Anthony Santander? More Like Can’t-thony Keep It Fair.

I don’t know if you were aware of this, but Anthony Santander hits a lot of foul balls. Let me rephrase that, Anthony Santander hits mostly foul balls. He hit 655 foul balls in 2024, a whopping 220 more than the balls he actually hit into fair territory. In all, 60% of the time that Santander made contact, the ball went foul. That honestly blows me away. It’s obvious once you stop and think about it, but I had simply never considered the possibility that some players would hit more foul balls than fair balls. As it turns out most players hit more foul balls than fair balls. In 2024, just 24% of players hit more balls fair than foul.

Still, Santander’s raw total of foul balls was second only to Matt Olson. In 2023 and 2022, the only other full seasons of his career, Santander finished fourth and eighth, respectively. Between the foul balls and the home runs, when Santander comes to the plate, you know exactly what you’re getting: a fantastic chance of bringing home a souvenir. This season, however, we’re not just interested in the fact that Santander’s foul ball per plate appearance rate was a whopping 98.9%. We’re interested in something a bit more specific.

Depending on how you look at them, foul balls aren’t necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. Obviously, all strikes are bad, but you’d prefer a foul to a whiff. On the other hand, if you hit the ball hard, you’d much rather see it stay fair than land just on the wrong side of the chalk. However, some foul balls are clearly worse than others, and that leads us to another thing Santander does distressingly often. In 2024, Santander led baseball with 65 popups. He also tied for the league lead in 2023 and he finished second in 2022. That’s why we’re focused on Santander in particular. When you discuss the unholy amalgam of foul balls and popups known as the foul out, Santander is unavoidable. These traits combine to create one particular result: Santander spends an extremely high percentage of his follow-throughs with his head tipped all the way back, looking like a little kid leaning out the window and trying to catch raindrops with his tongue.

Santander didn’t just lead baseball in foul outs in 2024, he blew the rest of the league out of the water.

Santander’s 36 foul outs were nine more than Daulton Varsho in second place. There were only 14 hitters in all of baseball who had half as many foul outs as Santander. And he didn’t pace the league for just this season; he fouled out more than anyone has in the last 17 seasons. We have foul out data going back to 1988, and over the 37 seasons that comprise all of recorded history, Santander’s 2024 campaign ranks fifth.

As you look at this list, a few things might jump out at you right away. First among them, Joe Carter really loved fouling out.

Second, a lot of the home ballparks of the players on this list had ample foul territory: Rogers Centre, Oakland Coliseum, and Kauffman Stadium in particular. Oriole Park appears quite a bit too, which might surprise you. According to Clem’s Baseball Blog, Oriole Park ranks dead in the middle of all stadiums, with 23,600 square feet of foul territory. However, if you look at the way that foul territory is distributed, it starts to make a little more sense. To show you what I mean, I’ve overlaid Oriole Park’s foul territory on Tropicana Field. The yellow area is in play at the Trop, the purple area is in play at Camden Yards, and the red area is in play in both parks.

The Trop ranks fifth in baseball, with 1,700 more square feet of foul territory than Camden Yards. However, most of that extra territory is down the line past the infield, where it takes an extremely long run for anyone to make a play on a ball. Oriole Park is a bit deeper right behind the plate, where the catcher has an easy chance at corralling a popup.

So Santander’s home ballpark hasn’t done him any favors, but there’s more to the story than that. This is about who Santander is as a hitter. From the first table in this article, you might have noticed that the players included tend to share a certain approach. Santander, Varsho, Bregman, Paredes, and Santana all specialize in pulling the the ball in the air, and that approach can lead a player to be out in front on a lot of pitches, under a lot of pitches, or both. Put those together, and you’ve got a recipe for making imperfect contact to the underside of the ball.

Santander also does his best work at the bottom of the zone. Here’s a heat map that shows his Runs Above Average. There’s pretty much nothing but blue once you get to the middle of the zone and above.

With a heat map like that, no one should be trying to get Santander out in the bottom third of the zone, and pitchers are very definitely aware of that. In 2024, 49.7% of the pitches he saw were either fastballs or cutters, the seventh-highest rate among players who saw at least 750 pitches. The average pitch he saw crossed the plate at a height of 2.45 feet, fifth highest among that cohort. When you see that much elevated heat, you’re bound to get under more balls. Next thing you know, you’ve got a spray chart that looks like the dregs of the Dippin’ Dots container.

Even though both his profile and his home ballpark are pushing him toward this dubious distinction, it’s important to emphasize just how much of an outlier Santander is. Over the past three seasons, Santander has fouled out 79 times, 15 more than José Ramírez in second place. On our all-time list of foul outs, Santander’s 2024 campaign is the only season in the top 30 that has come in the last 10 years. I’m honestly not 100% sure of why that could be. It’s a little bit surprising in light of the fact that on a per-pitch basis, the league’s foul ball rate has been rising steadily since at least 2002, and popup rate has stayed fairly constant over the past 20 years. It’s something I’ll be thinking about going forward, but for now, it makes the season that Santander put up all the more absurd.

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