After an uncharacteristic poor start to the season, Phillies first baseman Carlos Santana is finally starting to heat up at the plate.
The Phillies signed Carlos Santana last winter to boost a young offense that showed plenty of potential but lacked any veteran presence. The team hoped Santana would do just that.
During spring training and early this year, Santana took on a mentorship role with several of the team’s players, most notably Maikel Franco. Franco is off to a strong start of his own so that mentorship certainly helped.
Unfortunately, Santana has not had that same level of success. In his first 30 games, he hit just .151 with a .569 OPS. He had plenty of walks but hit just .163 on balls in play. He hit fly balls more than half the time but only two of them landed for home runs.
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Manager Gabe Kapler said that Santana was hitting a lot of hard balls, they just weren’t landing in the right places:
"“I trust that we are all seeing the same thing,” Phils’ manager Gabe Kapler said about Santana. “He is squaring baseballs up and hitting them really, really hard and right at people. It hasn’t just been one or two days, either.“It has been pretty consistent since spring training.”"
In Philadelphia’s last two series, Santana is hitting hard balls in the right places. He racked up four extra-base hits in the Washington series with two doubles, a triple, and a home run.
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Santana started off the Giants series with four runs batted in thanks to a three-run home run and RBI groundout. He hit another home run Tuesday night, then tied a career high with five runs batted in during Wednesday’s game. Santana then rounded out the series with a three-run home run Thursday.
In just seven games, Santana tripled his season home run total (two to six) and more than doubled his RBI total (11 to 26). He raised his batting average by 40 points and increased his OPS by 143 points.
What has potentially caused this turnaround in the last week has been a less dramatic fly ball rate. Excluding Thursday’s game, Santana only had a fly ball rate of 39.1 percent. He also had a hard contact rate of 39.1 percent. Combine that with Santana’s fly balls actually leaving the park, and you are seeing much better numbers from him.
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Having Santana producing in the lineup is huge for an offense that stalled for much of the first month of the season. The Phillies aren’t paying him $20 million a year just for his defense.