Living on the Sweet Spot, Two Mariners Dialed in to Open 2026 Season

You hear it the second you start playing baseball as a kid. “Find the sweet spot” on the bat. If you rope one to center field, you might hear a parent or coach yell “way to find the sweet spot!” They call it the sweet spot of the bat for a few reasons. In my personal experience, that was the spot on the bat where it didn’t even feel like you made contact. The contact between ball and bat was so optimal, that it didn’t reverberate into my hands at all.

Of course, for big leaguers, the sweet spot really means, the highest quality of contact. In fact, MLB’s glossary has an official definition for “the sweet spot.” It states, “colloquially, a player who hits the ball solidly is said to have gotten the "sweet spot" of the bat on the ball. The sweet spot classification quantifies that as a batted-ball event with a launch angle ranging from 8 to 32 degrees.”

So, it’s not necessarily a geographic location on the bat itself. Rather, it’s the quality of the contact, mostly considering the launch angle.

Unsurprisingly, the best of the best are at or near the top of metrics such as sweet spot rate. Hitters like Yordan Alvarez, Nick Kurtz, Ben Rice, and the red-hot Jordan Walker all rank near the top. What is surprising, however, is all of those hitters are looking up at two Seattle Mariners. A further surprise is that neither of those Mariners are named Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodriguez, Josh Naylor, or Randy Arozarena.

No, it’s Luke Raley and Dominic Canzone that stand in the top two spots for sweet spot rate in MLB so far this season. If you look at the Baseball Savant page for both these hitters in 2026, it’s redder than that one wedding on Game of Thrones (in this instance, meaning good).

Neither of these two are considered “the best hitters in baseball.” And the sweet spot metric isn’t the end-all-be-all. However, both of these players are off to great starts, while some of the bigger name Mariner sluggers have lagged out of the gate. Raley currently owns a better OPS (.938) than the likes of Oneil Cruz, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Kyle Schwarber. Canzone’s 94.9 mph average exit velocity ranks eighth-best among all MLB hitters with at least 40 balls in play so far this year.

They are also the top two Mariners hitters in slugging percentage. So, what does this mean?

For the Mariners, it means had it not been for these two, they would be much worse off than 11-15. Raleigh has a .667 OPS. Rodriguez has just one home run. Naylor has a sub-.270 on-base percentage. While the big names in this lineup are still thawing from a long offseason, it’s Raley and Canzone who have picked up the slack. Hopefully, this means that when the big thumpers get going, they can sync up with these two and the offense will catch fire.

Both Canzone and Raley have been in the starting lineup in 17 of Seattle’s 26 games so far. Manager Dan Wilson has been switching them between right field and designated hitter recently.

For now, it seems like a good idea to keep the top two sweet-spot-finders in all of Major League Baseball in the lineup together.