Chandler Simpson is really good at baseball and is doing things only a handful of players have accomplished in the game’s long history.
Entering play on Saturday night, 25-year old Simpson is hitting .296/.325/.353 over his brief two year career at the big league level. He hardly ever strikes out with a 9.4% career strikeout rate and barely whiffs, with a 90.5% contact rate. Since the start of the 2025 season, among hitters with at least 800 PA, Simpson ranks 7th in AVG, 5th in K%, and 3rd in contact%. Simpson is really good at making contact and hitting for average.
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Simpson’s elite speed of course also makes him an asset on the bases as he has already notched 74 stolen bases since making his big league debut, 2 shy of the MLB lead over that time (behind former Rays SS Jose Caballero). According to Baseball Savant, Simpson provides the most baserunning value of any player in the game.
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Simpson recently collected his 100th hit of the season as well as his 30th stolen base, this achievement put Simpson in some rare company, as only 13 players have reached those milestones over the course of their first two seasons, including 3x All-Star Bobby Witt Jr. as well Hall of Famers Ichiro Suzuki and Paul Molitor
Meanwhile, Simpson has been refining his play in the outfield. Yes, he had an adventurous time learning how to best utilize his elite speed during his time with the Rays last season, which led to occasional disastrous results and admittedly abysmal advanced defensive metrics in 2025; however, Simpson has worked incredibly hard to improve upon this skillset and now has developed into a plus defender, with a 93rd percentile OAA and is among the top half of outfielders with 5 defensive runs saved this season.
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So when did Simpson quietly shatter a franchise record that has been in place for over twenty years? Well, this is a bit of a funny one.
On July 17th when the Rays returned from the All-Star break. Simpson made his first plate appearance in the second inning and grounded out harmlessly. That was his 797th plate appearance with the Rays. With that trip to the plate, Simpson surpassed Jason Tyner for the longest stretch in franchise history to have not hit a homerun.
Tyner was acquired by the Rays in 2000 and would spend the entirety of his Tampa Bay tenure homerless, batting .261/.298/.303 over parts of four seasons. He would become a crowd favorite for his tenacious play and the front office even decided to plan a bobblehead day to be given out to fans on June 2nd. In early April 2002, Tyner got to check out the bobblehead:
“It looked all right. I’m sure I’ll get ragged about it. Oh well.”
However, over the first two months of the season, Tyner was among the worst players in baseball, hitting .214/.249/.238 over 180 PA. On May 28th, just a few days before the scheduled promotion, the Devil Rays optioned Tyner to Triple-A where he would remain for the rest of the season. Coincidentally, the team also had to cancel a Toby Hall bobblehead day that was planned when the backstop was optioned on the same day as Tyner; those dolls had yet to be manufactured though. Unfortunately, all 10,000 Jason Tyner bobbleheads had already been delivered to Tropicana Field. During the offseason, the team donated the bobbleheads to the Pinellas Education Foundation.
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Tyner would be up and down in 2003 and performed better but only received 102 plate appearances over the course of the year. He would be claimed off of waivers by Texas in December but the scrappy outfielder wouldn’t make his return to the big leagues until 2005 when he caught on with the Minnesota Twins and had a career year in 2006, accruing 1.5 fWAR, but was still homerless. But then, on July 28th, 2007, Tyner laced a ball down the right field line that was the definition of a wall scraper as it barely cleared the fence. But, the ball left the yard which gave Jason Tyner his first and only career home run in the big leagues after 1318 plate appearances.
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Tyner finished out the season with the Twins and joined up with Cleveland the following season but would only receive three plate appearances, the final trips to the plate of his career. Tyner would retire shortly thereafter and since moved onto coaching. Over the past several years, Tyner has been the head baseball coach at Monsignor Kelly Catholic High School.
Jason Tyner’s career ended with just the one HR and him hitting .275/.314/.323 and accruing 1.9 fWAR over 1467 plate appearances.
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Back to the 2026 Rays, fear not. Simpson has already proven to be more valuable than Tyner was in his career, having already eclipsed Tyner’s career fWAR with 2.4, and even stuck around long enough to see his bobble head distributed at Tropicana Field:
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