After a slow start to the 2025 season, Atlanta Braves third baseman has been one of the most productive players in the league.
While his hitting is something we’ve grown accustom to, his speed is not.
In fact, the 28-year-old slugger is not only having a career-best in sprint speed, he’s even ranking slightly ahead of Tampa Bay Rays prospect Chandler Simpson, who wreaked havoc on the bases in the minors.
Austin Riley’s sprint speed is shockingly quick
While one might look at Austin Riley’s thick 240-pound frame and assume he’s more adjacent to Daniel Vogelbach than Billy Hamilton, the cornerstone at the hot corner as actually always been deceptively fleet of foot.
Aside from 2020, Riley has ranked in the 61st percentile or higher since his MLB debut in 2019 in sprint speed. 2020 was also the only season where his average speed was worse than 27.8 ft/sec.
Of course, it’s easy to see why speed would be one part of Riley’s game that’s overlooked. The third baseman didn’t pick up his first career steal until 2022, his fourth season in the bigs, and didn’t steal any bags last season, keeping his career total at five.
His hustle down the line earlier this week against the Cardinals might have awoken more to the fact that Riley might be faster than he physically appears, but still, no one would expect him to be a speed demon.
Yet somehow, in a nearly impossible, too crazy to believe fact for the 2025 season, Riley is currently tied in sprint speed with a player who stole 104 bases in the minors last season, but impossibly, one month into the season, that’s the case.
While Tampa Bay Rays speedy prospect Chandler Simpson has only been up for a week, he has just enough competitive runs for Baseball Savant to qualify him for the Sprint Speed leaderboard. So far, he also clocks in at 28.1 ft/sec.
Baseball Savant’s percentile rankings actually put Riley ahead of Simpson, as the Braves two-time All-Star ranked in the 81st percentile in speed going into Friday’s games, while the Rays seventh overall prospect ranked in the 76th percentile.
This short sample fluke likely won’t continue once Simpson is more settled in the majors, after all he was the first to register three sprints over 30 ft/sec this year in the minors prior to being called up, but for now, the Braves can say that they might have the fastest player in the league.
