The Board Audits Itself

The man on the board

Chandler Simpson sits 14th on our Fade board — the board that ranks hitters whose results have most outrun their contact quality. He has the softest contact on that board (an EV95 of 98.1 against a group averaging 103.4) and the 95th-percentile wheels. The question that started this was simple: is he there because he got lucky, or because he can run and our model cannot see legs?

He is a genuine oddity. Born in Atlanta on November 18, 2000, and raised in East Point, Simpson hit .450 as a senior at St. Pius X and earned All-State honors. He received exactly one Division I scholarship offer, from UAB. He transferred to Georgia Tech and led all of NCAA Division I with a .433 average in 2022. The Rays took him 70th overall and signed him for $750,000. In the minors he stole 104 bases in a single season. He debuted with Tampa Bay on April 19, 2025.

Zero career home runs. Sixty-six steals. A .288 average across 198 big-league games. He has built a major-league career out of contact and legs in an era that pays for neither. Rays baserunning coordinator Jared Sandberg has said he would buy a ticket just to watch him play and called the skill set more exciting than past speedsters. During the 2024 Premier12, Mike Scioscia told him to stay true to himself and that he would see him in the big leagues. Simpson is not a cautionary tale. He is the reason we found the bug.

The bug

Our model grades a batted ball on how hard and at what angle it was struck. It does not see the man who hits it. A fast man beats that model, and he beats it every year. Across seven seasons the correlation between sprint speed and our luck gap has run about +0.3 — train years and test years alike. Fast men land higher than the physics of the ball alone would predict.

So we built the fix: the luck gap with speed subtracted out, then a Fade board ranked on the residual. We pre-registered the test, froze the protocol, and ran it once.

The fix that failed

The fix was worse. In both test years the plain old luck gap flagged the bigger fallers. On a fifteen-man board the raw gap produced steeper mean declines than the speed-adjusted version. Speed predicts where a hitter lands. The Fade board predicts how far he falls. The interaction between the luck gap and sprint speed was null. The gap predicts decline at every speed.

Simpson will give back what a slow man with the same gap gives back. He just does it from a higher perch, and to a higher perch. That is why both things can be true at once: he is fast, and the board still has a claim on him.

The correction

A sentence in our own published write-up had said we were flagging ten men who can run and five who got lucky and calling them the same thing. The second study refuted that sentence. We appended a public correction to the receipt the same day rather than editing the original away. Misses stay on the record. So do the sentences that turned out wrong.

The Fade board still flags him. We still stand behind it. The sprint-speed column is now printed beside every name so a reader can see for himself the thing the engine is choosing not to rank on. His luck gap has eased a couple of points this month and he has slid from 12th to 14th — good news for him, and the engine agreeing with anyone bullish. The board remains the board.

The market

Collectors are listing his rookie autos, parallels, and graded cards; some are buying for personal collections. The profile is rare enough that cardboard moves when he does.

Chandler Simpson cards on eBay →

Paid link — as an eBay Partner, FVR earns from qualifying purchases. Not financial advice. We take positions only after publication — never before. Misses stay on the record.

On the record

The claim is that the plain luck gap still outperforms the speed-adjusted version and that speed does not change how far a gap falls. If the next pre-registered holdout shows the speed-adjusted Fade board producing the bigger declines, this piece is wrong. We will know when that holdout is graded.

Biographical details per MLB.com, Wikipedia, Post and Courier, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sports Illustrated, and The Athletic. All performance data: MLB StatsAPI via the FVR engine.