Xavier Isaac’s climb to Triple-A has been a slow burn, and now the Rays are finally giving the left-handed slugger a bigger stage.
Tampa Bay’s first-round pick in 2022 has spent the past few seasons answering the same old questions with louder and louder contact. He entered pro ball as a high school first baseman at 240 pounds, a profile plenty of scouts were willing to dismiss. Instead, Isaac reshaped his body, turned what was once considered below-average speed into a solid tool, and even became a capable basestealer, going 46-for-54 on stolen bases for an 85% success rate in his minor league career.
The carrying tool has always been the bat. Since his debut in 2022, Isaac has produced a .235 ISO, a mark that ranks in the 98th percentile among 689 hitters with at least 1,400 plate appearances over that span. In all, he has launched 70 home runs since the Rays drafted him, and the raw power has never really been in doubt.
One of those blasts came in Asheville in June 2024, on a hot Sunday afternoon when Isaac took Carlos Calderon deep after seeing the first pitch for a ball. The ball left so hard it turned heads immediately, cleared the wall in straightaway center, and kept carrying until it reached a wooded area and struck a tree. The sound of the contact was the kind of thing people remember, and it fit the reputation Isaac has built as a hitter whose best swings sound different.
That kind of damage helped him surge through High-A in the summer of 2024, but the jump to Double-A exposed the swing-and-miss that has followed him for years. In 133 plate appearances at that level in 2024, Isaac hit .211/.346/.349 with a 40.6 K% and a 55.9% contact rate on all swings. The power was still there, but the strikeouts were impossible to ignore.
He went to the Arizona Fall League after the season and again showed the same combination: huge pop, plenty of whiffs. Changes followed, and when he returned to Double-A in 2025, the strikeout rate improved. But his season was derailed by a major medical issue in the summer, when he underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor and effectively lost the rest of the year.
Isaac later said in November that he had undergone brain surgery to remove the tumor earlier in the year and that he had fully recovered.
What makes him such a complicated prospect is the tension between the tools. The power is loud enough to dream on, with some scouts putting it at 80-grade and plenty more calling it easy 70-grade pop from the left side. The concern has always been whether the swing-and-miss would let the bat play against better pitching.
This year, though, Isaac has found something that works. He has been moving around in the box over the past few seasons, and even during this season, but the latest adjustment seems to have settled him in.
After missing a large chunk of 2025, he needed time to get back into game speed in April. Since then, the results have trended in the right direction, especially in August.
Here’s how the month-by-month numbers looked:
April: 79 PA, 51.7% whiff, 169 wRC+
May: 100 PA, 43.8% whiff, 152 wRC+
June: 90 PA, 34.8% whiff, 62 wRC+
July: 76 PA, 42.6% whiff, 142 wRC+
August: 81 PA, 31.3% whiff, 185 wRC+
A big part of the improvement came from a tweak in approach. Isaac experimented with dropping his toe-tap and trying to make contact with two strikes instead of selling out for damage every time. That helped trim the whiff, but the key development in August was that he kept the contact gains without giving up the thump.
The swing itself has changed too. Compared with April, Isaac is more upright now, which lets him use a smaller, more controlled load into his back leg before he drives forward.
For a hitter his size, that adjustment can be the difference between arriving on time and getting beat. The motion change is subtle, but the effect has been real.
Swing-and-miss is still going to be part of Isaac’s game. That much seems baked in. But the Rays are betting that he’s now in a place where the whiff is manageable, and that his power will still play even against better arms.
That’s the assignment at Triple-A Durham now: get used to spin, major league velocity, and better command than he’s seen in Montgomery. The belief is that he can handle it. He takes his walks, he recognizes pitches well, and now he has a swing that forces pitchers to think twice before challenging him.
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