{"id":686522,"date":"2026-04-30T07:40:38","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T07:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/686522\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T07:40:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T07:40:38","slug":"mariners-cole-young-has-remarkable-case-as-2nd-best-hitter-in-mlb-this-season-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/686522\/","title":{"rendered":"Mariners’ Cole Young has remarkable case as 2nd-best hitter in MLB this season"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mariners’ Cole Young has remarkable case as 2nd-best hitter in MLB this season<\/a> originally appeared on The Sporting News<\/a>. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cole Young<\/a> sits right behind Mike Trout<\/a> on an impressive MLB leaderboard.<\/p>\n

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And if you just use this one stat, the Seattle Mariners<\/a>‘ young second baseman has been the second-best hitter in baseball this season.<\/p>\n

Don’t believe it? Well, here it is.<\/p>\n

Young has the second-best Win Probability Added so far in the 2026 season behind just Trout.<\/p>\n

WPA is a stat that doesn’t just take into account a hitter’s outcomes, but specifically what point in a game they happen in and how it impacts the chances of winning.<\/p>\n

For example, a home run with your team leading 14-0 doesn’t add essentially any win probability. The chances of winning are already too high.<\/p>\n

A walk-off home run when trailing that turns a game into a win adds a ton of win probability.<\/p>\n

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MORE:\u00a0This might be the weirdest way to get an inside-the-park HR<\/a><\/p>\n

Every action has some amount of WPA, and Young has been second-best to Trout, with the leaderboard via MLB.com’s Daniel Kramer:<\/p>\n

That top-five is four of the very best hitters on the planet, with Young mixed in.<\/p>\n

WPA certainly requires a game to break in a certain way to get a chance at accumulating it, but then a hitter has to deliver, too.<\/p>\n

So far, Young has delivered for the Mariners, over and over. It’s been key for a lineup that took a while to get rolling around him.<\/p>\n

And for Young, it’s huge. After a slow start to his MLB career prior to this season, he’s found his stride and is looking like a long-term starter, with a knack for coming through when it really matters.<\/p>\n

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More MLB news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mariners’ Cole Young has remarkable case as 2nd-best hitter in MLB this season originally appeared on The Sporting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":686523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5,731,12342,21264,603,4,459,65,3526],"class_list":["post-686522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-baseball","tag-ben-rice","tag-cole-young","tag-daniel-kramer","tag-mike-trout","tag-mlb","tag-nick-kurtz","tag-seattle-mariners","tag-wpa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116492528807961717","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/686523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}