate, 17th-round middle infielder Colby Halter, would work. For a player like Halter or most other recent position player draftees, I’d look at the raw talents the player has, what their swing is like, what their approach is like, etc., do a bit of cross-referencing with the stats to get a sense of their current ability to bring those tools into games, and then project things from there. With a first baseman, though, the offensive bar is set so high that it kind of works in reverse order. Instead of examining the tools* and then looking up and asking “Okay, but how’s this playing out?” you’re starting from the stats, and if they’re excellent, then you go “Okay, what’s behind this?”

*Part of the reason it often seems to work this way with 1B types is that they tend to have so much similarity tools-wise–you figure off the top that they have power and are at least somewhat lacking in speed (and thus defensive range).

So we start with the stats, hoping for excellence in at least most areas. 

Thus far,* Simpson is a career .323/.410/.534 hitter since being drafted, splitting his time almost evenly between Stockton (2023) and Lansing (2024). He’s struck out 70 times (23.89%) and walked 38 (12.97%) in 293 career plate appearances, with both of those rates being more frequent in Lansing than they were in Stockton. He’s got eight homers, which isn’t a super impressive tally in those plate appearances, but 35 total extra-base hits. We can quibble with the home run and strikeout rates a bit, particularly in Lansing this year, but on the surface, it’s not like there are glaringly unchecked boxes from a really basic analysis. I can’t emphasize enough how different .323/.410/.534 is from, say, .280/.365/.475 in actually sending up enough of a flare that this is a player who maybe has a shot at breaking through the massive barriers to a big league first base gig.

*All stats in this article are through May 20th.

Further, there are also some positive contextual factors to consider in Simpson’s history. For one, he really seems to have improved in college, as his stats really jumped between his junior and senior seasons, indicating some late-blooming tendency that other teams may have missed on. Second, as senior signs go, Simpson was relatively young on draft day last season–he hadn’t turned 22 yet. The player the A’s took the round before him, slugging third baseman Luke Mann (himself excelling, albeit in Stockton), is almost 20 months older than Simpson is, for instance (Mann was a fifth-year senior). The relative youth and his quick promotion schedule means Simpson has gotten out from behind the age curve way more quickly than most senior signs ever get to. Finally, in considering his power production to date this year, one needs to remember the Midwest League is a tough place to hit in April, which could be a big reason why Simpson hasn’t cleared a ton of fences (though I’ll have more specific analysis of the homer production as we go on). He hit a ball in Great Lakes a week ago that I still can’t believe didn’t get out of the ballpark, for instance.

So there’s enough intrigue here to really pique some interest. Now, I’m sure you’re guessing that I wouldn’t be writing this article if I didn’t think there was at least something behind those stats that was interesting–why write a who-knows-how-long-this-will-end-up-length piece to tell the world a 15th-round pick isn’t any good, after all.

And yeah, there’s something behind them. 

The Stat Behind the Stats

When I chart games on the A’s non-Triple-A minor league affiliates, one of the statistics my spreadsheet spits out for me is an estimate of the player’s average exit velocity. Now, I have to emphasize this is a crude estimate. The way I calculate this is I tag every ball in play as hit soft, medium, or hard, trying to estimate on sight* whether its exit velocity was <65 mph (soft), 65-95 (medium), or 95+ (hard). FanGraphs has soft, medium, and hard hit rates, and they have actual average exit velocities for big leaguers, so I pulled those data and did some linear regression to come up with a formula for predicting average exit velocity based on this soft/medium/hard distinction. 

*At times, the exit velocity will be said or displayed on a broadcast, as well, which tells me which bucket it goes in. I still code it as soft/medium/hard rather than writing down the exact number, though.

So there are two obvious sources of error in this calculation: 1) I’m not going to be perfect in assigning soft/medium/hard (though I’ve worked to train my eyes and ears, and when broadcasters do state exit velocities around 95 mph, I’ve coded it right more often than not) and 2) the formula itself is estimating, not averaging. Nevertheless, I’ll say two positive things about it. First, even if it’s miscalibrated to some extent because I’m calling, say, most balls over 90 hit hard rather than 95, it’ll still compare players well to each other. Second, it’s probably not too far off, because it does put most minor leaguers in the 80s. Last year, three players cracked a 90-mph average in what I charted: Denzel Clarke, Lázaro Armenteros, and Colby Thomas, and none were over 91 (though Thomas and Brennan Milone were above 91 in Stockton; their time in Lansing brought them down to 90.2 and 89.94 mph for the season as a whole). That feels about right, since minor league exit velocities are lower than big league ones, in general.

This year seems mostly to be more of the same. There are currently three hitters in my dataset (Midland, Lansing, and Stockton) that I’ve got an estimated average exit velocity over 90 mph on. Brennan Milone is at 90.58 mph with the RockHounds. Myles Naylor is at 90.79 mph with the Ports.

Simpson is at 98.43.

That’s 48 balls in play, 2 softly hit, 14 medium, and 32 hard. A hard-hit rate of exactly two-thirds, which is, uh, not a thing. Nobody broke 50% in the big leagues last year.

Now, I definitely would not peg Simpson’s true-talent average exit velocity, even against High-A pitching, out there. In addition to the error sources mentioned above, it’s not a complete dataset: he’s put 76 balls in play this year, but I wasn’t watching the games with the other 28. 

Even so, whatever error there may be, I’m more than confident enough in my perceptions to say holy hell can this dude hit the ball hard. It’s that classic saying: “It just sounds different off his bat.” Off the broadcast microphone, no less–it’s not the sort of thing I really pick up that often, but you just cannot miss the sound. After I’d watched a few ropes off Simpson’s bat in the opening weeks, I was trying to place it, and then it occurred to me: “That’s the Joey Gallo sound.” I saw Gallo play maybe 20 games in A-ball back in my live-look days and never saw anyone else in those three years with anything close to his power, and here’s that sound again. I’m not saying Simpson is Gallo, power-wise, but the regularity with which the ball rockets off his bat has absolutely been a revelation thus far.

Indulge yourself. Watch this compilation.

The Swing That Produces It

So there’s plenty off the top, both on the statistical surface and beneath it, to produce suitable intrigue to really merit a deeper dive on how Simpson is managing to excel this dramatically. A huge key to understanding the success–and the extent to which it may continue at higher levels–is to understand Simpson’s swing. After all, excellent as his power is, there are plenty of swings that can impact the ball with extreme force like Simpson can, and many of them come with obvious tradeoffs in other areas.

The good news, right off the top, is that this isn’t the typical sort of long, swooping cut you’d get from a big first baseman. There’s some length in there because Simpson’s arms are so long, but the swing is notably pretty direct for a player of this type. 

The power seems to come from two things. First, of course, Simpson is a big strong guy who creates a lot of leverage. Second–there’s been a lot of talk this week about MLB’s release of new bat tracking data, one piece of which is how quickly the bat accelerates. Simpson’s swing seems to exemplify bigtime acceleration in a relatively short distance. Throw in the fact that he’s got solid hand-eye coordination, and you’ve got a recipe for getting the barrel to the ball with a fair bit of consistency and having those barrels produce impactful results.

Like a lot of big guys, Simpson likes to get his arms extended, but he also has the hand quickness to meet inner-black pitches out front or pull his hands inside them. He also has notably strong vertical plate coverage arising from the strengths mentioned above. Along with those hitterish elements, Simpson’s cut is notably fierce, as he seems to have a grip-and-rip sort of mindset at the plate and clearly isn’t trying to pursue contact at the expense of getting all of his strength to be present.

The one odd thing about Simpson’s swing is his footwork in the box. His legkick is fairly moderate and takes him slightly toward the plate, so there’s nothing all that unusual about that, but as he swings, he takes a backward step with his back foot, such that he typically meets the ball with only his front foot on the ground. It’s not a look you see very often.

Overall, though, Simpson’s mechanics in the box seem very promising. He’s not just a long-swing bruiser who can overwhelm A-ball pitching, and there’s reason to project him to have the capability to continue making solid contact, cover his strike zone, and hit the ball hard as he advances. The footwork is going to be a bit of a question, in that it can present a more unstable hitting base than you’d like, but he seems to have good posture and solid flexibility in the box in spite of it, and the hand quickness can make up for a lot. There are all sorts of unusual mechanical elements in the swings of even very successful hitters; rather than immediately becoming a serious skeptic of a player with one oddity in an otherwise strong operation, it’s typically more pragmatic to wait to see* if and when that oddity seems to cause any issues. It hasn’t seriously impacted Simpson’s production thus far,** so that’s the approach I’m taking in thinking about his projection as a hitter.

*Worth noting that this doesn’t mean “assume it will never cause issues.” A pragmatic evaluation of an A-ball player is going to include all sorts of possible pitfalls.

**Well, we’ll get to one area that it might be causing an issue later, but the connection I’ll make is more just throwing the possibility out there than actually claiming it’s causing trouble.

Athleticism

The other part of Simpson’s evaluation that stands out as a real positive for his prospectdom is that he’s a pretty good athlete as first basemen go. He’s not fast out of the box–in part due to the stepback motion, perhaps–but he runs fairly well underway (see the three triples in the highlight video earlier) and is notably coordinated in basically every task on the baseball field. He’s got good hands and is a big, flexible target at first, and he brings an intensity, aggression, and focus to defense and baserunning that you don’t often see in big sluggers like this. I don’t think Simpson is going to be a huge basestealer or anything–he’s tried six times but has only converted three this year–but every little bit counts in the fight to be a legitimate first base prospect, and the fact that Simpson is a good first baseman and not just a big guy with only one plausible defensive home does continue to move the needle in a positive direction.

In summary, then, here’s the pretty-much-assembled case for Will Simpson, Legitimate First base Prospect. I’ve assembled it in a bit of a different order than I constructed it, because the process of analysis does not always exactly follow its results.

1. Simpson’s ability to swing with a ton of strength and acceleration while maintaining a direct path to the ball really stands out, and his hand-eye coordination further allows him to impact pitches all over the strike zone.

2. That skillset in the box is playing out both in terms of specific analytics (exit velocity, in-zone contact) and bigger-picture production (triple-slash, etc.), which continue to verify that his combination of skills in the box lead to superlative results.

3. Simpson’s age relative to his senior-sign peers and his athleticism relative to his 1B/DH peers are modest but real advantages that cut against the typical reasons players like him are viewed through a highly skeptical lens.

Skillset, results, and peripheral considerations, all checked. Nice. It’s a good case.

No matter how white-hot the start to their pro careers are, though, all players present weaknesses and face questions they’ll have to answer as they advance. Simpson’s dominance may superficially appear so complete that it might be hard to see his, but they’re there under the surface. So I’ll now turn to those, and then we’ll see how they affect the whole picture.

The Inevitable Questions

I’ve emphasized how important it is for the offensive resumes of first base prospects to be complete. Statistically, Simpson’s is: he hits for average, he walks, he hits for power. The biggest question that tends to arise for these big sluggers is the validity of the first of those three skills, but Simpson’s swing and hand-eye coordination don’t lead to particularly huge questions about that.

By contrast, the area that might feel most airtight about Simpson’s prospectdom is his plate discipline. On a team that paces the Midwest League in walks (193) and walk rate (12.53%), Simpson still stands out:

Simpson: 18.88%

CJ Rodriguez: 18.27%

Colby Halter: 17.14%

Brayan Buelvas: 15.34%

Henry Bolte: 14.37%

Dereck Salom: 14.08%

Cameron Masterman: 11.02%

Jonny Butler: 10.76%

Danny Bautista, Jr.: 8.11%

Jose Escorche: 6.85%

Euríbiel Ángeles: 6%

(min. 50 Lansing PA to appear on this list)

But walk rate is not plate discipline. There are obviously a lot of things that go into plate discipline, but if we wanted one basic metric that got at it fairly directly, we’d want chase rate. Here are the chase rates for all of the above hitters from my charting data. Again, it’s incomplete data, but I’ve watched over half of Lansing’s games this season, so it’s pretty representative at this point.

Rodriguez: 16.39%

Bolte: 18.89%

Salom: 19.77%

Halter: 20.75%

Buelvas: 21.17%

Butler: 25.9%

Masterman: 26.32%

Bautista, Jr.: 28.28%

Ángeles: 28.67%

Simpson: 29.41%

Escorche: 36.32%

This largely correlates to the walk rate table above, except…there’s Simpson, tenth out of eleven, all the way below Ángeles, he of the 6% walk rate. A 29% chase rate isn’t terrible or anything, but it’s obviously way out of step with the surface-level notion of Simpson as a Ryan Noda-esque ball/strike differentiation savant.

With these statistical indicators in mind, two things need to be explained. First, how is Simpson walking so much if his plate discipline is actually only passable, and second, what can be said more specifically about Simpson’s zone-expanding tendency?

To explain the first of those two aspects, I want to begin by talking about a trend I think casual minor league followers might not be aware of. Back in my live-look days a decade ago, minor league players were largely left to their own devices when it came to figuring out their opponents. The philosophy organizations seemed to have was that it was good for players to learn how to make observations about their opponents and adjust accordingly. I’d occasionally get in conversations with pitchers (usually, each team would have two of the pitchers in the starting rotation doing charting work in the stands by the scouts and media) and they were clearly in a sort of read-and-react mentality when it came to opponent-specific strategy and had typically been provided very little information about their opponents beforehand.

Nowadays, that seems to have shifted. It was really apparent to me when I started watching minor league broadcasts again in 2021, having not really engaged with much baseball stuff since 2015, how much things had changed. Somewhere in there, organizational mentalities seemed to shift toward thinking “Well, these guys are going to have to interpret scouting reports as big leaguers, so we should get them used to that now.” No doubt the tech revolution with things like spin data and Rapsodo cameras (which really got going in the mainstream consciousness right around my initial retirement from baseball coverage in 2015) furthered that sort of integration at the minor league level, as players came into pro ball likely more familiar with at least some sort of data interpretation than ever before. Throw in the fact that in 2021, minor league baseball shifted to primarily six-game series, where everyone basically gets to face everyone on the other team over the course of the week, and now teams have more information on their opponents going in and more ability to make adjustments as the weeklong series progresses. As such, there’s so much more player-specific defensive shifting and pitch patterning than there was a decade ago, more in line with what you’d see in the big leagues, albeit not all the way to that level.

I bring this up in relation to Simpson because now that the book on players gets out there, the book on him–given all the superlatives and the obvious frequency he punishes anything in the strike zone–is be careful. Just under 44% of pitches he’s seen in my dataset have been in the strike zone per my coding. My coding is, of course, not going to be as accurate as Trackman or anything, but it should be at least broadly consistent with itself, and that number is below everyone except (weirdly!) Salom,* among Lugnuts players. It seems initially incredible that Simpson would have more than triple Ángeles’ walk rate with a higher chase rate, but Ángeles is up near 51% of pitches seen in the zone, highest on the team, and that right away takes a big chunk out of explaining how that could happen.**

*Salom and Escorche are the two semi-regular Lansing guys I don’t have a particularly big sample of data on–151 and 125 pitches seen, respectively (I like to be over 250 to really dive into the data), so I wouldn’t read much into Salom’s number here. Still kind of funny to see a guy who just hit his second career homer (in a career that dates back to 2018) appear to have been pitched so carefully.

**Ángeles’ incredible contact rates get you the rest of the way.

Simpson’s pretty aggressive in the zone, too–he offers 71.25% of the time at pitches there–so pitchers also likely get the read that he’s up there looking to do damage. He’s been so dominant that you don’t just want to lay the ball in there on 3-0 and assume he has the red light, because why would he? The same applies to get-me-over first pitches and climbing back in from other hitter’s counts.

When you consider that aggressive in-zone chase rate, I think it would be a mistake to say Simpson has a below-average approach overall. At 71.25/29.41 = 2.42, he’s got a better Z-Swing/O-Swing ratio than Ángeles (2.30) or Bautista (2.25), for instance. As aggressive and excellent hitters go, it also visually appears as though Simpson is particularly content with taking a walk; whereas a lot of hitters like this tend to offer at borderline pitches on three-ball counts because they want to do damage, Simpson has appeared to approach such situations with a decidedly more patient mindset.

Whatever you make of the disconnect between the chase rate and the walk rate in Simpson’s 2024 data, this season is the only time in which Simpson has walked especially frequently. His walk rate as a college senior was 11.3%, his college career before that saw his walk rate typically hover around 10%, and his pro debut last summer saw him walk only 7.3% of the time. So 2024 is a clear outlier, and it doesn’t seem like the underlying plate discipline data supports it being a real change in Simpson’s ability to work walks so much as it reflects the fear pitchers have in staring him down. With his current approach, a walk rate closer to 10% feels more appropriate, and that’s likely where it will head whenever he gets the call to Midland unless something changes.

And that leads us neatly into the second part of the plate discipline question: What makes Simpson’s chase rate relatively high, and what is the possibility for it to improve?

I think there are two contributing factors. The first is that Simpson understandably has a lot of confidence at the plate right now, and since he has the barrel adjustability to cover the whole zone, that confidence naturally extends to borderline pitches. The second is that he has some trouble with spin.

The second is obviously the bigger deal, but let’s get the first out of the way. When he’s behind in the count and a walk doesn’t seem to be in sight, Simpson does take an aggressive approach against borderline pitches. He’ll try to pull his hands in against fastballs just off the plate inside; he tends to foul these off, often with some authority. He’ll expand some against fastballs up and breaking stuff down, with mixed but reasonable results. I don’t see anything either visually or data-wise that would alarm me about that tendency, and if and when Simpson has less success and wants to dial down the aggression a bit, I don’t think he’ll have much trouble doing it.

But the issues with spin stand out. Now, an important thing: this isn’t a guy who’s just going to turn into jelly the moment a pitch starts breaking. I’ve got his estimated average exit velocity against fastballs at 98.83 mph; against breaking pitches, it’s 97.01–16 in play, 10 of them hard-hit. But well-executed breaking stuff is tough for Simpson to handle. He’s had a lot of issues with the pitch that we most associate giving same-side hitters trouble: the slider breaking off the plate away just below the knees. He’s seen 20 breakers in that zone, swung at eight, and missed on all of those swings, often not close to reaching the ball.

Simpson’s issues with breakers away from him extend to pitches that still land in the strike zone. He’s only made contact with two-thirds of in-zone swings against breaking pitches, with the vast majority of the whiffs coming on pitches in the low-outside quadrant; in contrast, he’s made contact on 88.57% of his swings against in-zone fastballs. There’s an additionally large split on out-of-zone contact: 57.69% against heat and 43.75% against breaking stuff. And his chase rate goes from 28.57% against fastballs to 33.68% against breakers.

You’re typically going to see more chasing and less contact against breaking pitches–they move more than fastballs–but overall, Simpson’s splits against spinners are more dramatic than you’d like to see, and they’re backed up by the visual evaluation; there have been many instances where Simpson’s seemed to be fooled by quality sliders. Now, he tracks the ball well through the zone and can do damage against inner-half breakers or hangers, but he’s going to have to show significant improvement in this area to maintain this complete statistical profile as he advances.

I do wonder–and as I previewed earlier, this is just speculation rather than assigning of causality–if maybe this is an area where the in-box footwork causes some issues, perhaps both in terms of identifying pitch locations laterally (because he seems to do a better job IDing vertical locations than horizontal) and in terms of getting his arms extended all the way to that down/away area while the right side of his body is moving backward. It will be interesting to monitor if Simpson makes mechanical adjustments as time goes on and he encounters some level of pro adversity and what those adjustments might do in making inroads on these issues. Identifying an issue a player has is not the same thing as guaranteeing that issue will forever plague the player, after all.

The other question in Simpson’s profile is fence-clearing. We’ve established that he hits the ball very hard, but why does he have only two home runs, then? Sure, some of it is luck–you can see plenty of near-misses in the hard-hit compilation–and some of it is the April Midwest League environment, but again, anything that doesn’t look airtight in a first baseman’s profile has got to be examined.

In an interview with Lansing broadcaster Jesse Goldberg-Strassler earlier this year, Simpson talked about how one of his offseason priorities was lowering his launch angle. Now, every player has some priority or other at any point in time, and many of them never manifest in any significant change of their statistical output. Still, it’s always good to examine whether the player’s stated focus is producing results, and…yep, in Simpson’s case it’s cut his flyball rate from 46.1% in Stockton last year to 32.1% in Lansing this season, per FanGraphs.

Is that a bad thing? I wouldn’t necessarily say it is. Simpson hits so many screaming liners and grounders that he’s been able to amass a .455 batting average on balls in play, up from .398 in Stockton last year. Though BABIP is certainly prone to a ton of fluctuation in <100 batted ball sample sizes, the lower launch angle would likely increase Simpson’s chances of maintaining strong* BABIP figures as he advances, and it could also increase his consistency of contact and decrease his swing-and-miss relative to what more of a flyball approach would do. 

*It won’t be .455 at higher levels, because defenses really improve. Even .355 is almost never sustained in MLB. But could a .350ish figure be possible? This combination of launch angle and exit velocity would certainly give Simpson as good a chance as anyone, other than plus-speed types.

Besides, this isn’t a Jordan Díaz sort of situation where the groundball rate is so high that it really cuts into the chances of extra-base hits. Simpson has, more than anything, just seen an explosion in his line-drive rate this year. With that in mind, it seems to me that there are two dimensions to this whole question of home runs and launch angle in Simpson’s profile. First, Simpson’s HR/FB% is only 8% this year. That feels like it should resolve upward–doubling feels very attainable in a larger, warmer-weather sample–but the extent to which it will resolve is still to be determined. For what it’s worth, it was just 10.3% last year in Stockton. Second is the question of what average launch angle truly optimizes Simpson’s offensive profile, since the lower one does come with more BABIP and possibly less swing-and-miss, but it may cut into the fence-clearing somewhat.

So on the whole, Simpson’s walk rate looks likely to decline at higher levels because of his chase frequency, and his limitations against breaking stuff away are a real flaw that he’s going to have to improve on if he’s going to retain his three-dimensional strength in the box. Further, though there are a lot of positive indicators about his ability to hit the ball hard, he’s got to prove he can translate that exit velocity into round-trippers with more frequency than he has as a pro to date.

Is that enough to sink Simpson’s first base prospectdom? I don’t necessarily think so. The way the swing works and Simpson’s extreme consistency of loud contact right from the get-go is still enough to make it possible he can at least do some C.J. Cron-style stuff even if the walk rate proves to be a total mirage. What these questions do mean, though, is that Simpson is still going to have his work cut out for him when he gets to Midland, which will presumably happen in the second half of the season, if not before. I don’t expect he’ll have huge struggles there or anything, and he’ll be young for the level if he arrives on that timetable, but I also don’t think he’ll continue this seemingly-effortless domination there without some underlying improvement.

Before we close the book on Simpson’s current prospect status, though, there’s another possibility worth touching on…

Will Simpson…Non-1B Prospect?

I noted earlier in this piece that even corner outfielders have far more possible big league jobs than first basemen do. They’re subject to some of the same pressures–center fielders and even some infielders can take their positions–but the moment there’s a viable defensive home for a player besides first base, the pressure on that player to be flawless offensively lessens considerably.

Simpson is certainly the sort of big, muscled-up presence you’d expect at first base, but since he’s a good athlete for the position, that raises the question of whether he has to be confined to first and first alone. He did moonlight in the outfield occasionally in college and has the long speed and coordination that one could imagine him getting passable there, but the A’s haven’t tried him out there yet.

What they have done in May is occasionally play Simpson at a position he never played in college: third base. He’s gotten six starts there, and the organization seems to be taking the possibility seriously.

I’ve watched a few of those games, so I can give you the early report on Simpson’s third base defense. He’s definitely made a couple of bad misplays and is understandably early in the process of figuring out how to control his body over there, but I’m not going to really hold that against him at this stage. Third base is easily the most error-prone position in baseball, and that tendency gets exaggerated in the low minors–Rookie-level players there often struggle to crack a .900 fielding percentage even if they show obvious upside with the glove. In that context, rawness is very possibly just rawness, not ineptitude. 

But he’s also shown some promise. This play probably best exemplifies it:

You can really see the arm strength on display there. Still, another aspect of third base defense that Simpson is still figuring out is the right arm angle to throw from, as he’s tended to come way over the top and throw the ball to first on a pronounced downward trajectory that makes the ball tough to catch, but he’s got plenty of arm strength and hasn’t had any issues yet with side-to-side accuracy. Though he doesn’t have great first-step quickness, he also seems to have the possibility for playable range at the position, and his overall feel for the game could theoretically get him to be an adequate defender over there.

Third base is thus a possibility that’s worth continued exploration, and I don’t think the outfield–probably right field given the arm strength–is out of the question either. That doesn’t mean I’m sure that third or right will be viable long-term positions for Simpson, but seeing as 40-grade defense at either would put him so much more cleanly in a good big-league role than 1B-only status would, it’s a smart idea to get him exposure to those positions early in his career, where many reps may lie ahead.

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Though it took me a long time to get there, the conclusion of this piece isn’t a radical one, just as it wasn’t in my analysis of Johnston. Will Simpson is indeed a prospect, particularly now that he’s not necessarily in a pure 1B/DH box. As with Johnston, to be there less than a year after the draft is a huge win for everyone involved.

However, the fact that there is real underlying legitimacy to Simpson’s performance also doesn’t mean that you should pencil him in as the first baseman for the 2027 A’s. He has real weaknesses that are likely to be far more sturdily tested as he advances, and unless he can really prove to be a defensive asset somewhere other than first base, any slippage* of his offensive production under those tests is likely to leave him short of a clear everyday role.

*I don’t mean that he’d have to keep hitting .320 with walks and power. As discussed before, there’s natural BABIP deflation as players like this advance, and that shouldn’t be held against the player. I’m more talking about chase, contact, and a strong hard-hit rate, among other things.

But if the biggest challenge Simpson faces is dealing with breaking stuff away from him, there still could be a role for him even if he never fully solves that issue, because lefties can’t throw him that pitch. He’s a pretty clean fit in a platoon role at whatever defensive position(s) he can play. I’ve used Noda as an occasional point of comparison in this article, but in theory, Simpson would actually make an incredible platoon partner for Noda, in that Noda is a lefty who has always mashed offspeed pitches far more than fastballs. If Noda were to still be around and in something like his 2023 form when Simpson was ready for the big leagues, a platoon where Simpson starts against lefties and some fastball-heavy righties, and Noda starts against all other righties, could provide big offensive production.

Ultimately, then, though I’d like to think I’m in a better position to assess Simpson than national outlets,* I think I have Simpson evaluated pretty similarly to most others. He’s a guy who could well perform solidly in the upper minors over the next couple of years and get himself into the big league picture, most likely as a platoon bat who either excels at first defensively or can hang in somewhere else (3B/RF) on the diamond. I’m not publishing my Top A’s Prospects list for another three weeks, but as of now, I don’t think my placement of Simpson on that list will be particularly different from what you see at FanGraphs or MLB Pipeline.

*Because of sheer volume of reps of the player’s video, not smarts/knowledge about analysis in general. I’d have no idea how to even begin assessing my abilities compared to those of others.

But Simpson is still early in his career, and though that’s the most likely path myself and others might foresee for him (still a great place to be given where he was a year ago), a number of other possibilities remain. Certainly, many of those are not positive routes–minor league baseball comes with a ton of attrition whether we like it or not. But Simpson, like Johnston, hasn’t really met much adversity yet and hasn’t needed to address his weaknesses as a pro–they all basically lie under the surface right now. The idea that his strengths aren’t locked in but the weaknesses are does come with some underlying pragmatism, but it also doesn’t really reflect how players develop. Two years ago, the A’s had another unheralded college senior tear up Lansing in the season’s opening weeks, with the one chink in his armor being issues with spin. That player was Brett Harris, who arrived in the big leagues two years later arguably a better breaking-ball hitter than a fastball one (albeit with other extant issues). If Simpson can improve against those pitches the way Harris has–a tall order, but obviously not an impossible one–and a couple of other things break right, like the fence-clearing, then some really interesting right-tail outcomes begin to open up, toward Christian Walker sort of territory. 

For now, though, there’s plenty to marvel at as Simpson excels and plenty to keep an eye on as he progresses.