BOSTON — In the midst of a bleak offensive season for the Boston Red Sox, there’s been an unlikely outlier: Ceddanne Rafaela.A glance at the team’s Baseball Reference WAR leaderboard shows Rafaela leading with a 3.5 bWAR. Fellow outfielder Wilyer Abreu is next at 3.1. Abreu has been a strong piece of the lineup the past two seasons and a Gold Glove winner on defense. Rafaela? He, too, has a Gold Glove, but until this season, he had never been able to produce consistently at the plate.Through 77 games, the 25-year-old has hit .284 with a .333 on-base percentage, .775 OPS and a 5 percent walk rate, all career highs. He has a 19.8 percent strikeout rate, below the 22.2 percent league average. But the biggest improvement has been his swing decisions. His chase rate has dropped from a whopping 46.6 percent in 2024 to 42.2 percent last year and 40.4 percent this year.On Saturday, in a 4-1 win over the New York Yankees, Rafaela went 2-for-4.What changed?Rafaela traces his progress to two conversations he had last season with former manager Alex Cora and former teammate Alex Bregman.Why MLB's draft proposal would be bad for baseball's futureKeith LawSince Rafaela debuted, Cora had tried to convince him to quiet his movements at the plate. His swing started with his hands high above his shoulders and a leg kick. Cora, who was fired in April alongside six coaches, insisted that lowering the hands, in particular, might help Rafaela get to balls quicker. But the young hitter didn’t feel comfortable with the motion of moving his hands and resisted the idea.Hearing it from a teammate at the time reinforced the notion a bit more.“Bregman always told me he doesn’t believe I’m a chaser, that I don’t chase, but that I have a lot of big movements,” Rafaela said of a conversation early last year. “It was after a home run I hit, he told me, ‘People that chase don’t hit those types of balls, so let’s try this (with your swing).'”Rafaela brought his hands down closer to his chest rather than above his shoulders. Just as Cora said, he felt he could get to pitches quicker. It resulted in a two-month tear, when he batted .286 with an .870 OPS before fatigue caught up to him at the end of July 2025.