Although it is probably my least favorite subject to write about, I’ll need to give you a little bit of personal background for the necessary context of this deep dive. I am a lifelong Giants fan. I attended my first game at Candlestick Park when I was 4 years old, and I’m 36 now, so if I did the math right I’ve been a Giants fan for just over 3 decades. In that time, there have been few more polarizing players than the current gangly first baseman who may be in his final season with the team, Brandon Belt.
I suspect the wide chasm of opinions on Belt have as much to do with two polarized camps of baseball enthusiasts as they do with Belt himself. He falls short for those in the “eye test” camp and is embraced by those who focus on statistics and analytics. You can predict someone’s opinion about Belt with remarkable accuracy if you know which category of fan or analyst they fall into.
There are reasons for this. He’s not flashy, he’s awkward and he moves oddly at times. He gets hurt more frequently than you’d like, he gets in awful slumps and seems (anecdotally at least) to do most of his damage when it is needed the least (i.e. the Giants being on either side of a blowout).
On the other side of the argument, he has some elite underlying skills that occasionally translate to production. He gets on base extremely consistently (career .356 OBP) due to a keen eye for not just balls and strikes, but also when to try do the most damage on pitches in his sweet spot. He walks, maybe too much for a guy that is supposed to be a power threat, but he sure does walk. And for as awkward as he is, can actually run a decent amount (stole 12 bases in his first full season) and is generally considered to be a plus defender, although he’s been closer to average in recent years.
So who is he? The analytics darling, or the poster boy for the eye test? In the abbreviated 2020 season, he was incredibly impressive by anyone’s standards. For starters, he slashed an incredible .309/.425/.591, all of which were career highs. You won’t find him on any standard leaderboards however, as he fell seven plate appearances short of qualifying. This alone may cause some to ignore Belt’s season as a byproduct of noise over a small sample, so it is worth examining more closely.
Where did this new version of Belt come from? The BB% and K% were almost exactly in line with what we would expect from the rest of his career, so he wasn’t seeing the ball any better than usual due to contact lenses or anything like that (and remember, his eye for the strike zone is already considered very good!). His BABIP was .356, which is certainly high, but he’s had higher BABIPs in his career and not come close to putting up the kind of numbers he did in 2020.
Where you do start to see a major difference in the underlying numbers is when you start digging into the Statcast data. Belt put up notably career highs across the board, with those of his average exit velocity (90.7), maximum exit velocity (109.1), Barrel Rate (16.8%) and Hard Hit Rate (46.9%). To give those some context- he certainly wasn’t a world beater with regard to exit velocity, but he was hitting the ball much harder than he had in the past, and importantly, doing it MUCH more often.
His barrel rate was 9th in MLB, sandwiched between Bryce Harper and Eloy Jimenez. His Hard Hit Rate was good for 30th in MLB. In previous years he would be nowhere near these thresholds, lucky to even rank in the top half of MLB regulars. These are real changes that held true for a 51 game sample in 2020, but will they hold up for a full season in 2021? That remains to be seen, but there is reason for optimism.
For starters, despite his being a mainstay in the Giants lineup for a decade, Belt will only turn 33 this season, so he is far from falling off the back end of the aging curve. He is in a contract year, for those that view “motivation” as a thing, although I can’t say I particularly think a lack of motivation was what has caused Belt’s struggles with consistency. But one of the biggest reasons I think he’ll have some more success than others are expecting is that he will be put in a position to succeed more often than not, and this will help him avoid prolonged slums.
How does that happen exactly? If it does, it will be due in part to the Farhan Zaidi/Gabe Kapler influence. During the Bruce Bochy years, which comprise the vast majority of Belt’s career, Belt (and Brandon Crawford) were expected to play every day, despite ceding the platoon advantage to some of the more difficult lefthanders in the game (Clayton Kershaw stands out as a prominent example here). This was as much due to a lack of viable alternatives as Bochy’s stubbornness, the Bochy era Giants teams were sorely lacking in depth and positional flexibility. These days, any number of righthanded batters could step in for a day to spell Belt (most likely this would be Wilmer Flores, Darin Ruf or Austin Slater) without losing too much in the way of expected offensive production.
So if Belt is allowed to hit in situations where he is likely to be the most successful, and he carries over the skill set he showed in 2020, could we see him finally end the Belt Wars and win over even the most traditional amongst the fan base? Could we see him exceed the 20 home run threshold for the first time in his career? It’s a real possibility!
On the other hand, if he does put together a career year, he’ll have overcome no shortage of obstacles. The Giants aren’t supposed to be particularly good offensively, and while Oracle Park has been modified as to be slightly more beneficial to hitters, it is still decidedly a pitchers park. What’s more, he underwent heel surgery in the offseason, then got COVID-19, and when he had recovered, he promptly got mononucleosis. It’s not what you want.
So with reasonable arguments for both optimism and pessimism, what do we do with Belt from a fantasy perspective? For starters, he doesn’t have to be Freddie Freeman to be successful. With a high 200s ADP, he has to outperform a guy like Rowdy Tellez in order to turn a profit on his draft price. I think it’s safe to say that’s a likely outcome, and further, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Belt finish in the top 100 players if he puts it all together and continues his inspired performance from 2020. Don’t let the rough offseason fool you, Brandon Belt has been fighting an uphill battle his whole career. Instead, be the beneficiary of the culmination of the Belt Wars leading to a career year across the board, and the fantasy glory that goes along with it.
