The Brewers announced that infielder Keston Hiura, who was designated for assignment this week, went unclaimed on waivers and has been assigned outright to Triple-A Nashville. As a player with more than three years of service time, he has the right to reject the assignment in favor of free agency, but doing so would mean forfeiting his $2.2MM salary. As such, he’ll surely accept the assignment and open the season in Nashville, hoping to play his way back onto the big league club.
Hiura, 26, was a ninth overall selection of the Brewers in 2017 and was a top 100 prospect in the years after that. He burst onto the big leagues in 2019, hitting 19 home runs in 84 games. His 30.7% strikeout rate that year was on the high side, but that was just his age-22 season. It seemed reasonable to expect that he would be able to refine his approach as he aged and grew accustomed to big league pitching, allowing him to make better use of that tremendous power.
Unfortunately, the opposite has proven to be true, with Hiura’s strikeouts becoming even more of a problem. His rate ticked up to 34.6% in 2020, then 39.1% the next year and 41.7% last season. The power still remains, as he hit 14 home runs in 80 games last year, but the punchouts give back a lot of the value that comes from those homers. As those strikeouts continued to mount, the Brewers often sent him to the minors, eventually exhausting his option years.
The Brewers could have kept Hiura around as a right-handed bench bat to complement their many left-handed hitters, but he actually has fairly extreme reverse splits in his career. He’s hit just .201/.283/.323 against lefties for a wRC+ of 65, while slashing .253/.332/.508 against righties for a 122 wRC+. The Brewers also brought Luke Voit aboard on a minor league deal this winter and saw him perform well this spring. He also has reverse splits, but not nearly as extreme as Hiura. Voit opted out of his minors deal but returned to the Brewers on a one-year deal, at which point Hiura was designated for assignment.
Hiura reached arbitration for the first time this winter and was able to secure himself a $2.2MM salary for the upcoming season. As mentioned up top, he can leave that money on the table and become a free agent if he likes, but the fact that no team claimed him off waivers suggests that none of the 29 other clubs values him at that price point. He’ll likely report to Triple-A and try once again to earn another opportunity in Milwaukee.