trwi7 wrote:old ball coach wrote:Santana free swinger with power
You don't walk 15% of the time if you're a free swinger. Guys like Segura and Gennett are free swingers. Santana is not.
He does swing and miss A TON. Only makes contact with 71% of the strikes he swings at which was second worst in AAA baseball. Same story the previous year.
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-domingo-santana-experiment-comes-to-houston/
Well, Santana has a bit of a contact problem. Although you’d never know it from his .320 batting average, the 6-foot-5 slugger ran a 29% strikeout rate in Triple-A this year, matching his mark from the same level last year. Now, on its own, a 29% strikeout rate isn’t terrible. It certainly isn’t good, but in an era where Joey Gallo‘s flirting with a 40% strikeout rate, 29% doesn’t seem so bad.
However, a player’s strikeout rate isn’t always a perfect indicator of his contact ability. The two are certainly strongly correlated, but other factors, such as a player’s plate discipline, also play a role in determining how often a hitter strikes out. And using the data that’s available to us, it seems as though Santana’s strikeout rate doesn’t do justice to his swing-and-miss.
According to Minor League Central, Santana’s made contact on just 71.6% of his swings on pitches in the zone this year — the pitches that are theoretically the easiest to connect on. Santana’s clip is the second-lowest figure among qualified Triple-A hitters. Only Rymer Liriano has whiffed more often, and his mark edges out Santana’s by a mere 0.1 percentage points.
Last year? Same story. Santana’s 71.2% zone-contact rate was the third lowest in Triple-A, behind a couple of minor-league lifers — Matt Fields and Cody Decker. Keep in mind that publicly-available zone data for minor leaguers isn’t super-reliable, but Santana’s ranked at the very bottom of these lists two years in a row. It’s probably safe to conclude that he’s pretty bad at making contact.
Some research I did a few weeks ago suggests that this might pose a serious problem for Santana as he transitions to the big leagues. I found that hitters who swing and miss on pitches in the zone in Triple-A have rougher-than-normal transitions to the big leagues, on average....
Kiley McDaniel placed Santana in the 143-200 section of his top 200 list last winter. In his write up of the Astros organization, Kiley noted that, even after talking to several scouts, he still wasn’t sure what to make of him.
Santana is an enigma that every scout I talked to ended their report with some version of: “I saw him enough to have a strong opinion, but I still don’t have one.”
After poring through the data, I share the same sentiment. His traditional stat line suggests he could have a pretty bright future ahead of him, but his inability to make contact threatens to render him a Quad-A slugger or platoon bat. We’ll see if Santana sticks around once Rasmus rejoins the Astros. But even if he is optioned to Triple-A, he’ll almost certainly be back in majors at some point this season. Regardless of how things shake out, Santana should be fun to watch. He represents yet another young, exciting player on a team that’s already chock full of with young, exciting players.
