Who is the fastest player in baseball?
That’s a pretty fun question to ask, especially at a time when racing is on the mind, ahead of the Aug. 2 Speedway Classic between the Braves and Reds at the iconic Bristol Motor Speedway, in Bristol, Tenn.
But this isn’t just about an upcoming baseball game in a NASCAR setting. It’s also a time-honored question you can just as easily envision fans of the 1960s asking. (Who would win in a foot race: Maury Wills or Lou Brock?)
It’s also not exactly the right place to start, because there’s a larger question at play here, which is this:
How do you even determine what “fastest player in baseball” even means?
It’s maybe not as obvious as you’d think.
Unlike counting stats like home runs or strikeouts, or even rate stats like slugging percentage or hard-hit rate, the tracking of speed can be somewhat subjective. The eye test is a good start, but the eye test can lie to you. Tracking data does better, but getting to “only measuring when is a player actually trying his hardest” is crucial — and difficult — lest you start counting a runner on third jogging home on a double as any meaningful speed data. Plus, in a sport geared more toward short bursts than long-distance running, sometimes how fast you get to your top speed is just as important as what that top speed is.
There’s more than one way to do this. The answers won’t all be the same. (All stats below are through Monday’s games.)
This is the Statcast go-to, with data available back to 2015, and it’s akin to a “top speed” metric, because it throws out a ton of unimportant walking and jogging. What it does is to find the fastest one-second window of a baserunner on what we call “competitive runs,” or selected plays likely to require full-effort running — home to first on grounders, for example, or running at least two bases on non-homers — and averages the top two-thirds of those. It’s measured in feet per second, where 27 ft/sec is the Major League average.
If that sounds like a mouthful, it is, but such is the difficulty of trying to only measure “was he hustling?” in a sport where there’s not exactly a box-score definition of that. It works, anyway, judging by the names at the top of the list.
2025 Sprint Speed leaders (as of Tuesday)
OK, so if Witt Jr. is atop both the 2025 list and the all-time list, it’s got to be him, right? Well, keep reading.
While Sprint Speed works really well, it’s also taking just the fastest 1 second to really get to that fastest speed, and when you’re trying to beat out a ball to first, that usually takes the batter 4-5 seconds. That’s a lot of information not used. Maybe “being the fastest player” is less complicated than an advanced model, and it’s just as simple as: Who gets to first base the fastest after making contact?
2025 Home-to-First leaders
There’s Simpson and Buxton again, but otherwise, we’re looking at a very different list of names. Yet as always, there’s a complicating factor. Other than Buxton and Straw, every player atop this list is either a full-time lefty batter or, in the case of Mangum, a switch-hitter who hits more often from the left side. Left-handed hitters have, by definition, a shorter distance to run to get from home to first. So sure, in real-world terms, no one gets there faster than Simpson. But maybe also, this points back to Buxton?
One way to solve the problem is to get a little mathier, by looking at 90-foot-split times. While the home-to-first clock starts when the bat makes contact, 90-foot-splits start when the batter makes his initial step toward first base. That takes out how fast the batter gets moving after completing his swing, and extrapolates everyone to a full 90 feet, which puts lefties and righties on the same scale. It’s more complicated, but should be more fair, too. Right?
2025 90-foot-splits leaders
Simpson and Scott II again, but for the most part now we’re looking at a new group of names, and you’re starting to see why this isn’t exactly a simple question to answer. Witt Jr. and Buxton, for what it’s worth, both show up in the back end of the top 10. Their repeated appearances no matter how we do this makes for a pretty compelling case.
Top speed is great, but not everyone gets to that top speed at the same rate, either. Reaction and acceleration matter too, right? One way to look at that is what we’re calling burst, or feet covered in the first 1.5 seconds after leaving the batter’s box. It’s hard to get to full running speed by then, so this tells you a little about speed beyond just “run real fast.”
Burst leaders, 2025 (feet covered in first 1.5 sec after leaving box)
This is actually one particular aspect of speed that Buxton isn’t really great at, which can be seen a little better if we go back to the 90-foot-splits and show percentile rankings for every five-foot split. Simpson, for example, is elite from start to end, with Carroll, Scott II and the gang only slightly behind him. Buxton, however, is well below-average for the first 10 feet before his elite top speed allows him to catch up.
There’s an obvious left-handed bias in this, though even just among righty batters, this isn’t a thing Buxton does well; he’s about as fast as a handful of non-burners for 10 feet before the afterburners take over.
But wait, hold on a second. Baseball isn’t just about 90 feet, is it? It may not be soccer, a sport that requires constant motion on a large field, but you don’t have to do things one base at a time, either.
Fastest home-to-home times, since 2015
All of those were inside-the-park home runs, save for Carroll in 2023, as he was thrown out trying to stretch a triple into a homer by a 99.7 mph laser beam relay throw from Cincinnati’s Elly De La Cruz. (Now there’s a type of speed, too.)
There’s obviously some limits here, too, because the opportunity to run all the way around the bases on one play just doesn’t happen all that often. You need a fielder’s mistake, or a weird bounce, or at least enough pop in your bat to hit the kind of ball that might turn into an inside-the-park opportunity. But to see Buxton with the top two, and Witt Jr. high up there as well? Maybe we’re getting somewhere.
There’s another way to do this, too. What if it’s just “how often do you reach elite speed?” Elite speed, in Statcast terms, is considered reaching 30 ft/sec. It’s called a “bolt.” Since 2015, no one has done that more than Turner — by a lot — followed by our familiar duo of Witt Jr. and Buxton, but that’s also partially a function of playing time, too. More interesting is looking at how often you get to that elite rate, which we’ll say is on those “competitive runs,” how often are you getting to that elite 30 ft/sec. mark?
Highest bolt (30 ft/sec) rate, 2025 (min. 50 competitive runs)
That’s Scott, in 2025, by what looks like a pretty massive margin. At this point, any way of looking at speed that doesn’t include Witt Jr., Turner, Simpson and Buxton is probably not the right way.
The numbers are all great and interesting. They might not be valid if the players on the field aren’t saying at least a little of the same thing. So, MLB.com’s team of writers asked 90 players this exact question in the early part of the 2025 season. Nine players received a vote as the fastest player in the game. (MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince goes into more depth about our poll here.)
“That’s a question we can get the answer to,” said Padres infielder Jake Cronenworth, pulling out his phone to look up the Sprint Speed leaderboard on Baseball Savant. “If you look it up, it’s Bobby Witt Jr. And I would’ve said him anyway. He’s that fast.”
OK, that’s cheating. (If nonetheless appreciated. Thanks, Jake!)
Simpson won overwhelmingly, with 40 votes, and nearly double Witt Jr.’s 22. Interestingly, De La Cruz collected 17 votes despite not ranking in any of our methods above, though he might have last year; he was in the 100th percentile in 2024, but has fallen into the still-very-good-but-not-quite-legendary 92nd percentile in 2025. No other player mentioned — Carroll, Buxton, Crow-Armstrong, Turner, Fernando Tatis. Jr. or Kim — received more than five votes.
Credit to Toronto infielder Ernie Clement for validating Simpson’s best-in-class burst rating above, saying “it’s about how he gets out of the box,” as part of his selection, which is essentially the same thing that Astros outfielder Jake Meyers said when he pointed out that “his first two steps are different from anyone else.” Research confirms: They are.
Witt Jr.’s support made a lot of sense, too, given how much we talked about him above, though Buxton, somehow, managed just two votes, with Royals pitcher Daniel Lynch IV accurately noting “when he’s on the field, he’s the most elite, dynamic player in the league.”
Maybe there’s some recency bias here, with Simpson the flashy new guy and Buxton, seven years his senior, more than 10 years into showing elite speed consistently. Maybe there’s not just one way to measure speed, either. But the numbers and the player opinions align, for the most part.
If we’re talking speed, we’re talking Witt Jr. Unless we’re saying it’s Simpson. Unless it’s Turner. Unless it’s Buxton. There might not be one single answer.
