The Next Step for Keon Broxton and Domingo Santana

Last year, only one team improved their exit velocity in the second half as much as the Brewers did, when they went from 17th in the league to fifth. That might not surprise you, because you’ve read often about the young power duo on that team — Keon Broxton and Domingo Santana — and those two were at their healthiest and most dynamic in the second half. And yet the team was 20th in park- and league-adjusted weighted run creation during that same period. There’s always something else that requires attention, both players agreed in camp this week.

The hardest hit ball in the Statcast era, to date, came off the bat of Giancarlo Stanton, but it resulted in a double play. Lifting the ball matters. You want to punish that air ball most of all.

Last year, Santana had some trouble with that aspect of his game, as Jeff Sullivan ably pointed out. Here’s the graph Jeff used to give us some optimism about Santana this year:

It turns out, that turnaround has something to do with a bed and a band. The bed started it all, as it does. “I slept on top of it wrong,” Santana said of his shoulder. “It didn’t feel right, so I kept stretching it, and then felt a little pop… That sidelined me for two weeks. And then that thing just came down into my elbow.”

That injury kept Santana from finishing his swing the way he likes to. “I’m a guy that likes to whip, and I couldn’t whip,” Santana said as he mimicked his swing. “I couldn’t really extend my elbow, I couldn’t get that whip.” We spoke of that moment in any swing when one palm is up and one palm is down, that moment when you’re transferring the power of the bat into the ball. In that moment, Santana was incapable of “whipping” the bat over and lifting the ball.

Palm up, palm down, right before contact when the hands whip and turn over.

The injury even prevented him from participating fully in his preferred everyday drills. “I do a drill with my back hand, I couldn’t do it at all, and that really hurt my ability to lift it,” the slugger said. “That little drill right there keeps me from topspinning the ball — when I hit it, just whip it.”

To get right, Santana spent the offseason working bands and stretching the area. “Just a lot of pitcher’s stretches,” he said of the physical work in order to “get those little muscles stronger, things I’ve never done before.”

While Santana likes to think about whipping and lifting, Broxton prefers to concentrate a bit more on line drives. “Since I’ve been a kid, I’ve always had a bit of pop,” the upbeat Broxton siad in Brewers camp this week. “Balls have always come off my bat hard. I just try to square the ball up every time.” He’s redefined success for himself: “I’ve come up with this thing that I don’t really care which way the ball goes as long as I square it up, as long as it’s hard and fair, then I did my job, that’s all you can do in the box.”

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t work to get the most of his natural ability to hit the ball hard. “I’m just trying to stay on top of the ball more, trying to hit the top half of the ball more,” he said of his work this spring. “You hit the bottom half and you lose chances of getting a hit. Trying not to pull off the ball a lot.”

Broxton has the rare ability to smoke line drives and hit for power without popping the ball up, so the approach seems to work well for him. Look at how he rates among batters who recorded an above-average home-run per fly-ball rate last year, when judged by pop-up rate.

Broxton’s profile looks a bit like Votto’s, doesn’t it?

Of course, there’s one thing that Broxton doesn’t do like Votto, and that’s make contact. Santana has the same problem. Both hitters agreed that they struck out too much. In fact, they seemed to echo each other on the way out.

Both said they had to capitalize when they had the chance. “You see veterans even taking strikes because they know that’s not really a good pitch for them to hit,” pointed out Broxton. “But if you throw it in the hot zone, they are not going to miss it.” And Santana: “Look for your pitch, but also don’t miss it.”

Santana did a great job of punishing pitchers when he got ahead late last year. Take a look at how his contact rate against fastballs expanded when he returned from injury late in the season.

The chart on the left represents contact rate before the injury; on the right is after it. The one on the right is full almost entirely of 100% marks.

As for Broxton, he’s working on his head piece, which makes sense considering that pre-release pitch information might be more important than post-release information. “If I have three at-bats, I’ve come to realize I’ll have one bad at-bat, and I’m trying to figure out why I’m having those bad at-bats and try to replay over and over what’s going on,” the outfielder said. “It’s just my mental approach.”

“If I have a successful at-bat, I try to come up with a game plan for my second at-bat and sometimes I stick with it and sometimes I don’t,” he continued. “Sometimes it’s the wrong plan for what the pitcher’s trying to do.”

Knowing the league and himself better will allow him to better anticipate pitches, he feels, and the data backs him up. Hitters swing less as they age in general. “You get more selective. That just comes off of knowing what pitches you can handle and which ones you cannot handle,” Broxton agreed. “When I first came up, I was chasing balls I couldn’t do much with. I could get a piece of wood on it, but I wasn’t going to get a hit. Now I’m looking over the heart of the plate and looking for mistakes.”

The good news for these Brewers is that there’s no other duo in baseball that averages as high an exit velocity as the two outfielders in Miller Park. In order to take better advantage of that shared tool, both outfielders are working on tweaking their launch angles and making more contact. It’s not all about exit velocity, of course.