For nearly two full years, Brayden Taylor looked like another minor leaguer whose career would stagnate once he reached Double-A.
Originally selected by the Rays as the 19th overall selection in the 2023 draft, Taylor has an excellent debut campaign, hitting .242/.361/.516 with 5 HR over 108 PA over the remaining minor league season. He followed that up by torching High-A in 2024, hitting .269/.389/.513 with 14 HR and 26 SB, registering a 154 wRC+ over 383 plate appearances.
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With his stellar play, the Rays promoted Taylor to Double-A on July 30th, 2024; he hasn’t been able to move past Montgomery since that promotion.
Brayden Taylor is a 5-tool player but none of his tools are much above average. He is a solid defender with a good arm; there’s some pop in his bat but no one would consider him a true power threat. His hit tool is decent but he won’t win any batting titles. That gives you a player whose five tools all grade around 50 or 55.
During his first full year in the Rays system, Taylor displayed exactly what type of player that could translate into. From August 4th, 2023 through July 27th, 2024, Taylor hit .263/.383/.514 with 19 HR over 491 plate appearances.
But once in Double-A, Taylor struggled to adapt to the more advanced pitching and his strikeouts skyrocketed. Over 125 plate appearances in Double-A in 2024, Taylor hit .194/.290/.435 with 6 HR, registering a 113 wRC+.
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Despite his struggles in Double-A, Taylor was ranked as the Rays 2nd best prospect entering 2025 and 65th overall in the game by Baseball America.
But the disappointing end to 2024 merely foreshadowed his bleak 2025 campaign. He suffered through mechanical issues and just plain old bad luck. After 437 plate appearances, Taylor hit just .173/.289/.286 with 8 HR, registering a 77 wRC+; the 77 wRC+ was among the bottom 20% of the league.
It can be said that Taylor was among the unluckiest players in all of minor league baseball in 2025. He finished the year hitting .173, which was the 2nd lowest batting average in MiLB, which at least in part was due to a .229 BABIP. There were 607 players who had at least 400 plate appearances last season and Taylor’s .229 BABIP was the 2nd lowest behind Juan Baez’s .226 clip.
The Rays did do some tinkering with Taylor in July to try to get the former first round pick going and he did have slightly more success over the second half of the year (97 wRC+ over 173 PA). After the season, Taylor was sent to the Arizona Fall League, where he hit .264/.400/.472. According to FanGraphs, the Rays had Taylor alter his hand and bat positioning.
It precipitated a swing change — his hands are starting lower and his bat is more vertical than before — that has him covering elevated fastballs much better than he was. Taylor is missing far fewer in-zone pitches with this new swing
By 2026, Taylor had vanished from prospect rankings, completely dropping on Baseball America’s top 30, falling all the way to 39th.
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Prior to the season, Taylor spoke to David Laurila of FanGraphs and went into elaborate detail of his swing changes and the struggles he had endured over the past two years. The purpose of changing Taylor’s swing would be to allow his swing stay through the zone longer and thus have a better opportunity to make better contact.
“The biggest thing we focused on was my hip line,” explained the lefty-hitting Taylor. “My hips were staying too far uphill with my leg lift. Instead of bringing my leg straight up and down, we worked on bringing it to my midsection to keep the hips online so that I can be in a better position at launch.
“Doing that changed my bat path,” he added. “Instead of my body being so uphill, and the bat just coming up and out of the zone, the adjustment allowed me to stay in the zone a lot longer. The bat being in the zone a lot longer is what I want. I want to be able to hit through seven baseballs, not come up and hit only one of them. Right? I want to have that adjustability to be able to stay through it and hit as many balls as I can.”
Taylor began the 2026 season back in Double-A and entering his last year before being eligible for the Rule 5 draft, a pivotal season in a minor leaguer’s career.
After one month, it looked like more of the same from Taylor as he finished April hitting .162, but a low BABIP suggested bad luck may be an issue; Taylor’s walk (15.0%) and strikeout (17.5%) numbers were solid.
In early May, Taylor missed several games but returned to game action on May 8th. The following day, his season and possibly career completely turned around.
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From May 9th through July 23rd, Brayden Taylor has hit .329/.415/.605 with 14 HR over 248 PA, registering a 165 wRC+. He has kept a solid strikeout rate of 24.6% over that stretch of time. His BABIP is .396 but he was due for regression considering his previous bad luck over the past two seasons. Despite his poor start to the season, Taylor now ranks 13th among all Double-A hitters with a 136 wRC+ and his overall BABIP is .325 which ranks 52nd of 170 qualifying hitters.
Meanwhile Taylor still has the plus speed and plus defense that had made him a top prospect.
Of course, the argument can be made that Taylor now has over two years of experience at the Double-A level and is getting old for the level. Baseball America hasn’t believed in his turnaround enough to push him back in the Rays top 30. However, FanGraphs in their latest update actually has Brayden Taylor among the top 100 prospects in the game at 75th overall and 6th overall in the Rays system and that’s including the Rays draft class of 2026.
Taylor changed his swing and is less vulnerable to elevated fastballs than he has been in the past. He’s going to get to power and play plus-plus defense at second and third base, or viable defense at shortstop if the Rays need him to.
At this point in the season, Taylor is slated to post the highest average, on-base, and slugging percentage numbers of his career while also reaching a new career high in homeruns hit as well as posting the lowest strikeout rate of his career.
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The next step for Taylor will be seeing if he can maintain this type of production at the next rung of the minor league ladder in Triple-A Durham.
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