Why I'm Bullish On Benintendi
A little bit of optimism in your 2020
Photo by Keith Allison
Andrew Benintendi really struggled. He couldn’t hit for power. His batting average was putrid. If you looked at his slash line you’d be forgiven for snarfing milk out your nose, whether you’d been drinking milk or not. The Red Sox left fielder was hitting .186/.262/.271. Sure, it was a small sample, but not *that* small. Sixty-five plate appearances isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing. And yes, the more eagle-eyed of you may have spotted that I’m playing a mean game with you because that slash line wasn’t from Benintendi’s 2020 season. It was from June 19th through July 4th of 2018, his best season, when he hit .290/.366/.465. I’m a meany.
There are real concerns about Andrew Benintendi going into the 2021 season, but what he did in 2020 shouldn’t be one of them. Yes, he hit a ghastly .103/.314/.128 over 14 games (52 plate appearances), but it was 14 games! Also, as I tried to point out, players go through slumps over 14 game samples all the time that would look horrendous as a final line on Baseball Reference. The difference here is that after that bad start, Benintendi got hurt and missed the rest of the season. So that 14 game sample is what we see when we call up Benintendi’s Baseball Reference page. That is the entirety of his 2020 season.
I may be dismissing 2020 as an indicator, but I’m not willing to say there aren’t concerns about Benintendi going forward. That would be silly. Like arguing Fish Slapping Dance isn’t the best Monty Python sketch. I mean, please. First though, let’s address some things in no particular order.
Trade him!
If the Red Sox could get a haul for him, they’d have traded him already. But how much would you give up for a guy with declining production over a three season period, who was bad and injured last season, and is set to make $6 million this season with one year of team control left beyond that? It’s not an enticing package.
Also, this would be what stock traders call “selling low.” A few years ago Benintendi was one of the most valuable left fielders in baseball. His salary won’t ever be that low again, but the skills are still there somewhere. The package of power, on-base, and good defense hasn’t evaporated. The prudent thing is to bring him back, and let him reestablish some value. Then if the team has fallen off you can trade him for full or at least more value.
He’s bad now!
I touched on this a bit above, but performing badly in 14 games does not make someone a bad baseball player, just as performing fantastically in 14 games does not make someone a great baseball player. Remember when Eduardo Nunez showed up from the Giants in 2017? He hit .340/.369/.575 over his first 23 games. That was great! It did not make him a great player though. The next season, 2017, over 127 games, he put up a .677 OPS. Then in 2018 he posted a .548 OPS over 60 games before getting released. Eduardo Nunez was fun but not very good. That’s sort of the opposite of Benintendi who is fun, but I think can be very good.
If you had to give a one word summation of each of his seasons in the majors, it might go something like this:
2016 (rookie): Good!
2017: Average
2018: Great!
2019: Average
2020: Injured
This isn’t the track record the Red Sox were hoping for (maybe a little more Alex Bregman in the sauce), but it’s not bad.
Benintendi will be 26 next season. He’s still in the prime of his career. He was a top prospect in baseball with scouts putting 70s on his hit tool (that means he’s well above average at putting the bat on the ball). This isn’t some nobody. The dude has skills. Given health, good coaching, playing time, etc, there is no reason to think he can’t be an above average left fielder for the Red Sox this season and next.
Real Concerns
None of this is to dismiss legitimate criticism. The great Alex Speier of the Boston Globe had an excellent piece on Benintendi a month ago in which he mentions two concerning trends. The first is Benintendi’s speed. His spring speed as measured by Baseball Savant has dropped from 28.2 feet-per-second to 26.2 during his time in the majors. Players do slow down as they age and prime speed is typically very early in a player’s career, so in general this shouldn’t be unexpected. However, if you look at his speed rankings by percentage (i.e. where he stacks up relative to other baseball players) you get a more concerning picture. Here are those percentages by season (oldest at the top, last season at the bottom).
So not only has he slowed down, he’s slowed a lot and relative to other players. This is the prime reason why you won’t see him playing center field for the Red Sox. You can also see this trend in his stolen base numbers and his overall base running. He’s gone from a good base runner to a bad one.
It’s not clear the reason for this drop-off, but if Benintendi is unable to reverse this trend then some of what made him an above average player will have disappeared. To be specific, I’m talking about above average defense in left field, stealing bases, the ability to play if not excel in center field, turning singles into doubles, and advancing two bases on singles. If the speed is gone, that puts pressure on his other skills, which brings us to the second item in Mr. Speier’s article that particularly concerns me.
Benintendi isn’t a power hitter. That’s not to say he doesn’t have power, but he’s more of a line drive, gap power type of hitter, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But those type of hitters can’t strike out a ton because they’re taking fewer bases when they put the ball into play than the pure power guys. But Benintendi has been swinging and missing more and more. In 2017, he missed the ball completely on just 15 percent of his swings. That percentage has gone up each season since. I’ve already explained why I’m discounting his 2020 performance, but Benintendi was swinging and missing on 23.7 percent of his swings over the full 2019 season. That’s a bad trend and one he needs to reverse, because the chances he’s a 30 homer hitter and can sustain missing that much aren’t great. Like, the opposite of the Fish Slapping Dance. (Seriously, just watch it:)
Ultimately…
Maybe I’ll write another piece on Benintendi later, because there are some interesting aspects of his batter profile that would be worth discussing further. But ultimately I think 2020 obscures where Benintendi actually is on his career curve. He’s still a relatively young guy who, after a breakout season in 2018, had a down year (which was basically league-average) in 2019. Then a bizarre few weeks of games and a brutal muscle strain combined with COVID and all the strangeness that came with it to throw a whole box full of wrenches into the machinery. My guess is if 2020 had played out as a normal season you’d have seen something more akin to Benintendi’s 2018 season from him, or maybe something between his 2018 and 2019.
Benintendi might not be the star the Red Sox hoped he’d be when he showed up in Boston fresh off lighting the minors on fire, but there’s little to say he can’t be at least an above average major league starter. Whether he is part of the long term future of the franchise or not remains to be seen, but the Red Sox owe it to themselves to see if the player they saw in 2018 is still in there. I think there’s a pretty good chance he is.