Maybe Bryson Stott’s secret is that he isn’t a natural born baseball player.
He sure looks like one. He has the sinewy frame, the grimy demeanor, the sweet left-handed swing that hangs in the zone like an early riser peering in a coffee shop window.
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But maybe he isn’t.
“I tell him routinely that he should have been a cricket player,” Nick Castellanos said a few weeks ago as he stood in the middle of the Phillies clubhouse after a home win over the Dodgers.
Castellanos cast an admiring nod to his left, where Stott was standing at a locker, fiddling with his postgame wardrobe. The Phillies’ second-year second baseman had spent the previous three hours making life miserable for a Dodgers pitching staff that just wanted to get out of town. He’d struck out in his first at-bat, but only after fouling off five consecutive pitches against lefty Caleb Ferguson. His next time up, he knocked a two-run single to center field, but only after working the count full against lefty Adam Kolarek. A couple of innings later, Stott again saw six pitches, this time taking ball four against lefty Alex Vesia.
Three plate appearances, 20 pitches, six foul balls, all of it leading up to a two-out triple in the seventh inning against righty Nick Robertson. That one only required three pitches. So call it a win.
“I mean, I like swinging at the first pitch,” Stott said, “but I also don’t like getting out on it.”
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Welcome to the simple philosophy of the Phillies’ next homegrown star. Don’t make an out. If you do, don’t make it easy.
Over the last couple of months, Stott has used the approach to solidify himself as a fixture in the Phillies lineup for years to come. He entered the weekend as one of the primary catalysts of the Phillies’ current surge, hitting .322 with an .853 OPS since May 17 while raising his overall season batting line to an impressive .300/.336/.424.
Stott’s peripheral performance hasn’t really changed over the last month. He isn’t hitting the ball much harder (he’s about middle-of-the-pack with a 24% hard-hit rate). His contact rate hasn’t changed. He’s been a little more aggressive in the zone, but not much. Mostly, he’s riding one of those waves a player often catches when he puts the bat on the ball as much as Stott does.
The important thing is that he has been this player for close to a year now.
Since the beginning of last August, he is hitting .299 with a .340 on base percentage and .428 slugging percentage in 537 plate appearances. He has only 10 home runs, but he also has only 98 strikeouts. Combine that with his 23 stolen bases (in 27 attempts), and you have a player who has been a significant net positive in the bottom half of the lineup at a position where most teams are content to sacrifice such a thing in favor of defense.
Stott will have his slumps. The question is whether you’ll notice them. Go back to early this season, mid-April to mid-May, when he had a 25-game stretch in which he hit just .215 with a .569 OPS. Even then, he failed to reach base in only four games.
In fact, he had done that just nine times total heading into the weekend. What separates Stott from a lot of contact hitters is his approach. He ranks 12th in the majors in pitches per plate appearance at 4.26. None of the 11 players in front of him are anywhere close to his 85.1 contact percentage. In fact, you have to go back to Jose Ramirez in 2021 to find a player who reached both of those thresholds in the same season.
Stott’s .266 average with two strikes ranks fourth in the majors among players with at least 100 such plate appearances, behind only Luis Arráez, Spencer Steer, and Ronald Acuna Jr. Half of his extra-base hits have come with two strikes.
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And, of course, the foul balls. As of Friday, Stott had fouled off nearly 31% of the strikes he’d seen, a number that ranks in the top quarter of qualified big league hitters.
“It’s impressive,” Castellanos said. “Especially when he gets to two strikes. Just foul ball, foul ball, foul ball. ... I don’t know if he does it intentionally, but he definitely doesn’t cheat to anything. His bat gets in the zone so deep that he’s able to foul off a lot of fastballs. If he’s doing it on purpose, then he has to teach me how he does it.”
So, is it intentional? Well, kind of. Stott won’t put a number on the percentage of pitches he is actively trying to waste. But it happens.
“Obviously, I don’t try to foul off pitches,” he said, “but if they are close with two strikes I’m going to try my best to foul them off and then see another. There’s some I should have hit, and then there’s some that maybe fooled me or it’s too close to let the umpire decide.”
Stott’s ability to put the bat on the ball at a moment’s notice is the kind of thing that should have plenty of staying power in post-rule-change MLB.
It’s difficult to overstate how much Stott’s emergence means for a Phillies team that has endured a decade in which Rhys Hoskins has been the only homegrown hitting prospect to establish himself as a legitimate first division regular.
There were the guys who couldn’t miss until they did: Domonic Brown, J.P. Crawford, Scott Kingery, and Maikel Franco.
The guys who might as well have been you or me: Cornelius Randolph, Larry Greene, Anthony Hewitt, Adam Haseley.
The guys you desperately talked yourself into: Cody Asche, Aaron Altherr, Nick Williams, Tommy Joseph, Roman Quinn, Jorge Alfaro.
Their names are so distant that they ring almost wistfully sweet: reminders of a time when you could still fool yourself into believing in something so dumb.
Don’t even ask about the pitchers.
Stott may never become the superstar people hoped for out of elite prospects like Brown and Kingery. But that’s more than fine. There’s immense value in a second baseman who can hit .300 and reach base at a 34 percent clip for a team that only needs him to be a capable eight or nine-hole hitter. Even if Stott never develops the power that would push him to the next level, he has already become something that this Phillies lineup would be lost without.
