Betting on Benintendi
After altering his approach and trying to crash the launch angle revolution a couple years ago, the Royals' left fielder has calmed his swing and seen a return to previous positive results.
Yes, it’s EXTREMELY early. But we’re going to have this discussion.
(Before you send this email straight to the trash, this isn’t about Salvador Perez. It was going to be! But even I’m not the pie-in-the-sky optimist necessary to put pen to Perez’s MVP candidacy, particularly since the Royals bandwagon for 2021 was hit by a semi, careened into a ditch, burst into flames and then had debris from the Chinese spaceship fall on it in the last week. It could be a trying summer.)
At no point from the time of his acquisition until the time I began typing this sentence has the Andrew Benintendi deal been considered anything except a home run. The Royals got a young, cost-controlled player for…Khalil Lee, Franchy Cordero and some players to be named not among the bevy of young hurlers they’ve spent the past few years accumulating? That’s how panicked the Red Sox were after a bad 2020 (which, who among us), from a guy two years removed from 4.8 bWAR? Buy, Dayton Moore, buy!
It was inexplicable at the time and remains so now, as Benintendi has shaken off a slow start to 2021 by becoming the Royals’ most consistent bat over the last two weeks, slashing .365/.421/.577 since April 23. Sure, this has coincided with the worst two weeks of the Royals season, but it feels unfair to punish him for that; Jesus, think where they’d be without him!
When the Cardinals acquired Jason Heyward, a similar analytics darling at a similar stage in his career, they parted with what was considered to be at the time a significant contribution; when the Cubs signed him to an eight-year, $184 million deal the next winter, no one blinked. They were signing the advanced numbers; everything else could be figured out after the fact and since the Cubs won their first World Series in eons, I suppose they did. Heyward hasn’t been great but the ends justified the means.
Benintendi’s age 22-24 seasons (.794 OPS, 108 OPS+) compare favorably to Heyward’s (.775 OPS, 113 OPS+) minus the Gold Gloves; when the time came to trade Heyward, he fetched a capable (at the time) big-league starting pitcher in Shelby Miller and a decent prospect. Benintendi’s Heyward-Lite production cost a fraction of that.
The Benintendi acquisition seemed tailor-made from the outset because he didn’t cost much on the front side, had years of team control in front of him and is unlikely to be the sort of player to command Mookie Betts money on the open market but could find himself in the Kansas City sweet spot of beloved local icon worthy of a nine-figure deal with no reason to truly look elsewhere. He’s from Cincinnati, for God’s sake; no one is in a hurry to get back to Cincinnati. Its chief cultural export is chili, and it’s not even good chili!
(Come and get me, Skyline Truthers.)
The park factors have made Benintendi a darling from the outset; dude’s never going to be a masher, but a spacious park like Kauffman allows for a doubles machine like Benintendi to flourish. He’s showcased a capability in left that Fenway Park, with its short fence and high wall, couldn’t have allowed. The defensive metrics are up across the board for him, which is a direct correlation to his ability to patrol a patch of left larger than a postage stamp, which was his fate in Fenway.
But let’s have a look at the batting profile, shall we?
Benintendi started out the season not hitting the ball hard and striking out a lot and given his renown for, if nothing else, putting the ball in play, that was cause for consternation. This has, from all appearances, begun to stabilize. His O-Swing percentage (29.6) remains a little higher than you’d love but it’s also a far cry from the 32.9 percent of his 2019 season. And unlike his last two seasons—which were below standard in 2019 and disastrous a year ago in whatever limited action he saw—Benintendi’s swinging strike rate is better than league average at an even 10 percent. He’s making contact rate in the zone comparable to his first Boston years, his line drive rate is up, his flyball rate is down and free from the specter of the Green Monster in left, is spraying the ball all over the field (career-high 33.8 percent opposite field ball in play rate). His strikeout rate has also cratered (18.8 percent!); these are all good things.
To summarize: he’s not chasing, he’s using the whole field, he’s working counts and putting the ball in play. This is not the sexiest endorsement you’ll ever get for a player but he’s been, basically, Rocco Baldelli if he never got hurt and then stayed hurt all the time. THAT’S A REALLY GOOD BALLPLAYER!
One of the questions when Benintendi joined Kansas City was where his mechanics were, or more accurately were not. Going back and looking at his 2019 Boston swings, it’s clear he was trying to get the ball in the air more and hit for more power, which he confirmed in his first media availability after the trade. As he also said in that initial press conference, he’s 5-9 and 175 pounds. Thirty-homer power is not going to be the hallmark of his game.
Behold, Man Attempting to Generate Power.
His swings in Kansas City look more repeatable; he looks more stable in the box. His back leg isn’t collapsing and he’s keeping his hands through. He’s closed his stance a little from early in the season and calmed his hands. The result looks pretty good!
It looks like the swing that will give you 40 doubles and 20 homers, hit somewhere between .270 and .290 and not strike out particularly often at all. And you get all that for a bunch of pieces that didn’t fit your timeline as a team and may not have had a long-term place in your overall plan.
A productive Benintendi should change that timeline and gives the lineup a core that is, with a healthy Adalberto Mondesi and a not-terrible Jorge Soler if either of those things exists, extremely dangerous. Despite the foibles of the last week (and they certainly were foibly), that’s still true and Benintendi is a huge part of that.
Hopefully going forward, he won’t be the only part that can hit.