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01/27/2025 09:46 AM

Anthony Santander's a peculiar hitter. Here, from left to right, are Santander's batting average, weighted on-base average, and slugging percentage by zone over the last three seasons:

See how red the two boxes from the heart of the strike zone to the bottom are? That's where you don't want to pitch Santander. He's one of the best low-ball hitters in baseball. He loves golfing pitches down there toward outfield walls. He should've played cricket.

Over the last three seasons, Santander's hit .317 and slugged .622 against pitches within the bottom third of the strike zone. That slugging percentage ranks among the top eight qualified hitters in the game, right up there with Yordan Alvarez, Mookie Betts, Kyle Tucker, and Aaron Judge. You really, really don't want to pitch him there.

With breaking balls, especially. Santander's batted .345 against curveballs and sliders in the lower-third with a 52.7 per cent hard-hit rate since 2022. For reference, Giancarlo Stanton's hard-hit rate against those pitches over the same span is a nearly identical 53.1. Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, and Judge are in the low-to-mid 40's.

Perhaps the worst pitch you can throw Santander is a slow-breaking ball that bends into the lower third of the zone. Kind of like this one:

Remember all the consternation over that? I spoke to people with the Blue Jays that spring who were flabbergasted by Christian Vazquez's pitch call. An 0-0 breaking ball down-and-in to a left-handed power hitter is bad enough — but it's worse against Santander.

Last season, Santander hit .368 with an .868 slug (!!!) against breaking balls from right-handers in the bottom-third of the zone. His five homers off those pitches were second in MLB to only Gunnar Henderson and Ezequiel Tovar. You just don't go down there against him.

Even a pitcher's miss patterns in that area are fraught. Santander's such a good low-ball hitter that he's liable to plunge beneath the strike zone and smoke pitches off his shoelaces out of ballparks.

The bottom of the strike zone varies for each hitter depending on their height (not to mention each umpire’s interpretation of the zone) but typically averages around 18 inches off the ground — or 1.5 feet. And since 2021, Santander has hit nine home runs against pitches less than 1.5 feet off the ground.

The only player with more over that span is Rafael Devers (coincidentally, current free agent and rumoured Blue Jays target Pete Alonso ranks third, and Eduardo Escobar, who Toronto signed to a minor-league deal last spring, is fourth). Here's the lowest pitch hit for a home run off a pitcher — Joc Pederson hit a lower one out against outfielder Wil Myers in 2022 — over the last four years:

And here's the second-lowest pitch to leave the yard against the Blue Jays since 2023 (Devers, naturally, has the lower one):

Santander does things like this because of his extreme lift-and-pull approach. He led MLB in fly ball rate last season and ranked within the top 30 in pull rate. Santander doesn't hit the ball especially hard — his 60th-percentile hard-hit rate and 62nd-percentile average exit velocity last season were pedestrian. But he still smacked 44 homers because he tries to yank everything to his pull side.

Anthony Santander's fly ball and pull rates
(MLB rank in brackets)

Do that consistently enough and you'll land some balls in the left or right field seats. And while an inflated 17.1 per cent HR/FB rate last season — his career average is 14.5 per cent — suggests Santander is unlikely to repeat a 40-homer year, his approach makes him a decent bet for 30. Particularly considering he'll no longer have to contend with Camden Yards' insane left field wall and dimensions, which the Orioles overcorrected in 2022 and are just now bringing back in.

Here's every non-homer ball Santander hit at least 330-feet to left at Camden Yards since 2022 overlayed on Rogers Centre's dimensions:

That's another eight homers, easy. Rogers Centre is about a dozen feet shorter to right-centre, too, where you can find another 8-10 balls from the last three years that didn't leave Camden Yards but would've in Toronto. Ultimately, Santander is moving from a ballpark that Statcast considered seven percentage points below league average for home runs over the last three years to one it judged as three points above average — a 10 per cent swing.

Now, Santander's approach isn't without its drawbacks. By trying to lift every pitch in the air, he inevitably runs into a great deal of pop-up contact — a truly undesirable outcome. Groundballs at least get misfielded or sneak through holes from time to time. But the league hit .015/.015/.017 on pop-ups last season, and Santander was the most significant contributor to those rates, leading MLB with 66.

That's after he hit MLB's second-most pop-ups in both 2023 and 2022. Of the 195 he's hit over the last three years, only two have led to him reaching base thanks to balls lost in the sun. Considering it's nearly impossible for runners to advance on pop-up contact, you might as well add the other 193 to his strikeout total.

That wealth of unproductive outs, combined with a league-average walk rate and 18th-percentile sprint speed, puts a great deal of pressure on Santander to make the most of the mistakes pitchers give him. And he tries to use his contact ability to get more of those mistakes, trailing only Matt Olson in foul balls since 2022. Anticipating Santander's signing isn't why the Blue Jays reduced the amount of foul territory at Rogers Centre last season. But it won't hurt his cause.

How do teams counter Santander's peculiar approach? By trying to beat him to a spot at the top of the zone with velocity. The average height of all the pitches Santander was thrown last season was 2.45 feet, the fourth-highest among qualified hitters. And half of those pitches were fastballs or cutters, the second-highest rate across MLB.

Pitchers are trying to keep the ball elevated above Santander's bat and throw it hard enough to lessen the time he has to execute his lofty swing. It's not a bad strategy. Last season, Santander hit .137 with a .229 xwOBA against four-seam fastballs thrown 95+ mph and located in the upper third of the zone or higher. And Santander saw more of those pitches — 275 in all — than any hitter in the league. That's where you get him out.

One would imagine the worst pitch Santander could face is a fastball with a low vertical approach angle, which charts a flatter path to the plate than the average fastball's more downward slope. That creates the illusion of a pitch rising. In reality, it's not dropping as much as hitters expect based upon the bazillions of pitches they've seen in the past, which the brain uses to recognize patterns and trigger muscle memory.

Pitchers like Joe Ryan, JP Sears, Luis Castillo, and Cristian Javier are among the best in baseball at utilizing this tactic. Of the 182 starting pitchers to throw at least 200 fastballs last season, Ryan's was the flattest. Sears's was third-flattest; Castillo's, 7th; and Javier's, 8th.

Lo-and-behold:

Anthony Santander vs. flat fastballs
(Since 2017)

Flat heaters neutralize Santander. He knows they're coming. He's read the scouting report. His swing simply doesn't agree with them. He's a combined 5-for-29 (.172) against the above four pitchers in his career. Don't be surprised if the Blue Jays choose a day they're facing Ryan or Sears to get Santander a little rest going forward.

Now, seeing so many elevated fastballs does allow Santander to sit on them in certain situations. And just as he can fish well beneath the zone for pitches he can drive, he's occasionally shown an ability to do the same to pitches well above the zone, too.

Although it naturally varies by hitter and umpire, the top of the strike zone is typically somewhere around 3.5 feet from the ground. And Santander has five homers off pitches 3.5 feet or higher since 2022, tied for the 6th-most in baseball. Last season, he led MLB in that strange category.

Poor Kevin Gausman, who gave up that uber-low homer from the start of this article, was also on the wrong end of this one last year, which went down as the fifth-highest pitch hit for a homer all season:

Santander has an odd habit of coming through with these swings in big spots, such as this solo shot off Matt Strahm last June to tie a game in the eighth:

And then there's this one off Bryan Abreu — the highest pitch Santander hit out in 2024 — which helped the Orioles instantly overcome a three-run, eighth-inning deficit:

So, what can Blue Jays fans expect from Santander? About 30 homers, 60 pop-ups, and 600 foul balls. A ton of elevated heat, a bunch of low breaking balls launched down the lines, and a handful of pitchers scratching heads after he's whacked pitches he has no business getting his bat head to over outfield walls. A peculiar hitter, indeed.