How Corbin Carroll leveled up: Diamondbacks star finds new heights after disappointing (by his standards) 2024

In a way, the sparkling first month authored by Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder Corbin Carroll shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, he’s a former first-rounder who became one of the best prospects in baseball and then became an All-Star and National League Rookie of the Year as a 22-year-old. But this? 

“This” refers to what Carroll has done thus far in 2025, particularly coming off what was by his emerging standards a disappointing 2024. In that 2024 campaign, Carroll was still a quite valuable player, but we unfairly expect straight-line trajectories from promising young baseball talents, and Carroll didn’t give us that. Last season, Carroll saw his OPS+ decline from 133 as a rookie to 107, and he saw his WAR drop from 5.3 to 3.4. In 2025, though, Carroll has so far not only found his expected level but also exceeded it. 

Through 28 games for the D-backs, Carroll is slashing .308/.376/.667 with nine homers, an MLB-leading four triples, and eight doubles. That slash line is good for an OPS+ of 186. Carroll leads the National League in hits (21 of those 37 hits have gone for extra bases), and his majors-leading total bases count is already up to 80. As a bonus, the speedy Carroll is five for five in steals, and he continues to have a knack for not hitting into double plays. Suffice it to say, that’s elite production, and if it’s sustained it’ll put Carroll at the forefront of National League MVP discussions (+350 to win, behind just Shohei Ohtani, per Caesars).

It’s of course easy to dismiss such lofty outputs based on sample size – it’s still April, after all. However, we’ve known for some time that Carroll has an exceptionally high ceiling as a hitter, and there’s also cause to believe he’s producing in a sustainable manner. We can plausibly say such a thing for two reasons. First, the ball-tracking metrics, which become illuminating much sooner than those top-line numbers do, reveal a hitter who’s earned that high level of production because of the batted-ball authority he’s demonstrated to date. Second, Carroll has made meaningful changes to his batting stance – changes that have allowed him to punish the ball to the extent that he has so far. 

Let’s talk about his underlying indicators first. Thus far in 2025, here’s what this hitter, listed at 5-foot-10 and 165 pounds, is doing: 

• Carroll’s quality of contact has given him an expected batting average of .310, which puts him in the 93rd percentile of major-league hitters. In other words, that .308 batting average has been earned. 
• He’s got an expected slugging percentage of .651, which puts him in the 99th percentile of MLB hitters. 
• Carroll’s average exit velocity off the bat of 94.4 mph puts him in the 95th percentile. 
• A hefty 58.6% of Carroll’s batted balls qualify as “hard-hit.” That puts him in the 97th percentile among his peers. 
• In terms of barrel rate, or the percentage of batted balls that leave the bat at the ideal combination of launch angle and exit velocity, Carroll is in the 91st percentile. 
• Carroll’s max exit velocity of 115.8 mph puts him in the 98th percentile. 

Carroll came into the 2025 season with a strong career OPS+ of 121, so this isn’t out of nowhere. Still, this is truly a higher plane of production for him, and it at least coincides with changes to his set-up at the plate. 

He first made changes down the stretch in 2024 in response to what had been for him a disappointing level of plate production. Instead of starting with his bat basically parallel to the ground, Carroll held it at a much higher vertical angle, which allowed for a smoother loading phase of the swing and a quicker attack of the incoming pitch. Probably not coincidentally, Carroll put up significantly stronger numbers in August and September of last season. 

He wasn’t done tinkering, though. This spring, Carroll, while keeping the bat more vertical, altered his hand position at set-up. Here’s a look (Carroll’s spring stance is on the left, and his set-up late in the 2024 season is on the right): 

In essence, this eliminates a bit of movement in the swing, as Carroll’s barrel angle on the left is pretty close to be “launch-ready,” whereas Carroll on the right needs another layer of movement to get there. Some players benefit from a more involved entry into the “business end” of the swing – think Gary Sheffield, for instance – but others, like Carroll presumably, do better when they minimize the number of steps it takes to get to the attack portion of the swing, which winds up being very similar from high-level hitter to high-level hitter. 

After implementing this suite of changes, Carroll has seen a major jump in average exit velocity – more than a 5 mph improvement year over year – and he’s also seen significant gains in bat speed and in his percentage of fast swings. He’s also “intercepting” the pitch closer to the pitcher, or more out in front, which in turn has helped Carroll pull the ball more often. Hitters enjoy the highest level of production when they pull the ball in the air, and Carroll this season is doing that a lot more often thanks to a higher pull rate and a lower ground-ball percentage. Last season, Carroll pulled the ball in the air 18.1% percent of the time, which ranked 115th out of 240 qualifiers. So far in 2025, he’s pulling the ball in the air 26.4% of the time, which ranks 40th out of 259 qualifiers. Drastic improvement, that. 

Of course, we’ll need to see if he is able to sustain this general level of performance – some level of decline is almost assured – but there are good reasons to believe Carroll has reached a higher plane as a hitter. If indeed he has, then he’s about to make the leap from star to superstar. That’s welcome news for a Diamondbacks team that has World Series aspirations in 2025.