Brewers Free Agent Target: Brandon Belt

Maybe we should be careful here. There are plenty of reasons to feel a bit of trepidation about Brandon Belt as a target for the Brewers this winter. Firstly, they're likely to want to utilize William Contreras and Christian Yelich as the DH a fair few times this coming season, and Belt only played 29 games at first base in 2023. Otherwise, he was a DH himself. He's also set to turn 36 years old in the spring. Finally, he's coming off a season in which (despite good surface-level numbers) he showed some serious, potentially irreversible holes in his swing.

That's the bad news. The good news is, because of the above, Belt is likely to be available for even less than the relatively modest $9.3 million he made as a member of the Blue Jays in 2023. The other good news is, Belt is a career .261/.357/.460 career hitter, and that he was even better than that in 2023. His raw production was fueled by a .370 batting average on balls in play, which might incite some folks to worry that he just got lucky, but his success ran deeper than that.

For his entire career, Belt has been a fly-ball hitter, and even when he hits the ball on the ground, he does it at an unusually high launch angle for a grounder. That's always had some value, but in the first year of the ban on infield shifts, we saw low line drives and high-launch ground balls take an especially noteworthy leap in value. Belt, whether intentionally or by earned happenstance, saw his tendency toward that kind of batted ball exaggerated, especially on his hardest-hit balls. He hit fewer lazy fly balls and more of those high-value liners.

Tightening his launch angles was a result of Belt focusing more on pulling the ball and less on elevating it, and it was also, partially, an outgrowth of his natural swing path. He's made a career out of driving the ball in the air to his pull field. Getting under the ball a little bit less often just helped him maximize the value of that approach under a changed rule set, and in a new home park. (Prior to 2023, of course, he had spent his entire career as a Giant, calling Oracle Park home, and he was severely discouraged from leaning into an approach centered on driving it in the air to right field.)

Belt didn't quite time all of this right, though. He did escape San Francisco, and he did survive to see the end of the infield shift, but both things have happened just as his bat seems to be slowing down. His whiff rate on fastballs spiked to north of 33 percent in 2023, which was not only a career-worst mark, but seventh-highest out of 290 qualifying batters. He did have a higher average exit velocity on the balls he put in play against heaters, but he got beaten too often with that pitch.

Belt did have the lowest whiff rate of his career on offspeed stuff, but that came with the lowest average exit velocity on those pitches of his career, too. The story the data is telling us is of a player past the middle of his 30s, searching halfway in vain for a way to work around the drag building up in his swing.

To his credit, though, Belt is being about as smart about that difficult set of adjustments as possible. That's in keeping with his track record. Belt has always been a very patient hitter, especially once he gets deep into counts, but he's actually quite aggressive on the first pitch. If a pitcher doesn't throw him anything close early in the count, that's when he starts grinding away and works his walks. Here's a chart of all hitters who had at least 300 plate appearances in 2023, with overall swing rate on the X-axis and first-pitch swing rate on the Y-axis. Belt is the red dot.

There are a handful of similarly extreme outliers in the league, but Belt stands out from the crowd in a noticeable way. He's aggressive on the first pitch, and then he gets patient. That's a nice thing, because by swinging early, he gives himself a chance to put the ball in play (usually hard, with some air under it, to the pull field, because that's what his swing naturally does) before the count gets deep and a whiff means a strikeout. It's also something the Brewers need to do more often, anyway. They swung less often on the first pitch than all but one other team in MLB in 2023, and it contributed to a higher strikeout rate than you would expect from a lineup that was better at making contact than at hitting for power.

In some senses, Belt is an uncomfortable fit for the 2024 Brewers. It might be exactly the right kind of discomfort, though, because he would bring precisely the valuable dynamic the team most glaringly lacked in 2023. He's also a good option for a team on a budget. If Matt Arnold and his crew are not able to spend as much as Rhys Hoskins will cost, Belt could still be a more productive alternative than reupping with Carlos Santana. In another sense, too, he's a wonderful fit for the team. Belt has 131 career home runs. According to Statcast's (admittedly, deeply imperfect) estimates of home run probability across ballparks, he would have 178 at Miller Park. Only Cincinnati would give him more career dingers than Milwaukee would. That's how good a fit the ballpark is for his batted-ball profile.

Do you like Belt for the Brewers? Would you rather have him or Santana? Let's discuss how he would fit with the team in the comments.