Coming into the 2026 season, I had buried Bryan Rincon at #44 on my offseason ranking. I had been a fan of his back after the 2023 season, but two years of injuries had led to him rarely being on the field and being pretty bad when he was playing leaving me skeptical he would ever hit enough to have a major league role.
Over the offseason, he got healthy and worked with Kevin Long on his swing. In the spring he hit a couple of balls that got attention in certain circles. He then hit .222/.367/.389 in the cold in Reading over the first month of the season. That was a positive sign, but since then he has hit .273/.414/.531 and looked like the biggest breakout prospect in the system. Given his home ballpark and the seemingly out of nowhere rise, there are plenty of questions about whether his system is real, with a real gamut from he is the next Edmundo Sosa to he replaces Trea Turner.
It is probably good to start by stripping away the triple slash line and looking at what underlying numbers we have available to us publicly. Here is year over year regular season metrics for Rincon over his four full seasons.
| Stat | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| G | 99 | 35 | 84 | 114 |
| PA | 425 | 148 | 359 | 514 |
| BB% | 16.0% | 16.2% | 13.9% | 17.7% |
| K% | 17.9% | 31.1% | 28.7% | 21.0% |
| Swing% | 37.6% | 36.3% | 38.4% | 38.9% |
| Contact% | 81.6% | 77.1% | 77.6% | 77.9% |
| SwStr% | 6.9% | 8.3% | 8.6% | 8.6% |
| CStr% | 18.6% | 20.4% | 21.0% | 18.6% |
| LD% | 21.1% | 20.0% | 23.3% | 20.9% |
| GB% | 44.7% | 45.3% | 36.3% | 43.0% |
| FB% | 34.2% | 34.7% | 40.4% | 36.1% |
| HR/FB% | 8.8% | 7.7% | 7.7% | 21.1% |
There are a couple of things that immediately jump out. The first is that it is really glaring that we need exit velocity data here. We know he had a 99.2 mph 90th EV and 102.5 max EV in Clearwater in 2023, and we know that he is definitely better than that now, I just don’t know how much better. In 2024 in the Arizona Fall League those numbers were 100.9 and 103.4 over 35 tracked balls in play. In their analysis of the minor league ball (more on this later), Baseball America buckets Rincon into the Middle EV section of 90th EVs between 102.6 and 104.5 mph over the last two seasons using non-public data. So we do know he is hitting the ball harder, but hasn’t become a slugger.
We also know he was hurt in 2024 and 2025 and that 2025 involved a broken hamate bone which has affects on hitting, in particular power. But even given that we see a lot of trend lines across the three seasons and striking similarities between 2023 and 2026. There have been changes and adaptations, but the overall DNA of what type of hitter Rincon is stays the same.
We should then address the elephant (HR/FB) in the room. We should start with the obvious culprit, Reading. Rincon has slightly more HRs at home (13) than on the road (11), he has more road PAs as well and we can remove walks, strikeouts, and HBPs to get HRs per Balls in Play. At home that is 13/151 (8.6%) and on the road that is 11/157 (7.0%). Over the course of the season we can crudely estimate it is probably boosting him by 2-4 home runs, which isn’t greatly changing our profile. The other side is that Rincon had a home ISO of .080 and .095 the last two years with road ISO of .170 and .133 so it is also fair to say that the Jersey Shore ballpark suppressed his power numbers the two injured years as well.
Then we get to the minor league baseball, which MLB assures everyone hasn’t changed, but the data says has changed dramatically. Baseball America’s analysis had home runs per game up 38% this year after year over year declines as the minors recovered from the lost season, level re-organization, and contraction. Their analysis saw that HR/FB rate in the FSL had increased from 11.3% over 2023-2025 to 16.6% in in 2026. Some of that they determined was better hitting optimization (which we know Rincon has) putting the real rise probably closer to 13.9% to 16.6%. This they determined was due to the ball flying further. This is similar to the home run boom (also due to the ball) in the mid 2010s that saw players like Freddy Galvis turn into sluggers. In the Eastern League, Baseball America had the increase in HR/FB rate at 5.4 points higher in 2026 than the previous 3 seasons.
Rincon is currently 8th in the EL among qualified hitters in HR/FB, in 2025 8th was 13.5% 64% of Rincon’s total. If we use BA’s EL numbers we would have Rincon about 16% HR/FB ratio. If we look at some examples in that 103-104 90th EV range we have players like Zach Neto (14.0%), Trea Turner (10.5%), and Willy Adames (13.4%) to name some shortstops which fits sort of our ballpark estimate here for what the minor league numbers are saying. If we just went with a 14% HR/FB ratio then we are looking at a 1/3 reduction in home runs or about 16 HRs this year with a 18.5 HR/600 PA pace. Some of those missed home runs turn into outs and some into doubles. Assuming Rincon is now near to average-ish raw power, a 16-20 home run a year pace isn’t entirely unreasonable assuming the contact abilities hold.
On the contact ability and approach front, there will need to be something that gives in that relation. He either will need to swing more or have vastly improved contact. Currently is contact rates are just acceptable, but get worrying when you look at his swing rate against lesser pitchers. If you look at patient to passive hitters like Geraldo Perdomo or Bryson Stott, they are running contact rates above 80% (89.3% and 83.3%) respectively and Rincon is at 78% in AA. Given he will see more strikes, Rincon probably will need to see that swing rate rise into the 42-43% range which is where like Brice Turang is with a 79.5% overall contact rate. This will have negative effects on his walk rate and on base ability. The sliding scale is that interplay between walk rate, strikeout rate, and that contact ability. A better contact ability is going to see a lower strikeout rate, but likely lower walk rate. We can see this in Bryson Stott who has settled into a 9.5% BB% 16.5% K% over the last few years (this is also where older Xander Bogaerts has settled as well, another hitter in our same sort of power range). The other side is Turang, or to the a more negative outcome Matt McLain, where you get the BB% consistently over 10%, but the strikeout rate climbs a good bit over 20%. What we don’t have available on the public side right now is if there are any holes against certain pitch types that are lurking such as breaking balls or high velocity fastballs, that would undo a lot of this by greatly decreasing the contact rate when he is exposed to more at the major league level.
We can lastly get to the batted ball contact profile, and we can see this is where some of the home run power is coming from, but also the lower batting averages. Rincon does much of his damage to the pull side in the air. Between pop ups and balls in outfielder’s gloves he is going to make some outs on balls in play. You don’t want him to be Kyle Schwarber, but we know from that contact rate that he also isn’t going to be a hit it to all fields on a line type guy either. It is probable that he runs BABIPs in the .260s or .270s, and batting averages in the .230s/.240s even at an optimistic peak. He also is consequently probably not going to hit a lot of doubles which will suppress his SLG and overall offensive value.
There are a lot of unknowns in here because of the level, the baseball, and the lack of public data. You put it all together and the upside is probably something like what JJ Wetherholt is doing this year, or maybe something close to what Bryson Stott does year over year. If that is all true, that is a really fine baseball player. Hopefully by the time we get into the offseason I will have access to more data (and time) to be able to see the pitfalls or get past some of the worries.