How Well Will the Anthony Santander Contract Age?
Not all slow-footed sluggers are built the same.
Trying to predict how a player will age is an imprecise science at best. Growing up in the early-mid 2000’s, it seemed like Albert Pujols was an incredibly durable hitting machine, destined to challenge Bonds and Aaron for all-time records, only to fall off pace after age 32. Meanwhile one of his contemporaries, Adrian Beltre, accrued more fWAR after he turned 30 than before1. If you’d asked most baseball fans then which player would have aged more gracefully into their 30s, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that would have bet against Pujols.
When the news broke that the Blue Jays had signed Anthony Santander, one of the things that stood out immediately to fans was the length of the contract: 5 years. If the decline hits early enough, that 5th year can be incredibly taxing on a team that’s trying to compete for a division title while also giving that player reps (also known as The George Springer Conundrum). When the value of the contract was revealed (including deferrals), most fans seemed ok with adding the extra year since the AAV2 wouldn’t be too much of a hit to the Blue Jays payroll. However, looking a bit deeper into the type of player that Santander is, I think there’s reason to believe that he’ll be productive throughout the entire contract.
The thing that is most apparent when looking at Santander’s stats since his breakout in 2022 is the game-breaking power numbers. I mean this guy absolutely atomizes the baseball and he does it from both sides of the plate. His two farthest home runs of the year each came from a different side, so of course, now we need to watch them both.
Boy that was fun, if you’re going out to left field in Oriole Park, you must be doing something right. Among qualified hitters, Santander posted the 4th most home runs & the 4th highest ISO3 behind only Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, & Juan Soto4. Of course, Santander isn’t nearly as complete of a hitter as those 4. The reason his ISO is so high is because his .235 batting average was 22nd worst among qualified hitters, just ahead of Ty France & Bryan De La Cruz.
The huge power, low average archetype paints the picture of a free-swinging slugger with a ton of strikeouts, but Santander goes about achieving his success in a rather unorthodox way. He does chase a lot of pitches outside the strike zone (33.8%5), but still posted a lower than average strikeout rate (19.4%6).
While those stats might seem at odds with each other, Santander achieves this by having incredible bat control & a penchant for fouling pitches off, especially with 2 strikes. His foul ball rate on 22.6% of pitches ranks in the 97th percentile of all MLB hitters and despite seeing nearly 3% more pitches with 2 strikes than the average MLBer (33% vs 30%), he still maintains his below average strikeout rate. For a guy built like Kyle Schwarber, his approach and bat-to-ball contact skills are much more similar to someone like Bo Bichette.
Another benefit to keeping the count alive with foul balls, is that Santander can wait until he sees a mistake pitch and pounce on it. The website PitcherList has a metric called PLV that breaks down the value of an individual pitch based on the Stuff, Location, etc. There’s a really excellent primer article on their website if you’re interested in reading more, but for the purposes of this article, this metric can tell when a hitter sees a lot of good or a lot of bad pitches. Santander is consistently in the 99th percentile among all Major League hitters at seeing a high rate of “Bad Pitches” by this metric7. Unfortunately, there’s no way for me to export the PLV data & run a correlation to see this, but my theory is that the combination of power + the ability to foul off close pitches leads to pitchers either missing way outside of the zone, or eventually giving up hittable mistakes.
While all this data explains why Santander enjoys the success he has now, the real reason why this contract will potentially age well is the way he distributes his batted balls. Santander is one of the primary beneficiaries of the Pulled Flyball (PFB) revolution; over 18% of his batted balls were pulled in the air last year & that number hasn’t been lower than 16% in a full season since his breakout in 2022.8 It doesn’t seem likely to stop anytime soon either. Year-over-year PFB% has a correlation of 0.71, meaning that it’s a repeatable skill from season to season.
You see, all the mentions of Santander’s titanic power & the video clips earlier were kind of meant to throw you off the truth, which is simply that Anthony Santander doesn’t really hit the ball THAT hard9. His 90th Percentile Exit Velocity (the average of the hardest 10% of a hitter’s batted balls, useful as a short-hand metric for power potential) was in the 74th percentile in 2024, certainly good but nowhere near Judge / Ohtani / Soto level. To Santander’s credit, he actually acknowledged this in an interview with Fangraphs’ David Laurila earlier this year.
“Honestly, I can’t hit the ball really far. You see guys like Yordan Alvarez, Juan Soto, Aaron Judge. They hit the ball far. Gunnar Henderson. Adley Rutschman. Those guys have pop. They can hit it farther than me. Colton Cowser. I joke around with him. ‘Bro, you’re a skinny dude. You crush the ball. Wow. How do you do it?’ I don’t have that kind of pop10. But I can hit in the game.”
The thing about PFBs is that they don’t need to be absolutely crushed to be productive. Ben Clemens of Fangraphs wrote an excellent piece early last year which demonstrated that PFBs are most productive compared to other spray angles specifically in the 95-100 MPH range of exit velocity. Those are the batted balls that tend to have their wOBA11 usually outperform their xwOBA12 (which doesn’t take spray angle into account), since if you hit a 95-100 MPH flyball anywhere else in the ballpark, it’s most likely an out.
However, despite hitting the 3rd most PFBs since his breakout in 2022, Santander hasn’t been a recipient of that xWOBA overperformance. There have been 186 players to hit at least 50 PFBs since 2022 & Santander ranks 90th; squarely in the middle of the pack when looking at WOBA - xWOBA. Meanwhile, PFB guys without raw power like Isaac Paredes, Alex Bregman, & Jose Altuve are all in the top 10. Santander still hits the ball hard enough that good things are expected to happen regardless of spray angle. This is the crux of the argument as to why he’ll age better than most raw power hitters: even once his bat speed goes & he stops hitting the ball as hard as he currently does, he’s still optimized his batted ball profile to deliver above average power output.
While intuitively it seems as though there’s some risk that losing bat speed will in turn cause Santander to not be able to pull the ball as efficiently, this actually isn’t the case. High PFB rates are generally more associated with pitch selection than raw bat speed.13 In fact, when looking at players who pulled at least 5 fly balls in 2024, there was 0 correlation between Bat Speed & how many PFBs they had.
Guys like Max Muncy & Marcus Semien are good examples as they’re older players with below average bat speed but are still able to get to 20+ homers a year due to their PFB tendencies.
The Blue Jays offseason hopefully isn’t finished, but compared to the abysmal moves last year (I openly despised the Kiermaier & IKF signings), it’s hard to be upset at adding a player like Santander. Everything in this article aside, he’s known to be a great teammate & one of the best character guys in the league as well. You don’t need analytics to tell you why having a guy like that in the clubhouse for 5 years will be a benefit to the overall roster.
Which would have seemed impossible after his 2.2 fWAR season at age 30
Average Annual Value (The dollar value per year of the contract)
A power metric that subtracts Slugging Percentage from Batting Average
Not a bad group of hitters, those guys
League Average is 28.5%
League Average is 22.2%
Bad Pitches are usually defined as pitches way outside the zone or right in the heart of the plate with poor Stuff grades
Good for anywhere from the 94th to the 98th percentile in all of baseball
At least not for someone who’s averaged 34 homeruns over the last 3 years
I appreciate the modesty Anthony, but the spectral remains of the baseball in the first video clip probably disagree with you
https://www.mlb.com/glossary/advanced-stats/weighted-on-base-average
https://www.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/expected-woba
Alex Chamberlain wrote about this effect in his excellent piece about PFBs early last year:
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-pulled-fly-ball-revolution-was-always-underway/