The SEC’s all-time hit king made his major league debut this week, to almost no fanfare. In some respects, the Tampa Bay Rays are a step down for Jake Mangum. The Rays currently play at Tampa’s Steinbrenner Field, capacity just over 11,000, while they await disposition after Hurricane Milton took the roof off the Trop last offseason.
Mangum played his college ball at Mississippi State, whose ballpark, Dudy Noble Field, holds 15,000, with a record attendance of 16,423 cowbell-whacking, barbecue-devouring maniacs. It’s one of the most electrifying (in good times) and demanding (in bad) environments in all of college sports. To someone who’s played at The Dude, as Mangum has, even the most raucous major league crowd probably feels like a Presbyterian church.
Mangum hit .408 as a freshman at Mississippi State and .357 overall, and collected a record 383 hits over four seasons on campus. But despite wrecking house in the best amateur baseball league in the world, it took him six full seasons in the minors to get added to a 40-man roster.
As befits a four-year college player, Mangum moved through the minors quickly. He reached Double-A after just 62 professional games, and Triple-A after 111 more games. And he’s been good — really good, in fact — at the highest level of the minor leagues, hitting .310/.353/.438 in 256 games, with 93 extra-base hits and 43 stolen bases, while mostly playing center field.
Despite this, interest in Mangum’s services as a potential major leaguer has been tepid at best. And that’s saying something, because — and I say this intending no undue disrespect — a lot of the guys floating around on major league benches are just not that good.
In 2019, the Mets drafted Mangum in the fourth round, but that draft position belies his actual status. Mangum, then a senior, signed for just $20,000, the first of seven consecutive minimum-bonus deals that financed the signings of high school pitchers Josh Wolf and Matt Allan.
We’re in the weeds now, so I’m just going to go hog wild with the trivia here: Mangum was not the only record-setting contact-hitting outfielder the Mets drafted as a senior out of an SEC school that year. They took LSU all-time hits leader Antoine Duplantis in the 12th round and signed him for more than four times what they gave Mangum in the fourth. If you know the name, you’re either a college baseball diehard, or you know that Duplantis’ younger brother is Mondo Duplantis, the two-time defending Olympic pole vault champion. They sure can run, those Duplantis brothers.
Back to Mangum: He was traded twice in his minor league career, but didn’t make it on to the 40-man roster until this past November. As such, he was exposed to the Rule 5 draft in 2023, but didn’t get a sniff. He was only an honorable mention on the Mets’ team-specific prospect lists in 2021 and 2022; by the time he got a numbered ranking this past February, he had the unusual distinction of having his age listed as 29.0; the only older player to make a prospect list this year was Yankees catcher J.C. Escarra. There are a couple kids on the Rays list who are 11 1/2 years younger than Mangum. In other words, Mangum is a month older than Magneuris Sierra, a veteran of six big league seasons who hasn’t played in the majors or the affiliated minors since 2023.
Through nine games in the majors, Mangum is doing well. He chucked up a goose-egg on Thursday afternoon as the Angels routed the Rays 11-1, but Mangum is still 11-for-33 for his big league career, with only three strikeouts and five stolen bases in five attempts. Small sample size though it may be, that’s a good first impression.
I’m interested in Mangum for two reasons. First is that his arrival in the majors is a good story. This is college baseball royalty, for starters, and I love any excuse to remember some college guys and talk about Antoine Duplantis and Rowdey Jordan and SEC West heroes of days gone by. Not only that, Mangum scratched and clawed through six years in the wilderness, waiting patiently for a call-up, and now he’s got it. If you don’t find that tale compelling, do us all a favor and look within yourself to heal your heart of stone.
The second reason to be interested in Mangum is that he’s a test case. If you’ve watched playoff baseball in the past 15 years, and checked in on what the man on the street says when his team loses — whether on social media, or talk radio, or a couple stools down at the bar to no one in particular — you’ve probably noticed a few common threads. Hitters are too passive; they’re up there to take a walk instead of put the ball in play. Hitters swing and miss too much. Offense is too reliant on the home run, and when that boom-or-bust style goes bust, there’s no Plan B. Nobody’s good at situational hitting anymore; hard contact is all well and good, but what happened to the days when hitters placed the ball where they wanted to and nobody could shift against them?
Having spent quite a bit of time on social media, and on the radio, and at bars — you know, anything that passes for the agora in post-industrial America — I’ve trotted out any number of rejoinders to these arguments. It doesn’t work. You can use numbers, or counterfactuals, or point out that the criticisms that get lobbed at Aaron Judge and Gunnar Henderson today were once leveled against Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. The proverbial slings and arrows haven’t changed since humankind used literal slings and arrows.
Where does Mangum enter into all this? He Plays the Game the Right Way. Not only in the sense that he is what often gets euphemistically referred to as “a grinder,” but he’s also a freakishly talented contact hitter who hits the ball on the ground and to all fields. He’s like a time traveler from 1941.
Mangum’s career minor league walk rate, across all levels, is just 5.8%. He doesn’t sit there waiting for the game to come to him. Across college, the Cape Cod League, the minors, and the pros, Mangum has hit just 29 home runs in 3,342 plate appearances. Across parts of three seasons in Triple-A, he’s hit roughly two groundballs for every fly ball.
The closer you look at Mangum’s game, the more the SEC career hits record looks like a backhanded compliment. A college counting stat record depends on a player getting four seasons in school; if Dylan Crews had stayed in school for his senior season, he would almost certainly have broken Duplantis’ school hits record and probably beaten Mangum’s conference hits record. He didn’t, of course, because he had better things to do as the no. 2 overall pick in 2023.
Here’s one reason Mangum, in spite of his elite contact skills, scared off professional evaluators. In 2023, he was in the 99th percentile of Triple-A hitters for chase rate. In 2024, he was in the 98th percentile.
By swinging at so many pitches outside the strike zone, Mangum not only reduces his walk rate, he’s putting balls in play off suboptimal pitches. On pitches outside the strike zone, he hit .243/.368/.323 in Triple-A over the past two seasons, which put him in the 31st percentile of hitters at that level for wOBA.
When the bases are empty, the result is really the only thing that matters. Strikeout or groundout, walk or single or catcher’s interference is kind of immaterial. But with runners on, the situation gets complicated.
So far this season, Mangum has seen 59 pitches with runners on base and put 16 of them in play, which is one of the 10 highest percentages in the league among hitters who have seen at least 50 pitches with men on. He’s hitting .313 with men on base, but the 11 times he’s failed to reach base have illustrated that there are worse things than swinging through a pitch with a runner in scoring position.
Fly balls are desirable because they produce home runs and extra-base hits with runners in scoring position, but they also almost never turn into double plays or force outs.
In 17 career plate appearances with runners on base, Mangum has five hits, four RBI, and one walk, and has yet to strike out. That’s great! But Mangum has come to the plate with at least one runner on base and less than two outs 11 times, and hit into three double plays. Even accepting the extreme, extreme smallness of that sample, that’s bad. Really bad. Almost three times as many double plays per opportunity as any other hitter in the pitch-tracking era.
Then there’s this play, which is what got me thinking about Mangum in the context of situational hitting in the first place. The situation: Runner on third, one out, one-run game in the bottom of the seventh, infield in.
This is situational hitting heaven. A medium-depth fly ball scores a run. So does a competent bunt. With the infield in, any well-hit grounder is probably going to find a hole and not only score a run but put Mangum on base as well. This is where the Nellie Fox-type hitter shortens up and punches the ball through the hole. What did Mangum do?
Ground the ball right to the first baseman, who threw Kameron Misner out at home. Not only did Mangum make an out and fail to score the run, his groundball left the Rays two bases worse off than they would’ve been if he’d struck out.
We’ll see if this evens out over the course of the season, if Mangum comes out ahead in the end. But this is the danger of situational hitting — unless it’s executed with inhuman precision, it carries less upside than swinging from the heels and praying, and carries additional risks.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com