Photo Credit: Scott Paulus/Brewers
Keston Hirua at Maryvale Baseball Park for Spring Training 2018
It’s been a very long year for Keston Hiura, but it’s also been a very impressive one.
Hiura, who the Brewers selected ninth overall in the 2017 draft, started his first full professional season with an invitation to major league spring training. He played in 19 Cactus League games for Milwaukee, batted .419 and sparked a conversation about whether a player in his first full professional season and with no experience above the low-A level might be able to help the Brewers immediately.
The Brewers, of course, took the conservative path and had Hiura open the season with High-A Carolina, but only left him there for two months as he hit .320 with a .382 on-base percentage and .529 slugging and earned an opportunity to play for AA Biloxi. He was still only 21 years old at the time of his promotion but Hiura also held his own in 73 games at that level, helping the Shuckers reach the Southern League championship series. He had at least one hit in seven of Biloxi’s eight postseason games.
By the time the AA playoffs wrapped up Hiura had played in 131 regular season and postseason games in 2018, easily the longest season of his life. He still wasn’t done, however. In fact, his 2018 season didn’t come to an official end until last week. The Brewers remained aggressive with Hiura and assigned him to the Peoria Javelinas of the Arizona Fall League, where he played among top advanced-level prospects from across the game. The Brewers were one of seven teams to assign their top prospect to the league.
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Despite the step up in competition and the challenges created by extending what had already been the season of his life, Hiura continued to dominate in the Fall League. He played in 23 games and led the prospect-rich league in hits (31), RBI (33) and total bases (54) and also finished among the leaders in runs scored (third with 19), home runs (fourth with five) and stolen bases (tied for seventh with seven). On Saturday he was named MVP of his league, then drove in the tying run in the ninth inning as Peoria rallied to beat Salt River for the league championship.
Arizona Fall League numbers require a bit of a context adjustment: The average AFL team nearly set a league record by scoring 5.23 runs per game in 2018, almost a run per game more than the AA Southern League. Teams typically hesitate to send their top pitching prospects to the league to avoid the risk of injury or overuse. Nonetheless, Hiura’s ability to outperform his top prospect position player peers at this level is impressive.
All of Hiura’s success raises the question once again about when he’ll be ready (or the Brewers will give him an opportunity) to help at the major league level. Hiura won’t turn 23 until August and has played just one full professional season, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to build an argument against calling him up. Writers from MLB Pipeline recently identified him as the Brewers’ most likely candidate to win the 2019 Rookie of the Year Award.
Hiura will likely have to wait at least a bit, however, to make his MLB debut. The Brewers can gain a seventh year of his service time and likely avoid having to pay Hiura for a fourth arbitration season by keeping him in the minors for a period of time to start the season, as they did with Ryan Braun in 2007. Often when this kind of service time manipulation occurs a team will make the argument that a player “needs to work on his defense,” and with Hiura that argument has some merit: He’s played well at second base as a professional but his time there has been limited, as he’s been the designated hitter in 81 of his 165 professional regular season games. He was limited to just three games in the field in 2017 due to an elbow injury.
At any rate, however, it appears clear at this point that Hiura is the Brewers’ best long-term option at second base. If the organization’s second basemen struggle to open 2019 as they did to open 2018 then the calls for Hiura will likely intensify and could accelerate his timetable.
