Red Sox: Is Andrew Benintendi a budding superstar?
By Damian Dydyn
After blasting his 13th home run of the season, Andrew Benintendi has established himself as one of the anchors of the Red Sox lineup. Is he a superstar?
He boasts the 16th highest wRC+ in baseball at 144. His ISO of .242 is 26th. He checks in at 16th in the majors for stolen bases. And he plays pretty solid defense to boot. Is Andrew Benintendi the next Boston Red Sox outfielder to become a superstar? It’s hard to argue otherwise. After a meteoric rise through the farm system, arriving in the bigs after less than 14 months from his draft date, he has avoided the dreaded sophomore slump and is cruising toward an All Star game appearance. (He is currently sixth in voting for outfielders, just barely behind George Springer and Michael Brantley.)
The 23 year-old boasts an impressive collection of above average skills while having no area of his game that is deficient. This high floor is why he topped out at the number one spot on most prospect lists going into his rookie season, beating out former fellow Red Sox farm-hand Yoan Moncada. Moncada had louder tools, although Benintendi had a much better chance of being an above average major leaguer. With excellent contact skills, the rest of his game would have a chance to come around at the big league level. And boy did it come around.
He had a phenomenal rookie season.
2017 was his first full season in the majors. He would have exhausted his rookie eligibility in 2016 had it not been for a knee injury. Regardless, last season was officially his rookie year and he didn’t waste the opportunity to gun for a Rookie of the Year award. If it hadn’t been for Aaron Judge bursting onto the scene, Benintendi would have taken home the hardware. With 20 HR, 20 SB, 90 RBI, 84 R and a .271/.352/.424 slash line, he set the table for taking a massive step forward in 2018.
More from Red Sox News
- Rich Hill’s Red Sox departure puts him within striking distance of unique MLB record
- Red Sox offseason takes another nasty hit with Nathan Eovaldi departure
- Why Red Sox fans should be rooting for Carlos Correa’s Mets deal to go through
- Red Sox exec claims Mookie Betts loss changed management style, but actions say otherwise
- How realistic are the Boston Red Sox/Chris Sale trade rumors?
In order to accomplish that, it would require tweaking his approach. Andrew Benintendi has impressive pop for a guy his size, but his home run power is exclusively to the pull side. That’s a bit of a problem for a hitter spending half of his games at Fenway Park. Fenway has an abnormally deep right field. Yes, it’s only 302 feet down the line, but it juts back to 380 feet very quickly. In fact, it gets to that 380 before even reaching straight away right field. Right-center field and center are, arguably, the hardest in all of baseball in which to go deep. To maximize his power output, though not necessarily his home run production, Benintendi needed to start going the other way for power. That meant peppering the wall for more doubles.
So what’s he doing differently this year?
Here is a link to his batted balls from 2017 laid out in a spray chart. You can see the home runs are almost entirely to the pull side whereas most everything else is using all fields. Generally speaking, an all fields approach is a good thing for a hitter. But when your fly ball power is above average and not plus, you don’t want to be wasting contact in the air to the deepest part of the ballpark.
This season, Andrew Benintendi has continued to spray line drives all over the park. But his fly balls have gone heavily to the opposite field. Overall, his pull percentage is actually way up. It jumped from 34.3% in 2017 to 41.2% this year. But that’s based on his ground ball pull rate, which is a staggering 67.1%. His fly ball pull rate is just 20% as compared to 48.9% to the opposite field. That oppo field percentage is up 8.7% from last season. In short, Benintendi has learned to use the Monster to his advantage. And that makes him a much more dangerous hitter.
His home run power will likely always play to the pull side. And because of that, we’re unlikely to see him hitting home runs like the guy he was chasing for RoY last season. But he should be a consistent 20-25 HR threat year to year who can post an OBP in the high .300’s and a SLG between .450 and .525.
Next: Red Sox: Mookie Betts positioned perfectly thanks to analytics
And that, my friends, is an All Star caliber player. Do you think Andrew Benintendi can be even better than he is right now? In what ways can he grow to squeeze more production out of his tool set? Let us know in the comments!