With knee issues behind him, Brandon Belt expecting to regain past form with Blue Jays

TORONTO – Over the past couple of years, as the frayed cartilage in Brandon Belt’s right knee routinely caught on the kneecap as he moved his leg, even chasing his two sons around the yard was too much for the new Toronto Blue Jays slugger.

Pain and swelling in the joint were a constant for the 34-year-old, who was grinding to stay on the field for the San Francisco Giants. Increasingly, the instability was undermining everything he tried to do at the plate, a skillset that had produced a .988 OPS across 148 games in the 2020 and ’21 season.

Eventually “the muscles around my knee shut down as the year (in 2022) went on,” and “I just physically couldn’t do it,” leading him to fear his playing days could be over. Then came the September surgery to clean out the damage – his third procedure on the joint – that “completely changed my outlook on the next couple of years.”

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Throughout his rehabilitation and off-season workouts, the pain and swelling have been gone, along with the hindrances that cratered his performance to a .676 OPS in 78 games. “I feel great,” he says. “There’s going to be to be no excuses for me.”

“I’ll flat out say it right now – I feel like I’m going to be who I was in 2020 and 2021,” he continues during an introductory Zoom call with Toronto media. “And if it doesn’t end up like that, it’s not because of something physical. It’s because I didn’t have the year I should have had. But I totally anticipate going out there and having that season.”

The Blue Jays, seeking to top up some of the thump lost when they traded Teoscar Hernandez to the Seattle Mariners earlier this winter, clearly feel the same way, committing $9.3 million on a one-year deal to land Belt and his middle-of-the-lineup profile.

A left-handed hitter expected to do the bulk of DHing and occasionally spell Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at first base, Belt said he had 3-4 teams to choose from at the end of his free agency and opted for the Blue Jays because he felt they valued him most.

Along with fellow new adds Daulton Varsho and Kevin Kiermaier, he’ll help bring more balance to a batting order skewed way right the past couple of seasons, giving manager John Schneider more opportunities to optimize his matchups. For context, last year the Blue Jays were last in the majors in at-bats with platoon advantage at 30.7 per cent, miles away from the league average of 52.7 per cent.

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Beyond batting from the left side, throughout his career Belt has routinely been among the best hitters in the majors in chase rate, walk percentage, barrel percentage and hard hit percentage. In the smaller ballparks of the American League East, away from the cavernous stadiums of the National League West, San Francisco’s picturesque Oracle Field among them, his power should play up, especially now that he’s got his legs underneath him again.

“My game has been don’t swing at pitches that are out of the zone and swing pitches that I can drive. That’s what’s really kept me going. When my swing doesn’t feel 100 per cent right, I can still find ways to get on base because I’m able to have a good eye and give myself a chance to at least take a walk or get a good pitch to hit,” says Belt. “When I had the injury and I wasn’t able to rotate and throw my hands as quickly as I wanted to, I had to start a little earlier. That made me go out of the zone a little bit, maybe swing at pitches I wouldn’t normally swing at and that created a lot of frustration for me. That’s tough when you can’t be yourself when you go to the plate.”

Getting back to both the approach and mechanics he used during those productive 2020-21 seasons should be muscle memory for Belt, whose bigger adjustment will be to a new baseball life.

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A fifth-round pick out of the University of Texas at Austin in 2009, the 6-3, 231-pound first baseman has spent his entire career with the Giants, debuting in 2011 and contributing to World Series championships in 2012 and 2014. Along the way, he became an organizational fixture and was the club’s most tenured player during the trying campaign of 2022.

There will be a lot of new waiting for him in the days ahead – facilities, locations, coaches, teammates, culture – and he’s unsure how that will impact him.

“This is the first time I’m ever doing something like that, but having new guys come in to the Giants, the thing that you work on the most is getting to know the personality of guys and letting them get an idea of what your personality is, how you fit into the team and the clubhouse, stuff like that,” he explains. “It makes me a little nervous, but it also makes me excited, you know? I don’t really know what to expect. The unknown kind of makes me a little nervous. But I’m really excited about the new adventure, too, especially with this ballclub. I think it’s going to be a fun year.”

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