Daily Graphing – Jorge Cantu

by
February 16, 2006

Last season Devil Ray’s prospect Jorge Cantu broke through in a big way by batting .286 with 28 home runs in just under 600 at-bats. That’s a considerable amount of power for a second-baseman as only Alfonso Soriano and Jeff Kent bested him in 2005. Let’s see if he’ll be able to repeat his breakout season and solidify himself as one of the top second-basemen.

BBP

Starting off with his walk percentage (BB%), he pretty much never walks. He actually had the 6th worst walk percentage of any player in baseball for the 2005 season. He swings at over 30% of the pitches out of the strike zone and 57% of all pitches which makes him one of the most prolific swingers in all of baseball. Fortunately he doesn’t strike out all that much.

KP

Most of his home runs came after the first two months of the season. In April and May he hit 6 home runs and in the following 4 months of the season he hit his other 22 home runs. His home runs per fly ball (HR/FB) stayed pretty steady the entire season which means his new found power was the result of hitting more fly balls.

LDGBFB

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

It looks like Cantu’s power is for real, but it’s not all good news. When he started hitting more fly balls he became a more aggressive hitter. By the end of the season he was swinging at a whopping 37% of all balls out of the strike zone, a totally unacceptable number. If he wants to keep his batting average anywhere near the .286 it was last year, he must learn to lay off pitches he shouldn’t be swinging at. If he doesn’t, not only will his batting average dip, but I suspect his power will also take a hit as pitchers key in on his inability or unwillingness to differentiate strikes from balls.





 

David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Frank Bundy III
19 years ago

Where do you get the data on how many pitches out of the strikezone a hitter swings at?

0