We’re About to Find Out a Lot About Heston Kjerstad

Heston Kjerstad turned 26 in February, and he only has 158 major league plate appearances. That’s more than you or I had at that age, but it’s not a lot relative to expectations. This was a highly polished SEC corner bat who went second overall five years ago, though for reasons I’ll get into, Kjerstad wasn’t your garden variety no. 2 pick. After a token call-up at the end of 2023, in 2024 he spent more time in Triple-A (where he posted a 160 wRC+ in 56 games) than in the majors (where he posted a wRC+ of 116, which isn’t lighting the world on fire, but is still good, especially for a rookie).

Nobody wants to get their shot because of an injury, but Colton Cowser busting his thumb on Sunday leaves a two-month hole that Kjerstad has to, has to, has to exploit.

In 2023, Kjerstad hit .303/.376/.528 in 122 games across Double- and Triple A. He performed even better in 2024. Given his high prospect stats dating back to his time at Arkansas, why has he spent so long in the queue? Well, Kjerstad’s draft position is a little misleading. He came out in 2020, when — I don’t know if you remember this — history happened and the college baseball season got canceled after less than a month. That June, a truncated draft went ahead, and with little information on the prospects coming out, the draft was comically college-heavy and conservative. Those players who did get drafted couldn’t play in the minors that year, and between scouting deficits and developmental disruptions, a lot of can’t-miss prospects from that class have failed to pop.

If I’d been in Mike Elias’ shoes that night, I wouldn’t have taken Kjerstad second overall; I would’ve gone with Vanderbilt’s Austin Martin, and we can all see how well that would’ve worked out. The best player from the 2020 top 10, so far, has been Reid Detmers, who posted a 6.70 ERA last year. The best player from the first round overall has been Garrett Crochet, and if you’re looking for other successes, the field thins out after Patrick Bailey, Jordan Westburg, and Austin Wells.

Moreover, not even the Orioles thought Kjerstad was actually the second-best player in the draft; he signed for the seventh-highest bonus in the class, some $2.59 million below slot. About half of that savings went to a Florida high school third baseman named Coby Mayo, whom Baltimore drafted in the fourth round and is now a top-50 global prospect on the fringes of the majors. Seems like a smart move in retrospect.

Even in that cursed draft class, Kjerstad had it harder than most. Shortly after the Orioles drafted him, Kjerstad was diagnosed with myocarditis and prohibited from undertaking strenuous physical activity — such as playing professional sports. By the time Kjerstad made his professional debut in June 2022, he hadn’t played a meaningful baseball game in 25 months.

And yet he killed it once he got his chance. The last year he was eligible for our Top 100 Prospects list, 2024, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin put a 70 on his power and ranked him 24th overall. Cowser, who ended up jumping him in line, was two spots lower on the Orioles’ team prospect list.

So even though Kjerstad’s professional career has been loaded with adversity not of his own making, he’s earned a shot. And yet he’s only kind of gotten it, because he’s been involved in something like a 12-way competition for three spots in the lineup.

In addition to Cowser, the Orioles have Ryan Mountcastle, a catcher time-share of Adley Rutschman and Gary Sánchez that is going to end up with one of the two DHing pretty frequently, and Ryan O’Hearn. A lot of teams would welcome a lefty bopper to their lineup, even one with limited defensive utility. The Orioles, like the French knights and the Holy Grail in the Monty Python movie, already have one.

Shelling out for Tyler O’Neill certainly adds to the corner outfield options, but believe it or not, the logjam is nowhere near as bad as it was this time last year. Back then, the Orioles also had to find time for Austin Hays, Kyle Stowers, and Anthony Santander, all of whom are no longer with the club.

So Cowser’s injury has finally, finally, made Kjerstad a starter. He’s started two of Baltimore’s last three games; the one exception was against Crochet on Wednesday, when I guess manager Brandon Hyde didn’t want to feed his young left-handed slugger to one of the best left-handed starters in the league. (Things couldn’t have gone much worse; Crochet pitched eight scoreless innings.) In order to stay in the lineup once Cowser returns, however, Kjerstad has to answer two questions that linger despite his productivity.

One is accessing his game power. Kjerstad hits the ball hard. From the start of the 2023 season through Wednesday’s games, 530 players have batted 150 or more times; Kjerstad is 93rd in hard-hit rate, which is pretty good. He’s one spot ahead of Max Muncy the Elder, and the next 20 spots on the list include guys like O’Hearn, Lawrence Butler, Cal Raleigh, and Kyle Tucker. But he’s 191st in barrel rate, at the head of a three-player group (with the now-retired Alex Kirilloff and Josh Bell) that I like to call the “Man, It Feels Like He Should Be Hitting More Home Runs” Club.

I have some explanation for that, albeit in a relatively small major league sample: Kjerstad has a moderate case of Ryan Mountcastle Syndrome. In brief: Generally, you want to hit the ball hard, in the air, to the pull side. That leads to home runs. When you hit the ball on the ground, ideally that goes to the opposite field. Grounders the other way tend to be softer, which lead to fewer double plays, and the more of them you hit, the less you’re going to get shifted.

Here’s what Kjerstad has done so far in his big league career:

That’s not an easy thing to fix, and you can tell because we’re talking about pretty good major league first baseman Ryan Mountcastle, and not two-time AL MVP Ryan Mountcastle. The hope with Kjerstad is that this is a small-sample mirage. Indeed, Kjerstad’s minor league spray numbers have usually been more in the 40% pull range, rather than the low 30s or high 20s.

The other lingering issue with Kjerstad is his ability to control the edges of the zone. Kjerstad’s career chase rate is 34.1%; the major league average this year is 28.9%, and has been in that neighborhood the past three seasons. A hitter with plus or plus-plus power can get away with a chase rate like that if he can seek and destroy within the zone as well, and his aggressiveness doesn’t push his walk rate down or his strikeout rate too far.

In 2024, Kjerstad ran a 12.4% walk rate and a 26% strikeout rate in Triple-A, which is great. In the majors, he wasn’t quite as good — 8.8% walk rate and 28.9% strikeout rate. But if he’s hitting 30 dingers a year, that’s entirely acceptable for a first-division starter.

Where things fall apart for Kjerstad is when the ball is around the fringes of the strike zone:

He’s whiffing a lot, and when he does make contact, it’s not especially productive. Small wonder, then, that on Thursday Red Sox starter Tanner Houck threw him basically nothing but breaking balls and offspeed stuff, in the area where he knew Kjerstad would have trouble handling it:

The first 10 pitches Kjerstad saw weren’t pretty. In his first at-bat, he whiffed twice en route to a six-pitch strikeout. In his second, Kjerstad fell behind 1-2, though one of those strikes came on a truly malevolent sweeper that looked like a batting practice fastball and dropped like the S&P 500 right as Kjerstad came out of his shoes swinging at it. Ain’t nobody hitting a pitch like that.

The red dot in the middle of the zone was the last pitch Kjerstad saw before Houck was lifted for a lefty reliever and Mountcastle was brought in to pinch-hit in response. It was also the first truly hittable pitch Kjerstad saw all day.

Sure enough, Kjerstad hit it. He dumped it in the left center field gap at 100.3 mph for a 320-foot double.

That’s good hitting from Kjerstad, and a very good result. But it’s not a great one. The best hitters in baseball can take that pitch and pull it. Here’s how the best left-handed hitters in baseball did last year on similar pitches:

Even the best hitters in the league don’t pull this pitch all the time; their collective spray charts are almost perfectly even from pull to opposite. But when they pulled those pitches, they posted a collective .820 wOBA and a 21.2% HR/BIP ratio. When hitting to the opposite field, their average exit velocity was more than 12 mph slower (111.1 mph vs. 98.8); accordingly, the best left-handed hitters in the league posted a 5.9% HR/BIP ratio and a wOBA of only .294 on middle-middle and middle-up fastballs between 92 and 95 mph that were hit the other way.

The difference between a double and a home run is pretty self-evident. It’s also the difference between a good hitter and a franchise hitter. If Kjerstad turns out to be the latter, he’ll end up helping carry the Orioles deep into the playoffs, given the team’s wealth of position player talent. If he’s only the former, he’ll end up as trade bait, just like countless prospects from this generation were before: Stowers, Hays, Connor Norby, Joey Ortiz, the list goes on.

Over the next two months, we’ll learn a lot about which fate awaits Kjerstad: Is he an important piece, or is he merely someone the Orioles can trade to get an important piece at a different position?

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