One Degree

On May 2, at CHS Field in St. Paul, Jonathon Long came to the plate four times and never once hit a baseball out of the infield.

The league's play-by-play file keeps it flat. First inning: grounds out sharply, first baseman to pitcher. Fourth: grounds out, third baseman to first. Sixth: grounds out, third baseman to first. Eighth: lines out to second base. Four balls in play, three of them into the dirt, two of them fielded by Ryan Kreidler at third.

Three days later FanGraphs published David Laurila's interview with him, and Long said this:

"Last year, my groundball rate was a little high for my liking. Instead of a 106-mph grounder to shortstop, I'd like to be driving the ball up the gap."

That night, against Columbus, he struck out three times and singled on a ground ball.

He was describing what he wanted, not what he was doing. Feverbaseball's engine tracks nearly every ball a Triple-A hitter puts in play, and over the two weeks that interview landed in — May 1 through May 15, on thirty-eight balls — 60.5 percent of them went into the ground. No two-week stretch of his season comes near it. All thirty-eight left the bat at a mean of one degree.

He hit .227 in May, the worst full month of his season. He named it before he could do it.

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Feverbaseball's engine does not think Jonathon Long is a star. He hits it 108.1 miles an hour at his best, against a median of 105.1 for the 414 Triple-A bats it has enough tracked balls to grade. He puts 42.9 percent of his batted balls at 95 miles an hour or better, against a league rate of 36.5. That is above average and it is not elite.

What he described in May is smaller than it sounds.

He isn't asking to swing harder. He said so: "I never try to hit home runs. When I actually try to swing harder, or try to create lift, I just create swing-and-miss." He isn't asking to pull the ball either. "I've tried to pull the ball more, but I don't naturally move that way well."

He's asking to meet the ball a few inches sooner.

The bat travels on an arc. It comes down into the zone, flattens, and starts climbing again on its way through. Catch the pitch late, at the bottom of that arc, and you hit the top half of the ball and it goes into the dirt — a 106-mph grounder to shortstop, worth nothing however hard it was struck. Catch the same pitch a beat earlier, with the barrel already climbing, and it leaves at an angle instead of a skid.

Two numbers describe this. Ground-ball rate is the share of a hitter's batted balls that go into the ground. Launch angle is the angle, in degrees, the ball leaves the bat at — zero is flat, the gaps in the outfield live somewhere in the teens, and Triple-A as a whole averages about twelve.

The hardest ball Jonathon Long has hit this season left his bat at 111.7 miles an hour on June 26. It was a single, at zero degrees.

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Orange, California, and Orange High School, and not a single college offer at the end of it. What he had instead was a phone call. Steve Trombly, who runs the travel program Trombly Baseball, told Long Beach State's Eric Valenzuela about a kid still available.

"He's a big hitter, he also pitched and put up crazy numbers his senior year of high school," Valenzuela told the Long Beach Current in April 2022.

Long walked on, then earned a scholarship as a sophomore. "I was just looking for a shot, I was looking for an opportunity," he said in that same piece, "and I was like 'alright, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out.'"

Then, in the summer of 2022, in the Cape Cod League, he couldn't handle high velocity with the leg kick he'd used for two college seasons. He told Laurila about it. He threw the leg kick away and rebuilt off a no-stride load, and the following spring he hit .312 with fifteen home runs and the Cubs took him in the ninth round, 266th overall, for $179,400.

This isn't the first time he has changed his swing on purpose. The first time worked.

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The second one showed up too, and the date isn't the one on the trophy.

His ground-ball rate was 53.2 percent in May, on seventy-seven balls. In June it was 39.7, on sixty-eight. In July, 34.8, on sixty-six. His line drives did the opposite over those three months, 16.9 percent to 30.9 to 34.8 — which means that by July his ground balls and his line drives were the identical share of his contact. In May they had been 53.2 and 16.9.

The league moves too, and it has to be subtracted. Qualified Triple-A hitters went 42.6 percent on the ground in May and 40.8 in July. The league drifted under two points. Long moved eighteen.

Cut his season in half and it comes apart cleanly. Through May 31, on 163 balls: 47.2 percent on the ground, 20.9 percent line drives, mean launch angle 7.9 degrees. From June 1 through August 8, on 147 balls: 36.7 percent on the ground, 34.0 percent line drives, 13.9 degrees.

Through May he was leaving the bat at 7.9 degrees. From June 1 he was leaving it at 13.9. The one-degree stretch in May was the floor of that, not the whole of it.

Now put 2025 beside it. Over all of last season, on 402 balls, he was at 46.5 percent and 10.3 degrees. Through May of this one he was at 47.2 and 7.9. Within a point, he was the hitter he'd been the year before. After June 1 he isn't.

And his full 2026 season — 42.3 percent, 10.7 degrees, almost exactly the Triple-A average of 42.0 — describes no month he actually played.

It's the average of two different hitters, and it's the figure a scout pulling his page in August gets handed first.

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Break the season into half-months and the numbers get noisy. His mean launch angle bounces — 4.7 degrees in early April, 13.0 in late April, 1.0 in early May — and a stretch six weeks before the interview beat several that came after it.

What doesn't bounce is the ground-ball share. On that measure May 1–15 is the extreme of his year at 60.5 percent, and June 16–30 is the turn: 35.7 percent on the ground, 38.1 percent line drives, on forty-two balls. The first half of June was still 46.2 percent, as bad as May, which is why the June-1 split understates the change rather than flattering it. The first half of July climbed back to 42.4.

Hitters drift late in seasons. Long does drift. Last year the drift ran backwards: 43.0 percent on the ground through May (135 balls), 48.3 after (267), 58.7 in September (46). Set the calendar window against itself and it's stark. From July 1 to the end of 2025, on 188 balls, he beat 51.6 percent of them into the ground. From July 1 through August 8 this year, on 79, he beat 34.2. The ground-ball rate he told FanGraphs he didn't like was specifically a second-half problem, and this second half is the reverse of it. Seventy-nine balls is a small sample and the half isn't finished. That is evidence, not proof.

Feverbaseball publishes EV95 — the ninety-fifth percentile of a hitter's exit velocities, how hard he hits it at his best. For the 2025 season his EV95 was 108.1 miles an hour. For 2026 it is 108.1 — the two figures are five thousandths of a mile an hour apart. The top of his range did not move at all. Underneath it, ten points of ground balls went away and the ball started leaving six degrees higher. It was the meeting point, not the effort.

The engine publishes that figure on a rolling window of his last 75 balls too, and there the two halves of his swing separate. Over the five weeks from mid-July to early August the rolling EV95 came down, 109.4 to 106.7. His rolling mean exit velocity — the middle of his range rather than the top — climbed over those same weeks, 92.1 to 92.7, after peaking at a season-high 93.2 in the last week of July. The top came down. The middle held and then some.

He had told Laurila as much about his own numbers: "I have above-average bat speed. That plays into my exit velocities, which I think were around the 90th percentile last year. But it comes naturally. I don't try to swing hard."

Three numbers hold across every window you can cut. The ground balls fell about ten points. The line drives went from a fifth of his contact to a third. The top of his range never moved.

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On July 9, at Principal Park in Des Moines, Long faced St. Paul again — the same opponent he had spent an afternoon hitting into the dirt in May. He came to the plate six times. He walked once and got five hits, two of them doubles and one of them a home run.

Nobody fielded a ball he hit. Not on the ground, not in the air. Five balls in play, five hits, and the box score records no groundouts and no fly outs at all.

Feverbaseball's Overnight — the piece the site runs each morning about the night before — wrote him up. It is the only time it has ever said his name.

By then the change was three weeks old. His extra-base rate had already nearly tripled in June, to 12.4 percent of plate appearances from 4.6 in May — eight doubles and five home runs — a full month before the thirteen doubles that won him International League Player of the Month for July, the Triple-A league he plays in. Thirteen doubles, 33-for-89 across twenty-two games. The swing it rewarded had turned over in June.

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He says he doesn't want to pull the ball. He's pulling the ball more every single month.

Pulling it, for a right-hander like Long, means hitting it to left field, the side he's already turned toward. The other way, to right, is the opposite field, and it's where he's spent his career saying he lives.

His pull rate, read off the hit chart, runs 21.4 percent in March and 25.0 in April. Then 29.9 in May, 33.8 in June. Then 36.4 in July and 38.5 in August. Against a league right-handed pull rate that sits near 39 all year, he opens seventeen points below it and by August is within one, with no month out of order. The March and August ends rest on 14 and 13 balls; the four months between them carry 66 to 77 apiece and the trend runs clean through all four. He began the year seventeen points more opposite-field than his league, and he has been walking toward ordinary since.

Across the full season he is still more of an opposite-field hitter than he was in 2025 — 39.4 percent to the other side against 32.8 last year. His account of himself holds on the season figures.

He isn't wrong about himself. Catching the ball earlier in the same path is what produces a higher launch angle and more contact to the pull side. They are not two changes. They're one change with two consequences, and he named the one he wanted.

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Scouts grade players on a scale that runs from 20 to 80, where 50 is a major-league average regular and everything below it is a question. On May 5, the day of the interview, FanGraphs had a 40 on Long — a bench bat, or a second-division starter — and ranked him seventeenth in the Cubs system. After the trade it kept the 40 and re-slotted him twenty-ninth in Miami's. MLB Pipeline, rewriting the same week, also lands on 40, and has him fourteenth in Miami's. Pipeline had him at a 50 a year ago and moved him back down.

Fourteenth and twenty-ninth, same organisation, same week. An org rank is an ordinal inside one system, and the two shops are ranking different populations of it. Both are printed here and neither is reconciled.

The reservation behind the 40 is about the same few inches. Quoted in that interview, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Fegan wrote that Long "swings hard and has several underlying data elements that corroborate his statistical output to this point — better-than-average contact, hard-hit, and chase rates, as well as peak exit velocities — but we're skeptical of it translating to the big leagues without incident because Long's swing is, well, long." Then: "It takes a while for the bat to match the pitch plane in a way that enables him to turn on the baseball, and he ends up late to the contact point."

Late to the contact point. That was written about the hitter who played until June — and notice what it credits him for on the way past. Peak exit velocities. The reservation was never about how hard he hits it. It was about where in the path the bat arrives — and that is what moved.

Pipeline's rewrite, done with the July line already on the page, still has him needing to drive the ball in the air to his pull side to reach his power, and producing too many ground balls, and getting passive at times. The grade hasn't moved. That isn't the same as nobody having looked.

His strikeout rate climbed as his contact improved — 19.4 percent in May, 21.9 in June, 22.8 in July — and his walk rate came off its June high in the same stretch. That's the reservation turning up in his own line.

And feverbaseball's own board dropped him. Its Triple-A pre-consensus list ranks the top twenty bats under 26 who haven't debuted, by EV95, and Long sat twentieth on it until the night of August 8, when Victor Bericoto cleared the board's eighty-ball minimum and took the place. Both men print at 108.1. The gap was a hundredth of a mile an hour, which is a digit the site doesn't display. Long wasn't screened off it — he's twenty-four, he hasn't debuted, and he isn't on the consensus board the screen reads, so he was eligible and he lost the place on the number. That board measures the top of a hitter's range, and the top of his range is the one part of him that didn't move.

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He knew what was coming. Michael Busch has first base in Chicago, and Long had already watched it happen to somebody else: Owen Caissie, his Iowa teammate in 2025, nothing left to prove in the minors and nowhere to play, traded to Miami in January. When the news broke that Long was going the same way, Caissie texted to say welcome and to ask if he needed anything.

"I saw his swing, I was like, 'Oh, this guy can probably hit,'" Caissie told MLB.com's Christina De Nicola on August 7. "I've always thought he's a really good hitter and a good teammate."

Miami's president of baseball operations was warmer than the scouting reports. "He's a very good hitter," Peter Bendix told De Nicola. "We think there's some things we can do to help unlock him, but we need offense, right? We always need more offense, and I think he's somebody who's right on the cusp of the big leagues."

Long has already said what happens when somebody tries to unlock him: he swings and misses. Miami wants the power unlocked. He got thirteen doubles by not reaching for it.

The cusp is not a roster spot. Long isn't on the 40-man, so he becomes Rule 5 eligible after this season — Miami adds him this winter or exposes him to everybody else. Kyle Stowers has taken over first base in Miami, where he had never played an inning in the majors before this season, to keep four outfielders in the lineup. Long has been at first twice and in left field three times since the trade, and he knows what that's for.

"Obviously, being able to play left field — probably an average left field in the big leagues — is probably going to be really important," he told De Nicola, "just to be able to play two different positions."

The decision is not his.

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Five games for Jacksonville, and he's 5-for-13 in them with four walks. Through August 8 the engine had counted seven of his batted balls in a Marlins uniform, which is not a sample and will not be one until October.

There's a version of this where June was a hitter arriving, and the swing he described holds up against major-league velocity, and the report about the long swing is a reservation he has already answered. There's a version where 147 balls is what a good Triple-A bat looks like in a stretch that happens to a lot of good Triple-A bats, and the 40 was right, and the ground balls come back the way they came back last August.

Nobody knows which, and he has the rest of a season to argue it in front of people who have already written him down. What's different this time is that he said it out loud first, in May, when he was worst at it — and something was counting.