Milwaukee Brewers: What to Expect From Keon Broxton?
The Milwaukee Brewers are still in the middle of their rebuild as we approach the 2017 season, but one player that could start turning some heads is outfielder Keon Broxton.
Keon Broxton made his big league debut in 2015 with the Pirates but shed his rookie label last season with the Milwaukee Brewers. He was acquired in a deal that sent corner infielder Jason Rogers to the Pirates. In 244 plate appearances spanning 74 games, Broxton went deep nine times with ten doubles and a triple, all while batting .249 with a .354 on-base percentage. He also added 23 stolen bases for good measure. That’s not bad for a half-season.
Broxton is set to begin his age 27 season with heaps of praise being thrown his way from the analytical community. Back in January, Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs wrote a piece entitled “How Keon Broxton Looks Like the Milwaukee Brewers’ Best Player” which talks about his exit velocity ranking high on the leaderboards and his solid defensive work in the outfield.
Late last season Beyond the Box Score wrote a piece about the solid month that Broxton was having since his most recent call-up, deeming him a rising star.
Broxton certainly has the tools to make a solid impact with the Brewers in 2017. The team will let him utilize his speed on the bases, as Milwaukee led the Majors in stolen bases last season. Broxton’s 3.5 BsR rating shows promise for his ability on the basepaths. His nine defensive runs saved (DRS) show he has skills in center.
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The two concerning factors when it comes to Keon Broxton are simple: His strikeout rate and his BABIP from a year ago. The K rate sat at an astounding 36.1 percent. Of players with at least 200 plate appearances, Broxton ranks second behind Alex Avila in that category.
As for his BABIP, which sat at .373, there is almost no way that that will hold. We’ve seen players with speed benefit from a high BABIP one year and fall off a bit the next year. While there were some extra circumstances surrounding Dee Gordon last year, his career year in 2015 was definitely helped along by a .383 BABIP which led to a .333 batting average. Call it PEDs, or a lack of luck, but Gordon hit just .268 last season as an encore with a .319 BABIP.
To that point, it’s not like Broxton hit for a high average already, so his BABIP may not matter as much as long as he continues to makes hard contact and drive the ball either in the gaps or over fences. Then again, in that hot stretch that he had in the second half of the season, Broxton hit .294 and had a 148 wRC+ across 45 games, so perhaps that low average was more a product of a slow start to the season dragging down the totals.
After going hitless in his first start this spring, Broxton has collected at least one hit in five straight and is currently batting .412 in the early going with two homers and five driven in. The one cause for concern here is that he has attempted three steals and has only been successful one time. As is the case with all of the statistics in this paragraph, it’s an extremely small sample size, so we can’t go on any of it, but it’s nice to check in to get an idea of what we could expect during the regular season.