Finding Colt Keith’s lost power

Colt Keith looks like a power hitter, doesn’t he? He’s listed at 6’2, 210 pounds, making him a certifiably large human being. His minor league track record speaks for itself, too. Prospect outlets consistently rated Keith as a 60 or 70 grade raw power guy, and his production bore that out in games as well as in term so max exit velocities.

Across three levels in 2023, Keith posted a .552 slugging percentage. That included a .521 slug and 13 homers in 67 AAA games. Keith’s power potential was one of the major reasons the front office bought out all of his arbitration seasons for just over $28M before he even debuted, with club options for another 3 years and $38M. The idea was that his good hit tool, strong eye at the plate, and big juice would create an ideal middle of the order force.

Things haven’t panned out that way over Keith’s first two years in the majors. To date, Keith has been a decent complementary player, but nothing special. His career slash line (.258/.320/.395) rates out as almost exactly league average. 2025 was a small step in the right direction, but an ice-cold start and a late-season rib injury disguised much of the progress he made over a hot summer. From May 1 to August 31, Keith was a top-60 hitter in the majors. His .277/.336/.463 slash line over that time was much more in line with expectations, but only over half an overly-sectioned season. It’s hard to say for sure if this was legitimate progress or a hot streak.

Because I’m me, I wanted to look into his power outage and see if I could figure out what’s happening. The start of that process was interesting: despite doing a lot of little things well like hitting the ball hard, making contact in the zone, and taking walks, Keith severely underperforms the rest of the league when he hits fly balls. That should be intuitive – if a player doesn’t hit for power, chances are his fly balls are the problem – but this isn’t the style of “different” I expected.

Keith gets on base roughly as frequently as the league average hitter on his fly balls, but slugs far less. Strangely, though, that power outage hasn’t translated to missing home runs, as he converts a roughly average rate of his fly balls into homers. Instead, it seems like the slugging gap comes from a surprisingly low amount of doubles off his fly balls. That’s particularly weird because most young hitters grow from doubles power to home run power as they find their footing; Keith already has the home run part down, but not the doubles.

To me, that suggests that when he gets ahold of one, he really maximizes it for home run power, but doesn’t do so frequently enough. This could be in part a pull rate issue, since we see he pulls way fewer of his fly balls than an average hitter, and it’s been well established that pulled fly balls go further than any other, and thus, produce better results. That makes even more sense when you consider the reasonably short porch in left, with a still fairly expansive and deep middle of the field in Comerica Park. A left-handed hitter needs to pull his fly balls to do maximum damage.

Turns out that we have a new way to easily look into that very hypothesis. Last year, MLB analysts introduced “Squared-Up Percentage”, a stat that measures how frequently a batter squares a ball up. Go figure. More importantly, they defined a “squared-up ball” as a batted ball that results in at least 80% of the maximum exit velocity based on the batter’s swing speed, the pitch’s velocity, and some momentum equations from physics. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the stat basically serves to showcase how well the batter can control his barrel to maximize energy transfer to the ball.

I chose to explore how often two players – Keith, and Francisco Lindor – “square up” baseballs at every launch angle. I compared Keith with Lindor because the two actually have similar swing speeds, exit velocities, and batted ball profiles, except Lindor has run a slugging percentage almost .100 higher than Keith over the last two seasons, despite being listed at 5’10, 190 pounds. As you’ll see below, squared up rate explains a large part of the difference in power production.

The graph below shows that comparison and also provides league average as a reference. The x- and y-axes are straightforward enough, but the bubbles and the red section are the most interesting to explore. Bubble size corresponds to how often a batter hits a ball at that launch angle, where a bigger bubble means that launch angle is more common. Meanwhile, the red zone indicates the optimal launch angles for home runs, so squaring up baseballs in those launch angles is where power comes from.

Here’s what stands out to me from this graph: Keith does a much worse job squaring up his air contact than Lindor, starting around 25 degrees. This matches our expectations pretty handily; Keith hits the ball in the air a lot, and he hits the ball hard a lot, but doesn’t often do both. Instead, he squares up his batted balls hit closer to the ground. Lindor, on the other hand, squares up a ton of baseballs all the way up to 40 degrees, which helps explain how he has 64 home runs over the last two seasons.

Ordinarily, the last thing I would do would be to check Keith’s 2024 data versus 2025 to see if he’s improving or not. Unfortunately, the launch angle distributions of squared up baseballs, and this very simple visualization, are only available for 2025. I’d wager this is an improvement from 2024 since Keith hit the same number of home runs and 7 more doubles in 100 fewer plate appearances, but I couldn’t say for certain.

Keith did improve in several ways from 2024 to 2025. His walk and strikeout rate both increased, which is generally a symptom of a more selective approach and a sign of good things to come, and there was a small uptick in power. Hopefully, as he continues to mature and adjust to MLB pitching heading into his age 24 season, Keith can square up more of the baseballs he would benefit most from, launch them higher to the pull side, and grow into the power hitter we saw in the minor leagues.