Watch: Keston Hiura is the Linsanity of baseball, 4 Homeruns in month of July, batting .608 (.323 for the season)

 

Hiura has come out of the All-Star break with his bat on fire. In Milwaukee’s first five games of the second half, the rookie second baseman went 12-for-19 with six extra-base hits (three doubles, a triple and two homers), a slash line of .632/.696/1.211. Hiura had multiple hits in four of those five games including a trio of three-hit games. On Monday he fell a home run short of the cycle but made up for it Tuesday, hitting one out of the park among his three hits (he also scored three runs and drove in a pair). Hiura already had four three-hit games for the Brewers this season, which is the fifth most on the club. On the season (entering Wednesday’s day game), Hiura is hitting .317/.383/.592 with nine homers, which he’s hitting at a rate rarely seen by a Brewers rookie.

When Keston Hiura first arrived in the big leagues back in mid-May, the No. 9 overall pick in the 2017 Draft more or less did exactly what he was supposed to: He hit .281 with five home runs, nine RBI and an .865 OPS in his first 17 games.

Then he got demoted.

Even with some plate discipline issues for Hiura early on (three walks and 23 strikeouts in those first 17 games), and even though the Brewers apparently felt the need to make room for Travis Shaw, this demotion still seemed uncalled for. After all, Hiura had homered in two of his last three games with five RBI prior to being sent down.

But it’s time to stop complaining about it, because I now feel confident saying the exact same thing I felt confident saying before: Hiura is here to stay.

Since his return in late June, all he has done is smash homers and steal bases — in his 15 games back with the Brewers, he has four homers (including an opposite field job on Tuesday night) and four steals, with a .357 average. That includes 12 hits in his last five games after a 3-for-3 Tuesday evening. Overall, with the Brewers this season, he’s hitting .323 with nine home runs, five stolen bases and a .975 OPS.

The other good news: As of this writing, he was still available in more than half of Yahoo leagues — 55 percent of them, to be exact.

Hiura may not continue running at this pace (he had seven steals in 57 games in the minors this year), but his potential as a hitter and fantasy option right now is pretty monstrous. Between the majors and the minors this season, Hiura has 28 home runs and 12 steals.