Giants executive and former general manager, Brian Sabean, made a curious comment about Brandon Belt on the Tolbert & Lund show earlier in the week, saying the first baseman “probably isn’t cut out for the middle of the order yet”, suggesting that hitting second, sixth or seventh is the best spot for him.
What’s somewhat bizarre about the statement, as brought up first by Dave Schoenfield, is that Belt is seemingly the ideal candidate to hit in the middle of the order for a Giants offense ranked dead last in runs scored in the second half. Belt has been, by nearly every legitimate metric, the team’s best hitter in 2016. He leads the team in OPS, on-base percentage and slugging. What’s more, Belt has an incredible career .995 OPS batting cleanup, and hits .802 when batting fifth, with those figures at .883 and .897 respectively in 2016.
It’s not as if Belt has been struggling as of late either. He ranks third in both of those categories in the month of September behind Gorkys Hernandez and Hunter Pence. Belt’s OPS this month is over .200 points higher than that of Buster Posey, whose spot as the the Giants’ three hitter seems immoveable, and middle of the lineup hitter Brandon Crawford, whose OPS in the month of September is a well below average .638.
Sabean isn’t the only one who doesn’t think Belt is cut out for the middle of the order. Since dropping Belt from the three spot on August 21st, manger Bruce Bochy has mostly alternated him between sixth and seventh in the order, even batting him eighth in a game on September 1st against Chicago.
Bochy moved Belt into the second spot on September 24th, the first time he had hit there all season, and it seems as if that’s where he’ll stay for the remainder of the season. With the sixth best on-base percentage in the National League, one could argue that’s actually the ideal spot for Belt in the lineup, and should greatly increase the chances that Posey, Pence and Crawford come to the plate with runners on base.
Still the sequence of events is curious, as are Sabean’s comments that seem to fly directly in the face of what the numbers say. It’s not as if taking Belt out of the heart of the order for much of September was successful, they’ve gone 11-14 in the month, and ended up abandoning the experiment last week.
What exactly Belt has to do to impress Sabean remains to be seen, but putting up the best hitting numbers on the team apparently isn’t it.
