Two weeks from now, the Giants will travel to Fenway Park to get Boston Creme’d by the Red Sox for three games. That’s not hyperbole! The Giants are 0-5 against Boston and have been outscored by them 93-50. It’s not going to go well. We’re not even going to have an interesting storyline to play up as Pablo Sandoval just had elbow surgery and is out for the season.

After a successful surgery, @KFP48 has started down the road to recovery. pic.twitter.com/2Dov0cPsLi — San Francisco Giants (@SFGiants) September 5, 2019

Sandoval’s 5-year deal with the Red Sox ends this season, and we all know that the Giants benefited tremendously from it by only paying the major league minimum for a player who hit a little bit above league average (and doing cool stuff the fans loved). But this post isn’t about Pablo Sandoval and his Red Sox career. Not entirely, anyway. It’s about how Brandon Belt’s Giants career has morphed into Pablo Sandoval’s Red Sox career.

Today’s mental error didn’t cost the Giants the game but it served to bury them. He hit a double and scored a run in last night’s win, but he didn’t do much to help out the Giants otherwise. He had a great home stand, though, with two home runs among eight hits and a .381/.435/.762 line in five games (23 PA).

Despite that six-game home stand, Brandon Belt has a .633 OPS over his last 109 plate appearances with four home runs. In his last 108 plate appearances with the Red Sox, Pablo Sandoval had a .622 OPS with four home runs. Those 108 plate appearances represented 17.4% of Sandoval’s Boston career, of course, as he was so bad that they cut him halfway through his contract.

Ignoring for a moment that he missed pretty much all of 2016 due to shoulder surgery, the totality of his Red Sox career was just 620 plate appearances and a .237/.286/.360 line. That’s just a .646 OPS for a player in his age 28-30 seasons making $17.6 million a year. The full breakdown:

620 PA

575 AB

14 HR

34 BB

101 K

136 H

27 2B

1 3B

Brandon Belt hit the IL last July with a hyperextended knee and returned August 14th. Since then, he’s had 634 plate appearances, so, just a little bit larger of a sample than Sandoval’s Red Sox career. Here’s that breakdown:

634 PA

546 AB

16 HR

80 BB

144 K

119 H

26 2B

3 3B

This amounts to a line of .218/.320/.364, or a .684 OPS, for a player in his age 30-31 seasons making $17.2 million a year. If the comparison seems superficial and perhaps a little unfair —

I mean, why wouldn’t you think that? This is Brandon Belt we’re talking about here. World Series champion. The 59th-best hitter in baseball (.351 wOBA) from 2011-2018, and the Giants’ second-best hitter behind Buster Posey over that same span; and, the best hitter on the team (.347 wOBA) since 2015.

Our beloved baby giraffe. The subject of a potentially prejudicial question in the McCovey Chronicles staff writer application (just kidding). Bob. One of the Brandons. The author of Splash Hit 69 (which, perhaps ironically, came against the Red Sox). And here I am stoking the flames of his flamers, his haters, the people who never liked him, who’ve been waiting for Belt to age out of the game to say “I told you he was always terrible.”

— but before you accuse me of switching sides in the Belt Wars,

Brandon Belt’s career up until this point has been defined by fantastic highs and agonizing lows, but through it all, steady defense. From 2011-2018, he averaged .266/.356/.455. The aforementioned .351 wOBA made him an above average major league hitter. A quick reminder of why wOBA is better than OPS in this case:

All methods of reaching base are not equal. On-base percentage only goes so far in measuring a player’s value. OPS adds different values (OBP + SLG percentages) for different methods of reaching base, but those values are simpler than the wOBA method, which assigns the proper value to each event, in terms of its impact on scoring runs.

Going back to August 14th of last year, he’s had one month out of eight with a wOBA on par with his career average. That was April of this year (.355 wOBA). If you combine 2018 and 2019, then he’s had just three such months (April and May of 2018 being the other two).

The league wOBA (minus pitcher’s hitting numbers) in 2019 is .325. Last year it was .320. Last year, April and May were the only months that were equal to or greater than league average. This year, he did manage to post a .325 wOBA in June. Here’s what his wOBA by month since 2015 looks like:

Terrifying, right?

There’s also his defensive numbers. We all know that the analytics community doesn’t quite have a handle on defensive numbers, but they’ve come a long way since the introduction of Statcast. Even still, that info is geared towards outfielders more than infielders, and we’re not interested in his adventures in left field, so, I’l be resorting to FanGraphs’ Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), which still do a good job of evaluating the D.

Your refreshers:

Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) is a defensive statistic calculated [...] that rates individual players as above or below average on defense. Much like UZR, players are measured in “runs” above or below average, and Baseball Info Solutions data is used as an input. Since DRS is measured in runs, it can be compared easily with a player’s offensive contributions (wRAA or similar statistics). Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) is one of the most widely used, publicly available defensive statistics. UZR puts a run value to defense, attempting to quantify how many runs a player saved or gave up through their fielding prowess (or lack thereof).

These stats also scale the same way.

0 = Average

+5 = Above Average

+10 = Great

+15 = Gold Glove Caliber

It has been largely downhill for Belt since June of last year, with just a bit of an uptick to begin 2019. Statcast still like a lot of his batted ball data. His .383 xwOBA (expected wOBA, which factors in the type of contact he makes along with walks and such) is in the 71st percentile of MLB. His 36.2% hard hit rate is just about his career average (36.4%) and a significant boost from last year (31.6%). His walk rate (13.7%) is in the top 7% of the league and his strikeout rate (20.4%) is well below his career average (23.2%).

Average exit velocity on his batted balls has gone up from last year, too (87 mph vs. 86.1), but I suspect some of that has to do more with the reconditioned ball than recovery from his knee problem(s). His Barrel rate on batted balls (that is, balls hit with an exit velocity of 95 mph or more and with a launch angle between 25-35 degrees) is down to 8.8% versus a career rate of 10.3%. Even last year, he was able to square it up 10.5% of the time.

The rest of his 2019 line of .229/.338/.395 can probably be explained by his performance against all the computer-driven defensive shifting he’s faced. Yeah, that’s right. We can measure how a player does against defensive shifts. Against all shifts this year, he has a .253 wOBA. That number can be scaled against the rest of the league through wRC+ (weighted runs created plus). 100 equals league average. Belt has a 55 wRC+ against the shift. That means he hits 45% worse than the league against the shift. Shifting has hastened the demise of Brandon Belt’s career.

That’s what it seems like we’re looking at here, anyway. The Red Sox were faced with a similar situation after signing Pablo Sandoval to a long-term deal. He never got in shape, he stopped hitting close to his career norms, and combined with other behavior was basically a net negative for the team.

Belt hasn’t done anything to piss off the front office or create a disruption in the clubhouse (at least, not that we know of), but beyond that, there are a significant number of similarities between his situation and Sandoval’s with the Red Sox. Like Sandoval, Belt was signed to a long-term deal by a front office no longer running the team. Ben Cherington signed him before the 2015 season. Ben Cherington was fired in August of 2015.

Dave Dombrowski experienced 58 games of Pablo Sandoval and decided that was enough. Farhan Zaidi didn’t sign Brandon Belt to his deal and Belt possesses many of the qualities Zaidi looks for in a baseball player, but at the same time, Belt’s .316 wOBA on the year makes him the 27th-worst full-time position player in MLB. He has been worth exactly zero wins above replacement (per FanGraphs), too. If you takeaway his great April, he becomes 21st-worst and a below replacement-level player with a -0.3 fWAR. Since July 1st, he’s 19th-worst (.290 wOBA) and -0.5 wins above replacement.

Statcast and the other proprietary stuff Major League Baseball hasn’t made available to the public has no doubt short-circuited the careers of Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford, Joe Panik, and Brandon Belt, but Belt’s fall has been the greatest of this group. It’s always possible that there’s something more going on behind the scenes, particularly where the health of his knee is concerned, but at some point, the needs of the many outweigh the knees of the few.

He’s younger than Pablo Sandoval, but Pablo was also a little bit younger than Belt when he hit his career crossroads. He was able to turn it around through some mild reinvention, but that was only after he got a wakeup call in the form of that DFA. The Giants might still try to trade Brandon Belt — and after successfully unloading Mark Melancon, why not at least try? — but if they don’t, they’re not out of options. Because I still think there’s good baseball left in Brandon Belt’s body, I’m going to hope it doesn’t come to that.