Whichever position Keith plays in his sophomore season, getting to more of his raw power is job one.
Friday marked the one-year anniversary of Colt Keith’s long-term contract with the Detroit Tigers . The six-year deal, complete with contract escalators and three option years that could take the deal to nine years and as high as $82,000,000, while guaranteeing $28,642,500, was pretty well received, and promoted by the team as part of a new era in Tigers’ baseball. It also quashed speculation as to whether Keith would make the active roster on Opening Day. So far the deal looks pretty good on both sides.
Perhaps the desire to live up to the deal was in Keith’s head for a little while early in the season. The then 22-year-old second baseman got off to a brutal start. For a few weeks he looked lost at the plate, posted an 11 wRC+ from Opening Day to April 30th. He wasn’t even striking out much but nothing was dropping, and he wasn’t driving the baseball. However, by May he was already settling in. From May 1 on, Keith put up a 115 wRC+ while hitting .282/.328/.426 with 13 home runs and a slightly better than league average strikeout rate. The Tigers enter 2025 with Keith as their best hope for an offensive breakout from their young players, but he’ll also have to contend with learning a new position.
Keith is already equipped to provide good production and upgrade the defense at first base, which matters more in the post-shift era. Not that learning first base is easy, but Keith is quicker and has a somewhat better glove than Spencer Torkelson. He just needs to avoid the pitfall of thinking the move to first base requires a 30 home run season. Selling out for home runs is a good way to get exploited by major league pitching, and Keith doesn’t need to reach too hard for more power.
Leave the first month out of the equation, and he’s already an above average major league hitter. As expected, he hit for a solid .260 average despite the .154 start in March/April. He handles left-handers just fine and doesn’t need to be platooned. He strikes out far less against right-handers, but surprisingly didn’t walk nearly as often as he did in the minor leagues. He also had a few months were he just didn’t hit for much power. It was a pretty up and down year looking through his monthly numbers, but you can expect Keith to moderate his slumps better going forward.
There is also plenty of upside remaining. The key for Keith this year is simply to be a little more selective in order to get on base a little more often and get more favorable counts. If he can do that, he should naturally develop into a consistent 20-25 home run producer with the potential for peak 30 homer seasons. He doesn’t have to sell out for homers and sacrifice strikeouts in order to get there either.
Keith’s raw power was often graded as plus or even double plus as a prospect. He went through a few cycles of bulking up on muscle going from 2021 to 2022, his breakout season. He then got a little leaner and more mobile to move to second base. Perhaps super jacked Colt Keith will return this spring, but it isn’t really necessary. Keith packs plus raw power, and at the major league level it’s more about getting to what you’ve got. There aren’t too many qualified hitters who don’t have the raw ability to hit the ball 420 feet or more. Suffice it to say Colt has that and quite a bit more in the tank and can comfortably match up with Kerry Carpenter, for example.
Currently ZIPS projections for 2025 have Colt Keith projected to hit .261/.323/.426 with 16 home runs in 570 plate appearances. I’d call that the floor for him, personally. Keith didn’t get to the major leagues with the haste of a Juan Soto or even Riley Greene, but he had just over two full seasons’ worth of pro plate appearances when he debuted in the major leagues last spring. It’s no surprise he had some rough stretches, but there is plenty of reason to think he’s going to keep getting better.
Keith has always had strong contact ability and plus hit tool grades as a prospect. He struck out a little more in A-ball, but since his debut in 2021 he’s basically averaged around 20 percent strikeout rates, and that held up in the major leagues quite well. He put up a 19.8 percent K-rate as a rookie, while the league average was 22.6 percent.
A .306 batting average on balls in play says Keith was probably a little unlucky, and that matches the eye test, particularly from early in the season. He has a 21.3 percent line drive rate, a 44.4 ground ball rate, and rarely popped the ball up. That’s not the type of contact that makes a ton of routine outs. You’d like to see a few less ground balls and more fly balls for power production, but considering how well Keith uses the whole field, there are probably some .280-.290 average seasons in his future.
Where Keith did struggle a little, and where we’d look for improvement in year two, was in his walk rates. He posted consistently good walk rates above 10 percent throughout the minor leagues, but only walked in 6.5 percent of his major league plate appearances in 2024.
His chase and contact rates were both a few points better than league average. His swinging strike rate of 10.5 percent was better than the league average of 11.1 percent. The one place he struggled a little was in taking too many called strikes. He had a 17 percent called strike rate against a league average of 16.4 percent. Not a big differential, and there may be elements of both rookie hazing by league umpires, as well as a young hitter learning that major league pitchers hit their spots under pressure better than minor leagues.
So while he lacks much defensive value, Keith is very convincing as an already above average major league hitter who should continue to improve. Without even getting to much more power, Keith still looks like a guy who will hit .280/.350/.450 pretty consistently in his prime. And if he happens to adapt and pull more balls in the air, there’s still a chance he develops into the consistent 30+ home run threat the Tigers hoped they had in Torkelson.
In 2024, we saw sort of a classic pattern of a solid hitter who needs to pull more balls in the air. Keith uses the whole field well, but a lot of his contact in the air was late and out over the plate. He did a nice job driving the ball to the opposite field overall, but that’s not the direction he wants his fly balls going. Finding more pitches he can pull would obviously benefit him greatly, but in 2024 he tended to pull the ball on the ground or on a line.
So, when he had the ball out in front a little he wasn’t lifting enough of them. And of course, experienced major league pitchers had their way sometimes and he often rolled over to the right side. Perfectly natural, but to really reach his full potential he’ll need to push back and drive more of those pitches. When he was covering the outer half, he hit too many slicing 350 footers from left center field to straightaway left, and just didn’t have the juice that way to hit many of them over the wall.
At the same time, Keith is the type of guy to hit for average and power both precisely because he makes a lot of quality contact and uses the whole field. He lined the ball to left field for singles quite a bit and probably was a bit unlucky in the doubles department. He doesn’t need to just get pull happy. A little more home run production may come just from settling in and having the experience to ambush a few more pitches over the course of a season. 20-25 home run Keith seasons feel within reach. 30 plus home run seasons for Keith, or the dream scenario, may take more emphasis on hitting to his park without sacrificing his plate coverage and all fields hitting ability.
Here is Keith’s flyball chart from 2024, by the way.
In his rookie season, Keith hit fourseam fastballs very well, posting a .355 wOBA. He struggled more against sinkers and cutters. He was a little below average against breaking pitches and offspeed stuff too, but he did hit both for more power. As you might expect, he likes the ball up. He covers the bottom of the zone reasonably well in terms of just making contact, but he rarely drives the low ball down near his knees. So he’s either got to wait pitchers out to get more balls up, or he’s got to handle low pitches better. That will be a point of interest in determining how much upside Keith has in his offensive game.
Moving to first base may end up hurting Keith in WAR calculations, but this is part of the reason to extend a young player that a front office has confidence in. It’s easier to move Keith because he isn’t worried about putting up a 2 WAR season rather than a 3 WAR season because of positional value. With a full offseason to work on it, Keith will probably do just fine at first base, but it’s fair to suggest that it’s a position with very different responsibilities and may not come naturally to him.
Weu can’t assume Keith is just going to move over and be an instant plus defender at first base, but he’s got the hands and the baseball sense for the position and should do well with reps. Meanwhile his move allows the Tigers to get two above average bats on the right side of the infield. While the upgrade isn’t terribly satisfying to Tigers fans this offseason, Keith and Gleyber Torres should be a significant upgrade from Keith-Torkelson in 2024. The left side of the infield? Well, we’ll see.
The Tigers pitched their way to the playoffs last year. Certainly the offense got better down the stretch and the team played pretty good defense as well. But they still head into a new season with Riley Greene and Kerry Carpenter as their two biggest bats with an overall pretty average group around them. Matt Vierling and Gleyber Torres should be above average hitters, and it’s possible that Parker Meadows could level up. Colt Keith is still the Tigers best hope to step up to that next level with a significant breakout this season.