Corbin Carroll Has Put Together His Most Complete Season Yet

With a power/speed combination that any team would pencil into the top of their lineup, Corbin Carroll has quickly become one of the game’s best players.

Selected 16th overall in the 2019 draft, Carroll rose to the top of prospect rankings quickly. With 80-grade speed and grades of 50 or higher across the board, he forced the Arizona Diamondbacks to debut him at just 21 years of age. In that 2022 season, the 5-foot-10 outfielder posted 1.4 fWAR in 32 games.

Following his strong showing in 2022, Arizona knew that it had a franchise cornerstone in Carroll. He was a favorite for Rookie of the Year award in 2023 and won the accolade unanimously. That season, Carroll slashed .285/.362/.506 with 25 home runs, 54 stolen bases, and 116 runs scored.

Expectations were understandably high for Carroll in his second season after posting a 5.3 fWAR as a rookie. He was an MVP candidate and expected to lead a Diamondbacks squad that had made a Cinderella run to the World Series in the previous year. This was Carroll’s chance to cement himself as one of the game’s elites.

Unfortunately, he wouldn’t meet those expectations in 2024. A sophomore slump, which saw Carroll bat just .231 in 684 plate appearances, halted his ascent to the level of stardom that fellow young All-Star Bobby Witt Jr. reached last season.

It was still a valuable season – Carroll hit 22 homers, stole 34 bases, and posted a 107 wRC+, but he wasn’t hitting the ball hard consistently. Carroll needed to hit the ball with authority to become a true five-tool player.

In 2025, Carroll will have done just that. He’s already set career-highs in home runs (30), RBI (76), and fWAR (5.9). It’s his most complete season yet, and it’s all because he’s hitting the ball for more power than ever.

What’s Fueling Carroll’s Power Surge?

Carroll has never hit the ball this hard, this consistently, in his career.

His average exit velocity of 92.1 mph and hard-hit rate of 49.9% are both significant improvements over previous career-bests. Carroll’s improved bat speed, up one mph from last year, gives him the opportunity to strike the ball with greater impact at the point of contact. This is evidenced by Carroll’s max exit velocity of 115.8 mph this season, which is two mph higher than any previous batted ball we had seen from him.

Not only is Carroll swinging the bat harder and hitting the ball harder, but he’s hitting it in the air much more frequently. Carroll’s ground ball rate has steadily decreased over the past couple of seasons and fell 10.2% from his mark in 2024. By beating the ball into the ground less, Carroll has seen a seven percent increase in his fly ball rate and a three percent rise in his line drive rate.

Fewer ground balls typically mean a greater expected slugging percentage, which is among the league’s elite this season (.550), compared to his decent previous career-best (.441).

By selling out for more power, Carroll is striking out the most (24.2%) in a full season in his career. While he’s striking out at a subpar rate, Carroll is walking at an above-average clip (9.6%) – which is helping to minimize that impact.

Nothing alleviates concerns about a hitter’s future impact like hitting the ball harder, in the air, more often. Carroll may be striking out more than he has before, but that appears due to a productive change in approach, rather than a regression of skill.

Carroll’s Ultra-Efficient Swing

Thanks to the new swing path/attack angle tool on Baseball Savant, which publicly tracks the vertical angle at which hitters’ bats travel through the hitting zone, there’s now a way to directly compare and contrast the swings of major league hitters based on this specific metric.

The model defines an ideal attack angle as 5-20º, and only Ramón Urías of the Houston Astros approaches the ball with an ideal attack angle more than Carroll. If we couple ideal attack angle percentage with bat speed, we see that those players who swing the bat hard and at an ideal angle often are some of the game’s best.