Hiura’s Historic Month

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PHOTO CREDIT: Milwaukee Brewers

Keston Hiura

Keston Hiura.

Keston Hiura’s MLB debut season is going about as well as one could have hoped, all things considered.

Even after an 0-for-4 day on Sunday Hiura is batting .325 with a .390 on-base percentage and .619 slugging in his first 43 games as a member of the Brewers. He’s already responsible for eleven MLB home runs, including a walk off on Saturday but not including another ball that missed by inches earlier in the same game. He’s the first Brewer rookie ever to win the National League Player of the Week award and it’s possible he’s been the National League’s best player for the entire month of July. Sunday’s game was the first time he appeared in a game and didn’t reach base safely since July 6 and only the third time in the month.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to believe the Brewers had a player of this caliber in the organization, saw him hit .281 with a .333 on-base and .531 slugging at the MLB level in his first 17 games but then opted to return him to the minors for most of June. In a related note, they went 9-11 while he was in back in AAA.

Hiura is almost certainly not going to return to the minors again anytime soon after demonstrating some pretty clear staying power with his performance over the last month. Now that he’s up to stay, however, a new question emerges: How much did the Brewers cost themselves by being conservative with him until recently?

The Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistic provides an easy jumping off point for the simplest answer to that question. Following Sunday’s loss Hiura had played in 43 of the Brewers’ 107 games to date and two commonly accepted versions of WAR estimate his value at 1.5 (Baseball Reference) and 1.8 (FanGraphs) wins. Taking the middle ground of those two numbers and pro-rating it out suggests 107 games of Hiura could have been worth about 4.1 wins already, providing 2.4 extra wins of value for a Brewers team that enters the week a game out of first in the NL Central.

Of course, that estimate requires a collection of caveats:

• First, even if Hiura had opened the 2019 season with the Brewers it’s unlikely that he would have appeared in all 107 games to date. Nagging injuries, rest, bad matchups or a desire to keep another bat in the lineup likely would have cost him at least some of that playing time.
• Second, despite the fact that Hiura has been remarkably productive in his time in the majors, it’s unfair to assume he would have sustained this level of production consistently over an additional two-plus months of the season.

Even if those factors discount Hiura’s potential contributions a bit, however, another factor suggests he could have been even more valuable to the Brewers this season: While Hiura was absent the Brewers gave consistent playing time to Travis Shaw during the worst season of his career. Shaw appeared in his 60^th game of the season on Sunday and the two WAR models agree he’s cost the Brewers around a win above replacement over that time. The Brewers certainly couldn’t predict Shaw would have the kind of season he’s had but making the decision earlier to give some or all of his playing time to Hiura could have, on paper at least, made a significant difference.

The short-term loss incurred by keeping Hiura in the minors for a big chunk of the season does carry a long-term benefit, of course: By delaying the start of Hiura’s MLB career they also delayed his eventual free agency, gaining an extra year of his services in exchange for a couple of months this season. If Hiura is a big part of a contending Brewers team in 2025, it will be at least in part because the Brewers waited to bring him to the majors at the start of the 2019 season and didn’t use him at all in 2018.

In the meantime, however, the Brewers are likely to raid their organizational depth once again this week to trade for players they’re hoping might net them a win or two down the stretch. While they’re paying a premium for wins on the market, it’s worth noting that they might have cost themselves a couple by being overly conservative with Keston Hiura this spring.