A switch-hitting former Rule 5 pick who hit only nine four-baggers before June is an unlikely candidate to be putting up the numbers he is now.
No, the Orioles haven’t had the same “it” that they did in 2023, when they unexpectedly won 101 games and the AL East. The rotation is thin, the bullpen random, the offense spotty. But it’s worth highlighting one thing on the Orioles that is better in 2024 than in 2023: Anthony Santander.
Santander currently has hit 38 home runs, third in MLB behind only Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, and just ahead of Marcell Ozuna and Juan Soto. Between them, those four players have 17 All-Star selections. It’s distinguished company.
Tony Taters has never had such hype around his name, and he never was a golden boy at age 19 like Jackson Holliday and Gunnar Henderson. Rather, he was signed as an international amateur by Cleveland in 2011, and most of his early career was defined by his struggles with injuries. Scouts saw power and potential, but it wasn’t clear whether his conditioning problems could be overcome. Back in 2017, Fangraphs’ Eric Longehagen saw him as a “low-end regular or luxury bench bat.” The more optimistic among them focused on his power:
The Orioles may have found something in the Rule Five draft, finding this injured high celling outfielder in Single-A and rehabbing most of the year. Shows power from both sides of the plate with an average hit tool. Still needs to spend time on the Orioles 25-man roster next year but could one day be an everyday outfielder in left or right field.
It’s taken seven years, but this is the year Tony Taters is growing into this optimistic expectation. Not many prospect predictions go so right as this one, especially not for switch-hitting Rule 5 guys, and especially not to hit 40 home runs in a season, which, with 28 games left, Santander is well-poised to do.
Most Rule 5 guys don’t go on to have long careers. Technically, Roberto Clemente was a Rule 5 pick, snatched by the Pirates from the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954. Josh Hamilton was a Rule 5 pick for Cincinnati in ’06, future Cy Young Johan Santana was chosen by the Florida Marlins in ’99, and hometown favorite Darren O’Day was selected by the Mets in ’08. All of them were great, but they didn’t all stick with their drafting team.
Last year, Jonathan Mayo ranked Santander the second-best former Rule 5 player of the last ten years after Detroit’s Mark Canha, who’s got 15 bWAR in ten seasons (to Santander’s 10+ bWAR in eight seasons) and Garrett Whitlock, a Boston bullpen regular. And that was before his explosion this year.
It’s also improbable that Santander should be doing this for the Orioles. Now 29 years old, Santander made his big league debut with Baltimore in 2017, back when Buck Showalter was still the manager and Chris Davis, Jonathan Schoop, J.J. Hardy and Manny Machado were manning the diamond. Seven years later, he’s endured a change of ownership and many changes in the outfield around him, and constant rumors of his being traded practically every season.
While Santander hit 33 homers in 2022 and 28 last season, it was hard to see this offensive outburst coming. First, because of his injury history: 2022 was the first year he played more than 110 games, and he spent part of that hurt. Working with a doctor on calisthenics and conditioning seems to have helped him a lot. Second, even those impressive seasons didn’t feature this kind of productivity: he is homering in 7.0% of his plate appearances, more than anyone besides Ohtani and Judge, and a higher rate than he’s ever put up in his career.
On top of that, he’s a switch-hitter, which is an art disappearing from the game. Of the roughly 550 batters who took a plate appearance in 2024, only 58 were switch hitters. And although there have 365 40-home run seasons in history, only eleven were achieved by a switch-hitter. The last to do it were Carlos Beltrán (41) and Lance Berkman (45) in 2006.
Besides, according to MLB, Santander’s hard-hit data doesn’t seem like that of an elite power bat. He ranks in the 63rd percentile in hard-hit rate and 82nd in expected slugging—good, but not great numbers. What he does well, however, is pull the ball in the air. He has the second-lowest ground-ball rate of any qualifying hitter (28.3%), the second highest average launch angle (24 degrees), and of his 38 home runs, 33 have come to the pull side (25 as a lefty, eight as a righty).
Santander is also an unlikely candidate for a 40-HR season because he started the season off so cold. He hit just .207 in May with five home runs but then exploded with a .264 average and 13 four-baggers in June, to go with a .303 average in July and nine more.
Now we know it’s kind of what he does at this point, and Santander’s breakout has been extremely well-timed. His club has needed his sustained production as hitters continues to grind through a collective offensive slump. Santander’s 14 home runs in the second half are as many as Gunnar Henderson (5), Cedric Mullins (4), Ryan O’Hearn (2), Adley Rutschman (2) and Ryan Mountcastle (1) have combined.
Santander also has that tough-to-define clutch quality. Of Santander’s 38 home runs in 2024, 20 have been game-tying or go-ahead blasts, the second most behind Aaron Judge’s 22. That includes his go-ahead grand slam last Friday against the Astros, one of the defining moments of the O’s season:
Tony Taters’ career-best season is also coinciding with his last season before he’s set to hit free agency. Whether the Orioles make an effort to retain him or not remains to be seen. But right now, it’s time to focus on the postseason. And to get there and go deep, they need Tony Taters to keep on mashing.