Branton a ‘phenomenon’ 3 seasons in the making
As a freshman at Stanford, Beau Branton started 28 games at four different positions. The past two years, though, he mostly rode the bench.
At 5-foot-7, the shortest player on the team, he finally got a chance to play regularly because of an injury to second baseman Duke Kinamon. Even after Kinamon’s injury, it took Branton a few weeks to start.
To say that life is good for him now would be an understatement. He’s hitting .347 with a .432 on-base percentage as the leadoff man for the No. 2 team in the country.
The Cardinal (34-6) have won 11 of their past 12 and are tied with No. 8 UCLA atop the Pac-12 standings with a 14-4 record going into a series at Utah that starts Friday.
What’s more, Branton will graduate next month and already has a job lined up even if pro baseball doesn’t work out. He’s going to be an industrial engineer for Disney, working at its theme parks.
“Say we’re building a new ride for the new ‘Star Wars’ line that’s coming out,” he said. “Our industrial-engineering
team will run computerscience models or mathematical models to determine how many cars they should put on this ride. Or here’s how long the lines are, here’s how we can shorten them. Things like that.”
Head coach David Esquer said that when Branton got his chance this year, “he started hitting and never stopped. He’s been kind of a phenomenon around our team.”
Branton employs a batting stance similar to that of former big-league infielder Julio Franco, who hit .298 over his 23year career. Branton starts his stroke with the barrel of the bat not quite pointing at the pitcher, like Franco, but still pointing forward.
For Branton, the stance is only a few months old. “I wasn’t feeling too good at the plate during intrasquads in the winter,” he said. “I tried to switch it up and it felt good, so I stuck with it.
“I’ve always had my hands close to my body. What I wanted to do was get on a plane with the ball. I felt I was chopping down on balls, not really squaring it up. I was just trying to find the right position to get me going.”
It worked spectacularly. Before tailing off in the past few games, he was hitting in the .380s.
“He plays with a quiet confidence and a peace about him that is kind of infectious to the team,” Esquer said. “The guys like his attitude; he’s not too stressed.”
He has made just four errors. “He’s been a stabilizing force for the whole team,” Esquer said. “We are where we’re at because of our pitching and defense.”
Branton was a batting champion at Punahou High School in Honolulu. He was born and grew up in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where his father was a computer engineer for an oil company and his mother taught. He was 13 when his parents retired and moved the family to Hawaii, where they had grown up.
“There are a ton of American ex-pats” in Saudi Arabia, he said, “so baseball was pretty big. I was lucky to have a lot of good coaches growing up.”
Having played for Saudi Arabia in the Little League World Series, he’s trying for a rare double — playing in the College World Series, too.
Briefly: Kinamon, much improved from his groin injury, is practicing with the team and is close to returning to action, Esquer said. With Branton playing so well at second, it’s possible Kinamon might play third, with freshman Tim Tawa moving to center field. … Outfielder Brandon Wulff, who was hitting .324 when he sustained a foot injury in late March, is “a couple of weeks away,” Esquer said.