As the second weekend of baseball winds down, Brandon Belt
stands tied with Mark Trumbo and Pedro Alvarez for the most home runs in
baseball with 5. Now Trumbo, thanks to the Australia series, has done it in
more games, but the three of them are the home run leaders right now. By all
accounts, Belt is a lock to hit 25 home runs, and maybe even more. People are
buzzing about Belt’s power, but maybe they should pump the brakes a little bit
on Brandon Belt. There are a few reasons why we should probably temper our
expectations for Mr. Belt. His peripherals, the park factor and the nature of
his home runs lead me to believe that this early-season surge may add a dinger
or two to his year-end total, but people calling for a 30+ home run year may be
slightly disappointed. I anticipated a breakout for Belt, but to somewhere in
the 22-25 home run range. He just happened to get a big bunch of those out of
the way early on.
First, his peripherals. Belt has taken one walk this year in
49 plate appearances. One. Compare that to his 14 strikeouts this year and you
can see that Belt is going up there lacking his trademark patience at the plate
(he has a career 23.2 walk rate, meaning he gets a walk between every 4 and 5
plate appearances) in favor of trying to hit balls out. This rate is completely
unsustainable, and there are only a handful of people in the league with as
many strikeouts as belt with one or fewer walks:
Chris Johnson, Khris Davis, Everth
Cabrera, BJ Upton, Josh Donaldson & Brad Miller
None of these players really profile out as superb hitters,
especially Upton. Miller is just learning the league and Johnson is notoriously
bad at taking walks. Krush Davis’s big knock was that he flat out cannot take a
walk to save his life. When you look at the K/BB ratio, Belt is not in good
company. I know what you can say to
this, and that is “small sample size!” Well my question to you is: what makes
this small sample size statistic different than Belt’s ISO that is over 100
points higher than his career average, or the fact that one out of every three
of his fly balls went over the wall. While Belt’s output thus far has been
impressive, it’s been created by an unsustainable approach at the plate.
Second, Brandon Belt plays in one of the most notoriously spacious
ballparks in baseball. Ask Madison Bumgarner and Brandon Crawford, a home run that
is a home run in nearly every park isn’t a home run in AT&T Park. Bumgarner
hit a shot to the warning track and Crawford hit a massive shot to Triples
Alley, neither of which left the yard. Both would have been out in most
ballparks, but AT&T isn’t most ballparks. In every year since 2011,
AT&T has landed in the bottom five in home runs per game. This will be a
problem for Belt going forward, as four of his five home runs were on the road,
and at least one, maybe two, would not be a home run at AT&T park, as the
following overlay shows:
I guess that last paragraph was sort of a two-fer. AT&T
Park won’t sap Belt’s power; I anticipate his power surge causing his doubles
to go through the roof. I just wouldn’t expect his hits to land on the other
side of the fence as often as they have through the first couple weeks of the
season. While I hope I’m wrong, I want to caution Giants fans to not lose their
mind when it comes to Brandon Belt’s potential this season.
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