Best of BP: New Stadium, New Sluggers: Three Rays Ready to Rake

Hurricane Milton’s devastating strike over St. Petersburg tore the coated fiberglass roof right off of Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays. It will cost the team roughly $56 million to fix MLB’s only remaining domed stadium, but the repairs won’t be complete until the 2026 season—if they’re made at all. For the upcoming 2025 campaign, the Rays will play every home game at George M. Steinbrenner Field, which currently serves as the Yankees Spring Training complex and home venue for their High-A affiliate.

The shift is geographically convenient for players and fans, as it’s only 21 miles away from The Trop and is actually much closer to Tampa itself. The agreement was, luckily, an easy one between the division-rival Yankees and Rays. Hal Steinbrenner “didn’t hesitate to offer assistance to the Rays” and said, “It’s the right thing to do for their fan base,” according to Sam Blum and Chris Kirschner of The Athletic. The stadium is named after Steinbrenner’s father,, who lived in Tampa. The Yankees will receive $15 million from insurance for hosting the Rays and providing necessary stadium upgrades.

Baseball America’s Minor League park factors rate Steinbrenner Field as the 4th (out of 10) most hitter-friendly stadium in the Florida State League in terms of wOBA. However, that number jumps to 1st for left-handed hitters but falls to 9th for righties, emulating Yankee Stadium’s infamous short porch in right. This discrepancy could create some extremely lopsided results for Rays hitters in 2025, but there’s more to the story.

Because Tropicana is one of only two domed stadiums in baseball, the temperature, humidity, wind effects, and air pressure are all relatively fixed. To go along with a batter’s eye that has generated complaints from hitters over the years, The Trop is a hitters’ nightmare.

On fastballs between 94-96 MPH from 2022 to 2024, Tropicana Field has the highest average IVB for road pitchers. It’s the only venue to surpass 17” on average.

This plot below shows Rays hitters’ swing-and-miss tendencies at home versus on the road. They make much less contact against fastballs at Tropicana at every level of induced vertical break.

Using regression tree modeling, I have taken every Rays batted ball from 2024 and estimated two versions of wOBA for each:

1. Tropicana wOBA: The predicted wOBA trained on every batted ball in Tropicana Field from 2022-2023 (leaving out 2024 because that’s in the dataset we’re using)
2. Steinbrenner wOBA: The predicted wOBA trained on every Spring Training batted ball in Steinbrenner Field from 2022-2024 (including 2024, because none of the Rays batted balls were actually in Steinbrenner)

Both versions of predicted wOBA use three elements: exit velocity, launch angle, and spray angle. It’s also important to note that because Steinbrenner produces a higher wOBA on batted balls in general, the predicted wOBA values are also going to be higher:

The methodology makes more sense when plotting the difference between Steinbrenner wOBA and Trop wOBA, where red favors Steinbrenner and blue favors Tropicana. The infield dots hover around 0, the extreme left-field batted balls are blue because of that short area in The Trop, and the rest of the outfield is predominantly red.

*Note that the color scale is shifted, making it slightly harder for batted balls to be red. This is because Steinbrenner’s actual wOBAcon is higher than Tropicana’s anyway.*

Here’s a plot of exit velocity versus launch angle, following the same scale. Keep in mind that this won’t show the effects of spray angle:

The batted balls below zero degrees of launch angle are going to hover around zero in terms of wOBA difference, because the stadium is not going to change the outcome on these BBE. There’s obviously a ton of irrelevant variance involved there. What’s really important is that red band of lower EV, higher LA batted balls that are above the sweet-spot range (8-32º). These are going to result in a ton of extra production for Rays hitters.

Because Tropicana Field already brings such a challenging hitting environment, the stadium switch should come as a relief for most hitters. Here are three in particular I have identified as guys who could benefit the most from the stadium change:

Jonathan Aranda, LHB

In a small sample last season, Aranda crushed the ball. He ranked sixth in all of baseball in barrels per plate appearance, seventh in average EV on aerial contact, and 19th in expected slugging.

No Rays hitter had a higher average exit velocity on batted balls with a launch angle greater than 20º, and with a Pull% percentile of 86 on such BBE, the models absolutely love Aranda.

*Those light blue circles you see in the right-field area are ones where The Trop barely beats out Steinbrenner, but both wOBA models predict values of 1.700+*

Overall, Jonathan Aranda’s estimated Steinbrenner wOBAcon of .543 led the Rays. He hits the ball in the air with authority, and as a lefty with pull-side power, he will thrive. His ability to drive the ball to both right and center field will create more extra-base hits at Steinbrenner. He hit 49 balls at least 300 feet last year, yielding an actual wOBAcon of .705. Those same batted balls were estimated to generate an average wOBA of roughly 1.041 at Steinbrenner, the only Ray to surpass 1.000 on these events.

Aranda’s opposite-field power is significant. Below is a plot of his batted balls roughly between the CF and LF positions:

As a left-handed batter, this section of the field is important for Aranda. Once he starts driving the ball out to right, pitchers will likely try to move further away from him, so maintaining oppo production will be crucial.

As he lifts the ball, the separation in estimated production becomes more visible in this segment of the field. Although Steinbrenner favors lefties, Aranda carried a .508 estimated wOBAcon on these batted balls, nearly a 200-point difference over The Tropicana prediction.

In an interview, Aranda mentioned that he came into the season looking to attack fastballs. There is no doubt in my mind that he worked explicitly in Tropicana over the offseason at some point because the difference is night-and-day:

While he won’t be playing in The Trop next season, his ability to see and hit fastballs in that environment is much improved. He’ll have no trouble maintaining that trait in Steinbrenner; his road xwOBAcon against fastballs went from .360 to .399, but he did so while improving his Z-Swing% by 16%. It’s a pitch he’s started to mash in general, both at home and on the road, but the improvement at Tropicana gives me confidence that he’ll have no lingering fastball issues at Steinbrenner.

Below is a comparison of Aranda’s swing against two fastballs, the left from 2023 and the right from 2024. His legs are closer together, and his pre-pitch hand movement is much more direct. Notice how much faster his swing starts after leg-lift thanks to the hand position fix:

Aranda has a patient plate approach, but is difficult to put away. He makes contact when behind in the count, and it’s typically loud, too. He sits toward the middle of the spectrum in terms of bat speed, but generates a lot of power by doing damage in-zone and frequently lifting his balls-in-play.

Richie Palacios, LHB

Palacios has played for three different teams across three seasons and has accrued exactly 2 WARP as a big leaguer. The Rays acquired the slugger last offseason in a one-for-one trade for rental reliever Andrew Kittredge, and he’s got some upside. His average exit velocity, max exit velocity, xwOBA, xwOBAcon, BB%, and Sweet-Spot% have increased each season. He also quietly paced for 31 stolen bases per 150 games despite tallying only four in his two preceding seasons combined.

Similarly to Aranda, Palacios is a left-handed hitter who pulls the ball in the air. He ranked in the 89th percentile of all hitters in terms of aerial pull rate, something that should translate nicely to Steinbrenner, as the model predicts:

Palacios gains 75 points of estimated wOBAcon with the switch to Steinbrenner, which shouldn’t come as a surprise based on his spray chart. However, his batted ball-profile has evolved over the years:

While I’m not sure how much of this can be credited to the Rays and their coaches, Palacios’ swing has been tweaked. His pre-pitch bat-wiggle is still there, only higher up and further from his body. He puts a ton of weight on his front leg during his load and rotates through his back knee, which he keeps nearly parallel to the ground as he fires the barrel. Here’s a slowed comparison of last season (left) and this season (right):

There’s an intriguing trend with his profile in terms of launch and spray directions, especially because of the stadium switch. The changes in Palacios’s batted ball profile complement his improvements in exit velocity, damage, and bat speed.

Pictured below are batted balls to Palacios’ pull-side (spray angle greater than 10º) that traveled at least 100 feet:

On these BBE, Palacios is predicted to gain 194 points in estimated wOBA, moving from .466 at the Trop to .660 in Steinbrenner. Although Palacios has seen steady improvements in exit velocity, he’s not quite at an elite level yet. However, at a much smaller park (and one that favors left-handers, no less), his ability to stay out in front and continue to pull the ball will be a much more meaningful factor than exit velocity in regard to damage-doing.

Palacios worked with Driveline last offseason, and while it’s unclear if he’s continuing their programs, he saw a noticeable improvement in bat speed. This led to his improvements in xwOBA, max EV, and other metrics.

When we get more into the nitty-gritty aspects of Palacios’s offensive profile, his progression of bat speed over the course of the season caught my eye. There’s an expected decline throughout the extreme duration of the season, but this is slightly concerning for someone with mediocre swing speeds as it is:

Luckily, there’s more good news for Palacios. He struggled a ton in The Trop, especially against fastballs. This chart should remind you of one from earlier in the article:

Palacios’s Whiff% jumps above 60% in that 16”/17” IVB range at The Trop, but he’s right around league average on the road. This is one of the main reasons why I think he’ll excel both generally and at Steinbrenner; he won’t have to play at Tropicana.

His struggles are consistent against other pitch groups and types as well. His swing decisions against offspeed pitches are fascinating:

Palacios clearly has trouble reading offspeed pitches in Tropicana’s environment, and his comfort in the box is displayed by his bat speed. His Contact% only improving by a single percentage point, mixed with the slight bat speed improvement, shows that he’s not really getting his A-swing off at Tropicana when he sees splitters and changeups. He’s doing whatever it takes to make contact after being caught off guard by abnormal movement and spin, a thesis further reinforced by his lopsided swing rates.

Richie Palacios is one of the top candidates to improve at Steinbrenner purely based on the increase in his estimated batted-ball production. For someone who’s posted a .567 OPS in their lone 131 ABs in the Trop, the switch to Steinbrenner will make hitting a whole lot easier.

Curtis Mead, RHB

Mead struggled in 2024 when he joined the big-league club. With just a .569 OPS and poor K/BB ratios, there was a large gap from his time in AAA, where he slugged .481 on a .369 wOBA. However, his batted ball profile looks quite interesting, especially in Steinbrenner. Combining his Triple-A and MLB batted balls, his spray chart shows his 72-point gap in Steinbrenner wOBA over Tropicana wOBA:

Mead’s 391 batted balls projected for a .406 wOBAcon at Steinbrenner, a hefty improvement over just .334 at Tropicana. A lot of this comes from flyballs to center and right field. If we take a look at Mead’s hard-hit balls with a minimum launch angle of 25º, we can see his predicted Steinbrenner wOBA start to take off after that left-field corner area:

*Negative is LF, Zero is CF, Positive is RF*

On batted balls with a spray angle between -10º and 10º, where we really focus in on that center field area, Mead’s estimated production skyrockets.

His predicted wOBAcon at Steinbrenner on these batted balls is .556, but at Tropicana, those same events return a value of just .368, an improvement of 187 points. That’s the largest disparity among every Rays hitter with 30 balls in play within those spray angle parameters.

This double by Mead is a perfect example of why he will shine at Steinbrenner. The predicted Tropicana wOBAcon on batted balls with similar EV, LA, and Spray Angle is .460; solid, but you’d expect more for a double off the wall. At Steinbrenner, the estimated wOBAcon is 1.900.

The seven batted balls in the data frame with similar metrics at Steinbrenner gave us a value of 1.900, and here are the actual results of those batted ball events:

• Sac Fly
• Home Run
• Home Run
• Home Run
• Home Run
• Home Run
• Home Run

Mead is not a pull-happy hitter—an archetype that works well in Tropicana. For someone who likes to use the entire field, Steinbrenner is perfect for Curtis Mead.